This story was originally published on August 9, 2015.On August 9, 1945, the United States military dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. An estimated 70,000 people died, many of them burned alive. The attack came just three days after the bombing of Hiroshima that left an estimated 140,000 people dead.Less than a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese government surrendered, formally ending World War II. The dropping of both bombs ushered in the nuclear age and the arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union.To this day, researchers still do not know the true number of victims of the atomic bombings — although they estimate that nearly all were civilians and fewer than 150 Japanese soldiers were killed.For decades, many of the families who survived that day found it too painful to share their stories. The shame and scars of being a "bomb-affected person" — known in Japanese as hibakusha — were too great. Artist Miyako Taguchi is a second-generation survivor from Nagasaki. Both of her parents survived the bombing but never spoke about their experiences. Miyako says she believed the cost of not relating her family's experiences is too great — so she left Japan. She shared her story with Refinery29 from New York, where she now lives."Both my mother's family and my father's family were survivors of the bombing of Nagasaki. When the bomb hit, my father was 17 years old and my mother was 12 years old."My father didn't want to tell me what happened, so I had to find out from my mother and from my father's sister, my aunt. I began putting the pieces together."My father had been working in the shipyard, but he was home that day because he had injured his leg. If he had gone to work that day, he would have been closer to the epicenter and may have died. When the bomb hit, people didn't know what was happening. They were crazy with fear and they didn't know what to do. People were screaming, people were dying, everything was shaking, and everything was black."People did what they were supposed to do — they tried to go into the bomb shelters, but the shelters didn't have enough space. They didn't expect that all the people would need to escape at the same time. So my father, his friend, and his friend's family walked for three or four days to a place they had in the country. He escaped with them."