Today was veteran's day in the Netherlands. This year, guest of honour was 95-year old Dick Büchel van Steenbergen, retired airforce photographer.
He had been captured by the Japanese, and was doing forced labour in a factory in Nagasaki, only 1700 meters (1 mile) away from the impact site of the nuclear bomb, when it hit. The impact knocked him unconscious for 15 minutes. He woke up with just a few scratches.
For the next two weeks, he was put to work by the japanese, collecting wood right in the dead zone, to burn the corpses that other prisoners of war were forced to collect.
I have to say, he was spot on when he said, in response to the question how he felt about finally being recognised by the Japanese government as a 'hibakusha' (= 'survivor of the explosion') in 2016:
"It felt like a recognition of what we have been through in prison camps in Japan and Dutch Indonesia. To be quite honest, I had expected this recognition to come from the Dutch government first, instead of the Japanese. The Dutch government never concerned themselves with us. Nor has science, and that's what I really find incomprehensible. I would say it would be extremely interesting for science, to find out why so many victims of the atomic bomb got radiation sickness, and cancer, while I am 95 now and have never been ill, even though I strolled around right in the middle of the deadzone for two weeks."
That guy has some serious radiation resistance.