A bronze sculpture of a tricycle that belonged to a boy who died in the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima has been put on display at a museum in Switzerland.
A ceremony was held on Thursday at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, where the artwork is now on display.
The artwork is a sculpture of a tricycle that a 3-year-old boy was riding when the bomb was dropped. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons commissioned the work and donated it to the museum. The boy’s actual tricycle is on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
Digitally scanned data of the tricycle was used to create the life-size artwork. The sculpture will be on display permanently on the museum’s ground floor, where visitors can see it for free.
Pascal Hufschmid is the museum’s director. During a news conference, he said that the sculpture reminds people that the family links and love that surrounded the boy are still alive, despite the atrocious destruction brought about by the atomic bombing.
Cannon Hersey is one of the artwork’s sculptors. He said, “Many young people are inspired by this place and to have the tricycle to live in that environment will inspire future generations.”
ICAN’s Executive Director Melissa Parke said, “This tricycle comes to the humanitarian capital of Geneva at a time when the risk of use of nuclear weapons has never been higher, and so this tricycle is a poignant symbol.” She added that it is a “symbol of the harm that nuclear weapons can cause and why they must be urgently eliminated.”