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While Bierman sold dresses, Lewis returned home from the war to sell candy. Those casualties could have been our casualties. But he felt that if the enemy got the bomb, they were going to use it. Not that he was basking in the glory of having been part of that. Mitchell said his father regretted the tremendous loss of life, "but felt that in that time, and in that place, it was the right thing to do. In their writings, Bierman and Lewis remained convinced that two atomic bombs that initially killed more than 200,000 people ultimately saved more lives by forcing Japan to surrender. Once the nuclear genie was out of the bottle, the world never be the same, and the arms race was on.
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Like many veterans, Bierman didn't talk much about the war, but was proud of his role in it. The son also keeps his father's uniform and the Air Medal he received for the A-bomb missions in a glass case. Mel, who died in 2013 at age 91, put together a 90-page memoir that Mitchell now has. "My mother worked in the back, doing the books." "My father worked in the front of the store, doing all the schmoozing and hiring," Mitchell said. His parents were partners in the clothing business, and the family lived a comfortable middle class life on Idaho Street in Passaic. He was the youngest of three children born to Mel and Carol Bierman - Anne being the oldest, followed by Louis. Mitchell was born in 1962, 17 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mel Bierman came home to Passaic to the family business, selling clothes - and became quite successful, opening Stage III shops in Passaic and Upper Montclair, and later buying Ginsburg's, a high-end ladies' store downtown on Main Avenue. The war effectively ended five days after the bombing of Nagasaki, when Japan surrendered.
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"We just got out of the way in time - otherwise we would have been roasted." "Picture I took as we were getting out of the way when the 'mushroom' came up higher than was anticipated," Bierman wrote. He produced some of the first images of the mushroom cloud, pictures that Bierman's son, Mitchell, has hanging in his home in Randolph, with a handwritten note from his father. Bierman, who served as a tail-gunner aboard on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, was one of the crew members charged with taking pictures after the explosions.