This week, survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan during World War 2 marked the 74th anniversary of the attack with a minute’s silence in Hiroshima.

This air of remembrance is what prompted a Twitter user (@mugi80190880) to post her own family’s wartime story along with an item that the family has kept until this day. If her grandfather had never owned this item, she would never have been born.

The iron tobacco case in his left side's breast pocket had caught the bullet. It blasted through one side and lost so much momentum that it couldn’t penetrate the other side of the case.

This innocuous item had saved Mugi's grandfather, and as she went on to point out in her tweets, this led to him returning home to get married to her grandmother. Then the following year, on 6th August, the same day the atomic bomb dropped, her father was born.

Now she has a son of her own and if her grandfather had died that day, her father, herself and her son, would have never existed.

Just 1 millimetre of iron changed the whole course of this family’s future. It's a humbling and poignant reminder of the fragility of human life and the reality of war. Mugi ended the Twitter thread with hopes for peace in the future.