25 Year Aniversary of Chernobyl Nuclear Explosion

[ahka]

This year like never before we remember Chernobyl nuclear explosion that happened on April 26, 1986.  First of all the memories were brought to us in March after the tragedy of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan that involved a similar nuclear reactor and second, today it is the 25 year anniversary or as one journalist wrote “quarter century mark”.

 

Living in Kiev, we had no clue what, when and where happened.  My parents were teachers and a few parents of their students were military professionals.  Kids shared with my parents that there has been an explosion late at night and their fathers were called for immediate deployment not far from Kiev.

The first day no one knew about the seriousness of this event and our close proximity to it.  A few days later there were more rumors and more talks about some explosion.  My dad tried to catch Voice of America on our radio that actually revealed some information about what was happening.  The reception was very bad.  My dad's friend (I think) called us from America and asked what was going on.  He knew more than we did.  With more information we still didn’t realize that something was wrong, yet, I was getting worried about it.  I was 10 years old.

My parents were getting ready for their trip to Moscow that they planned long time ago.  My best friends’ father was scientist and he got some information about radiation.  He told us to stay home and not go anywhere, close windows and wash our apartment with water plus if we have some iodine (йод) mix 1 drop with milk and drink it up.  It was impossible to stay home all the time because we had a dog that needed to go out and my sister was sick, parents went to Moscow for a week to celebrate May 1^st and 2^nd  holiday, so it was me who had to get outside.  We didn’t drink any of that milk with iodine. 

When parents got home, the explosion was on the news yet government was not telling us anything more specific not to cause panic.  My parents and our relatives agreed that they had to ship kids away and tried to get tickets out of Kiev for as soon as possible.  My aunt Zoya lived nearby the train ticket place and she managed to get us all tickets to Kherson for May 10^th. 

My grandparents lived in Kherson in small 1 bedroom apartment on the 9^th floor.  On the train it was my sister and I, my cousin Natasha and her sister Vita with her little daughter, my aunt’s Zoya’s granddaughter with her mother and her mother’s new family (husband and 2^nd child).  So, it was 9 of us.  It was a big crowd for 1 bedroom apartment.  First night we all stayed at my grandparents and the next day t. Zoya’s group left for some nearby town on Black sea. 

My cousin Vita was the oldest, she was in her late twentieth.  She got vacation from her job and stayed with us.  It was the best thing that she was with us.  My grandparents were working and had no time to entertain us, so Vita would take us to the beach and after the beach she took us to the children’s café  where we ate very delicious deserts and watched awesome cartoons.  The café was called Golden Key (Золотой ключик).

We were getting along well most of the time, we had friends in Kherson and played with them after they were done with school.  My grandparents did not have telephone, so to call our parents we had to go to the telegraph and request the long distance calls to Kiev.  We tried to stay connected.

From one of the calls we found that my dad continued to stay in Kiev with our grandma (she couldn’t walk) and he was working at the school, measuring radiation and washing school while our mom was sent to Krasnadon (Краснадон, Варашиловградская область лагерь Молодая Гвардия) with the school kids and other teachers.  In June all schools evacuated children from Kiev to various summer camps in USSR.  The whole family was apart.  We wrote letters and tried to continue to make phone calls to each other.

I missed my parents, my grandma, and my friends.  I had no idea where my best friends were at that time.  We never were separated for more than one month ever before. 

In July, it was arranged that we would come back to Kiev and then our dad, my sister and I would join my mom with our schoolmates in Krasnadon.  When we came to Kiev, it was very very clean and water trucks kept washing the streets.  There were no children in the city and pretty much no adults on the streets.  It was weird, like dead city.  Everything was green and summery beautiful only there were no children’s noise coming from our playgrounds.

I was so happy to see my dad, my grandma and our dog! 

Our school was arranging 2^nd session of the summer camp in Krasnadon.  There were a lot of busses that came to our school to get all the kids and teachers who were going to Krasnadon for the 2^nd 45 days.  Nurses walked through the buses looking for lice in our heads.  My dad was worried that I might have night terror attacks as I had once in a while as a child.

The caravan of buses that were accompanied with police (militsiya) took us to the train.  They literally brought each bus to the train, so we didn’t have to step on the ground.  The train took us to Varashilovgrad (currently Lugansk).  It was fun being on the train with our classmates for about 24 hours.  They gave us some food on the train and it was funny that they gave us mineral water that was called Cherbobyl.

Once we arrived in Lugansk, we were transferred to the busses that took us to the summer camp where our family finally re-united.  That was the summer that my father quit smoking.  I have wonderful memories from that summer camp.  It was a lot of fun plus we were there with our parents and friends.  We made new friends, went on cultural tours around the area.  My dad even went down into the mine with the local miners. 

My poor parents had no vacation that year.  At the camp they had to work 24 hours a day.  My mom was there for 90 days.  Kids were fooling around and teachers had to make sure that everyone is healthy and safe.  There were incidents when kids wanted to run away or go outside of the camp grounds at night.  So, my mom often didn’t get any sleep because of some kids who either were sick or silly. 

After 45 days we returned back to Kiev.  I finally met my best friends; they came to the school to meet our buses.  When I saw them I started crying.  I missed them a lot.    

On September 1^st school started as nothing happened.  People who were at the camp became good friends; our parents with other teachers who worked all summer at the camp were awarded a mini fall vacation – a train cruise.  It was pathetic.

Women in our family got thyroid issues, we don’t know if it relates to the radiation that we got exposed to or not.  In our school yard next year we found dandelions that were with 4 and 5 heads.  Who knows?

When I was pregnant with Michelle, we had some gas leak in our building; everything was in fog that brought the emotions of Chernobyl back.  We were told that that chemical that got released into our building was not very dangerous.  However, being pregnant and having Chernobyl experience made me very upset and I even cried when I went to my doctor at that time.  So, there is emotional memory that still seating there… 

What memories do you have about Chernobyl nuclear explosion?  Did it touch your area?

 

Comments

[i12bmore.livejournal.com]

I was a schoolkid in Indiana. Every week, we would have a time in class called Current Events. We would watch a filmstrip each week, and with each picture, our teacher would talk about the related news story and try to describe things in a way squirmy 10-year-olds would understand.

Our teacher, Mr Gromer, who led out these sessions, had very much been a hippie in the 1970s, and had never really left it in his ideology. He had a pretty dark view of the future of the world, at least to me at the time, and we talked a lot about the potential for nuclear war.

So it was in this setting that I learnt about the Chernobyl disaster. It was probably also about this time that our teacher read us a story from "Omni" science magazine, a piece of dystopian fiction in which nuclear winter had driven humanity underground. And so, though there were not a lot of details given about Chernobyl--only so much 10-year-olds would understand, and only so much time in the school day--I knew that it had to be a very scary time for the people "over there in Russia." (At that time, Americans commonly said "Russia" to mean "the Soviet Union".)

Summer vacation started about a month after the disaster. We did not follow the news in my family, so I didn't really think much about it during the summer. When school started back at the end of August, not a word was mentioned of it, as the filmstrips we received simply followed the news cycle, and we never really learnt how news stories ended.

[agusovsky.livejournal.com]

yes, here in USA, we hear news and everything passes by if it didn't touch us personally. Thanks for sharing your story.

[ygalperina.livejournal.com]

I was 14. I remember I was glad that we did not have to take final examinations at the end of the school year.

Also, when we were on that train to Voroshilovgrad (Lugansk) whenever the train stopped strange people would give us food or water, or whatever they had. They were crying and saying something like "please, take the apples (or whatever they had). Poor kids from Chornobyl"

[agusovsky.livejournal.com]

for some reason I absolutely don't remember that. What else do you remember that I didn't mention here?

[ygalperina.livejournal.com]

Well, I remember papa brought geiger counter from school. We were measuring radiation level in the house - the dust under beds and in corners was fine. I think (not 100% sure) that Pushok's fur was radiating little more than supposed to...

Also I remember that once my physics teacher learned from the kids in school about the incident - his kids were on their way to Siberia the same day which was April 26...

I remember a few months later our neighbor t.Anya went to Chornobyl as a contractor to clean it up. Our dad was trying to talk her out of it, but she said that the pay was good...

[levinius.livejournal.com]

wow, that's pretty sad - about the woman I mean. Overall, thank you both for sharing.
I don't remember anything (I was 4), except for some news on TV and my parents being worried. I think even in Moscow I wasn't allowed to go out, and I was upset about it, because it was just beautiful outside.

[ygalperina.livejournal.com]

yes, that woman was pretty lucky though - she is alive and well. I think she did not get close to the reactor. Other people, who also had no idea, were not that lucky :(