Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

by Svetlana Alexievich

“There are sicknesses that can’t be cured. You just have to sit and watch them.”

Then why do people remember? So that they can determine the truth? For fairness? So they can free themselves and forget? Is it because they understand they’re part of a grand event? Or are they looking into the past for cover?

Back then I thought of death just as I did of birth. I had the same feeling when I saw a calf come out of a cow—and the kittens were born—as when I saw that woman with the brick in the bushes killing herself. For some reason these seemed to me to be the same things—birth and death.

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.

I’ll remember everything for you.

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You’re just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person.

I’m not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man.

eventually people stopped checking. “See no evil, hear no evil. Who knows what those scientists will think up!” Everything went on its way: they turned over the soil, planted, harvested. The unthinkable happened, but people lived as they’d lived.

“Now you understand,” he says to me, “why no one believes you? You lie to yourselves.”

But we always lived in terror, we know how to live in terror, it’s our natural habitat. In this our people have no peers.

I’m afraid of staying on this land. They gave me a dosimeter, but what am I supposed to do with it? I do my laundry, it’s nice and white, but the dosimeter goes off. I make some food, bake a pie—it goes off. I make the bed—it goes off. What do I need it for? I feed my kids and cry. “Why are you crying, Mom?”

“You’re all like black boxes here,” he said. He meant the black boxes that record information on airplanes. We think that we’re living, talking, walking, eating. Loving one another. But we’re just recording information!

Disbelief. Then anger. So they start convincing us: anyone working twenty kilometers away gets double pay, ten kilometers means triple pay, and if you’re right at the reactor you get six times the pay.

They taught us how to fall down so that the wave of the explosion would miss us. They taught us about irradiation, thermal heat. But about the radioactive contamination of an area—the most dangerous factor of all—not a word.

We see a woman on a bench near her house, breastfeeding her child—her milk has cesium in it—she’s the Chernobyl Madonna.

basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.

Everyone called them heroes. [Cries.] It’s impossible to suffer like this without any meaning. Without any of the old words. Even without the medal that they gave him. It’s there at home. He gave it to our son. I know just one thing: I’ll never be happy again.

It was a long, long chain, and at the end of it a few people made the decisions. We turned out to be defenseless. That was the main feeling in those days. Just a few people were deciding our fate, the fate of millions.

What power! This limitless power that one person could have over another. This isn’t a trick or lie anymore, it’s just a war against the innocent.