Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

Thirty kilometers away, Natalia Yuvchenko and her two-year-old son, Kirill, were among the 1,200 refugees who had been billeted among the clay-and-thatch homes of Lugoviki, a rural settlement on the River Uzh without a single telephone. The last time she had seen her husband, Alexander, he had been waving to her from inside his hospital ward in Pripyat and telling her to go home and close the windows. Since then, she had received no information about where he had been taken or what condition he might be in. With two other families from her building in Pripyat, Yuvchenko and her son were taken in by an elderly peasant couple who gave up the bedroom of their small house for the newcomers. Yuvchenko and the others with young children shared the bed; everyone else slept on the floor. On Monday, the old man took the children fishing, but Kirill was still sick, and the house was damp. By Tuesday, there was no longer enough food to feed three families, and Yuvchenko was almost out of money. She appealed to her former neighbor: “Sergei, let’s get out of here,” she said, and together they gathered enough cash for bus tickets to Kiev. When they arrived, she took Kirill to the airport and boarded a flight for Moldova, where her parents and Alexander’s parents still lived directly across the street from one another. From there, Yuvchenko set out, once more, to find out what had happened to her husband.