Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

 

On April 29, 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library suffered an arson fire that devastated the library's collection in what was seen as the largest disaster in the history of American libraries. I recently read a book about that disaster and it was an eye-opening look at the story, but I puzzled over how I had never heard about it.

But it soon became clear that the world was invested in an entirely different story on that date in history. Consider the following newspaper headlines from that day.

What happened on that day in history that far eclipsed the library story was the meltdown of the number four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the USSR in what is now the northern part of Ukraine. This was a disaster of untold costs, both in human lives and money spent.  Voices from Chernobyl is an oral history that focuses on what happened after that day, what happened to the people who lived nearby, what happened to the first responders who rushed to secure the scene, what happened in the shadow of such devastation. Alexievich collected these interviews in 1996, a decade after the disaster, but the pain is still so raw and current in the voices that she shares.  

I found this book hard to read, but it was so powerful. So many stories of bravery, sadness, triumph, and fear.  There was so much I just didn't know - about how quickly the radiation killed some people and how very slowly it killed it others. How the radiation didn't always show at first, so the countryside looked beautiful when people were forced to evacuate, many against their will. How isolated people from the area felt afterwards. How some people fled and some stayed and everyone felt like they made the wrong decision.  I don't have much to say beyond that I think this should be mandatory reading, but I'm going to pull out five (I limited myself to five) powerful quotes for you to ponder yourself.

5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left." My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little," and I had thought she didn't understand anything. (page 36)

We came  home. I took off all the clothes that I'd worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don't want to talk anymore. (page 73)

We rode around the Zone for two months. Half the villages in our region were evacuated, dozens of them: Babchin, Tulgovichi . . . The first time we came, the dogs were running around near their houses, guarding them. Waiting for the people to come back. They were happy to see us, they ran towards our voices. We shot them in the houses, and the barns, in the yards. We'd drag them out onto the street and load them onto the dump truck. It wasn't very nice. They couldn't understand: why are we killing them? They were easy to kill. They were household pets. They didn't fear guns or people. They ran towards our voices. (page 98)

I'm afraid. I'm afraid to love. I have a fiancé, we already registered at the house of deeds. Have you ever heard of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima? The ones who survived after the bomb? They can only marry each other. No one writes about it here, no one talks about it, but we exist. The Chernobyl Hibakusha. (page 108)

We could have left, but my husband and I thought about it and decided not to. We're afraid to. Here, we're all Chernobylites. We're not afraid of one another, and if someone gives you an apple or a cucumber from their garden, you take it and eat it, you don't hide it shamefully in your pocket, your purse, and then throw it out. We all share the same memories. We have the same fate. Anywhere else, we're foreign, we're lepers. (page 198)