A fantastic but depressing, very depressing book simultaneously, very difficult to go through. But it gives different points of view and insights from the acute victims to the liquidators, firemen, soldiers, teachers, students, housewives, resettlers, camera recorders, photographers, writers, journalists, school children, young children. How they were affected and how they perceived the incident, and its aftermaths, its causes and people's behavior towards them and theirs towards those people.
How they perceive government actions and points of view. How a few exploited the situation and the supplies. how the school children perceive it. How the facts are buried down by the heroism and the truth under propaganda. A person can get used to anything and create jokes around it. About scientists, partisans themselves, how much they were obliged, why they hid the info, and how little they knew themselves.
They felt Segregated:
"The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there’s you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they’re Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites."
"We're from Chernobyl." ‘‘I’m a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.
"We're from Chernobyl." ‘‘I’m a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.
They felt Stigmatized:
"One woman invited us to sleep at her house. “Come," she said, ‘I'll put down some linen for you. I feel bad for your boy." Her friend started dragging her away from us. “Are you crazy? They’re contaminated!"
"When we settled in Mogilev and our son started school, he came back the very first day in tears. They put him next to a girl who said she didn’t want to sit with him, he was radioactive. Our son was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class. The other kids were afraid of him, they called him “Shiny." His childhood ended so early".
"My own sister did not allow me in her house, she had a baby. We spent the night on train station."
"My own sister did not allow me in her house, she had a baby. We spent the night on train station."
"They (hostel mates) make my daughter stay out to see if she 'shines' at night."
Some of them had to return to Chernobyl:
"Here, we’re all Chernobylites. We don’t scare 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 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."
They felt cheated and being used:
"They take readings but don't tell you, it is not for you, it is for the scientists"
"The doctors put down 7 bees. In fact it was 600!"
"We (rescue workers) were not allowed to talk to them (the victims, residents)"
"The most reliable “robots” were the soldiers."
Rumors mill was spinning: Rumor factory works everywhere the same.
"In Minsk they’ve washed the trains and the inventories. They’re going to transfer the whole population to Siberia. They’re already fixing up the old barracks left over from Stalin's camps. They'll start with the women and children. The Ukrainians are already being shipped."
"There are now pike in the lakes and rivers without heads or tails. Just the bodies floating around. Something similar is going to start happening soon to humans. The Belarussians will turn into humanoids."
"They didn’t allow anyone to film the tragedy, only the heroics."
They were not allowed to write or record anything:
"Since you're writing this book, you need to have a look at some unique video footage. We're gathering it little by little. It's not a chronicle of Chernobyl, no, they wouldn't let anyone film that, it was forbidden. If anyone did manage to record any of it, the authorities immediately took the film and returned it ruined.""They didn’t allow anyone to film the tragedy, only the heroics."
"They kept asking me 'What do you write'. Then they managed one of my colleagues to spy on me. and he asked me to be careful"
They (Party Administrators) only followed orders:
"I’m a product of my time. I'm not a criminal."
P.S. The author Svetlana Alexievich belongs to Belarus, born in Ukrain. At the time of Chernobyl Disaster (April, 1986) she was living in Minsk. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. The first edition was published in Russian in 1996 and in English in 2005. The HBO series and the other movies on Chernobyl are extracted from the same book.
