A letter from the Zone

“Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.”
Michel de Montaigne

Shortly before visiting Ukraine I told a gathering of friends and relatives in LA about our plans to tour Chernobyl, the site of a major nuclear accident on April 26, 1986. My enthusiastic announcement was met with long uncomfortable silence and was cold-showered by the first question “Are you insane?” Clearly, no one was amused by the prospect of us wondering through the “highly radioactive wasteland” adjacent to the power station and eating a “poisoned” lunch at the station’s canteen.

Many of my well-meaning friends had still lived in Ukraine in 1986 and their lives were turned upside down by this disastrous event, which took place a few hundred kilometers from their homes. They had preciously little information about the accident and its aftermath. Besides, people didn’t believe the official announcements anyway – there were lots of questions and very few answers. Should the people stay put in their towns? Should they evacuate their children? What food was safe to eat, air to breathe and water to drink? What levels of radiation were they exposed to inside their own apartments or on their way to work? What the heck is this thing called “radiation” anyway?

Come to think of it – what would we, the Americans, do if one of the nuclear power plants located to the north and south of LA suddenly blows its roof off and starts spewing tons of invisible radioactive matter into the bright blue California sky?

Regardless of our relatives’ disapproval, we had already made our minds about going to Chernobyl. Our visit was organized by a private Ukrainian company called Chernobyl-TOUR, www.chernobyl-tour.com. A few weeks prior we had to submit the passport data of everyone in our group, because the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Ukraine had to clear all visitors to the Zone. Why is it necessary? Don’t know – good soldiers don’t question the standard operating procedures.

The big Mercedes-Benz van was waiting near our hotel in central Kiev at 8 AM on June 25, 2012 or 314 months after the accident. The town of Chernobyl is situated about 120 km north from Kiev and our two hours on the road were packed with a lively Q/A session with our well-informed guide, Sergei Mirniy, who had participated in the cleanup process during the memorable summer of 1986 as a young lieutenant. Sergei is an ecologist and a published author. Just two months after the accident he was drafted into the massive cleanup effort conducted by the Soviet Army. Sergei was a commander of a reconnaissance unit taking daily measurements of the radioactive levels all over the Zone. Later he described this amazing experience in a series of books dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster. Our group was extremely lucky to have Sergei guiding us through the area and sharing his life stories with us.

The ancient town of Chernobyl dates back at least to the 12th century AD. During the 18th and 19th centuries it was one of the Hasidic movement centers and 3/4 of its population was Jewish, including my husband’s late grandfather. Chernobyl has never been a big or famous place, but nevertheless managed to play a familiar role in the gruesome Eastern European history full of bloody military campaigns, religious movements, revolutions, famines, border disputes, antisemitic pogroms and, most recently, nuclear power generation.

Once the wars were over and all of the Hasidim had moved from Ukraine to Brooklyn, the Soviet government decided to build the first ever nuclear power station in Ukraine. This monumental project started in 1970 and required the creation of a new city, Pripyat, that would become a short-lived home for 45,000 people employed by the power station. The first reactor became operational in 1977, the year I left Kiev for the much greener pastures of New York City. Three more reactors went on-line during the next 6 years and the station, named in honor of V.I. Lenin, started to generate 10% of all electricity used in Ukraine.

On April 26th 1986, in the middle of the night, a series of very unfortunate events combined with the reactor’s design flaws had caused the world’s worst accident at a nuclear facility. The entire population of Pripyat and the neighboring villages was completely evacuated during the next few days. It took about 1100 buses to ferry everyone out from the city – where does one even get that many buses in such a short period of time? I can’t even begin to imagine what went through the minds of thousands of people when they were given a few hours to gather some money, documents and basic belongings before boarding the buses and leaving their homes!

26 years later we are walking through the abandoned streets of Pripyat, Chernobyl and a few smaller villages in between. The Ukrainian forest is not a tropical jungle by any stretch of imagination, but it is taking over the empty streets and buildings. The trees and bushes are growing everywhere, but it is still possible to walk into a former school, food store, hotel, even a jailhouse and take countless photos of destruction, abandonment, and devastation.

We measure radiation with the handheld Geiger counters, which look like modern mobile phones. Sergei tells us that the readings are within the norm in the town of Chernobyl and most of the villages and we would get similar levels in central Kiev. He recalls the massive clean up effort, which consisted of removing contaminated soil, trees, equipment and burying it in huge trenches. Sergei also talks about the marauders, who broke into the huge Zone in order to steal everything that they could remove and haul away. This included a mountain of contaminated scrap metal and building material, which was sold and is still being used today somewhere around the world.

We take group photo’s in front of the mortally wounded Reactor Number 4 and on the bridge over the cooling pond where we throw pieces of bread to the whale-sized catfish. We admire the crumbling city marker that says PRIPYAT in Cyrillic letters. We eat bland lunch at the power station cafeteria together with the plant’s workers. We shop for souvenirs at a tiny General Store located in Chernobyl’s one and only bus station. We walk through an abandoned Jewish cemetery near the bus depot where my husband immediately spots three gravestones with his grandfather’s family name engraved on them. Adjacent to it is a common grave for the Chernobyl Jews exterminated during the Nazi occupation of the area.

Yet, strange as it may sound, life seems to be more or less… normal! I mean, we see regular people walking on the streets of Chernobyl – about seven thousand workers stay here during their regular 2-week shifts. A few hundred people had moved back into their homes in the Zone and continue to live off the land. We actually visited a very friendly elderly couple in a remote village and tasted their homemade blueberry jam.

Perhaps, we expected to see something really out of this world, like two-headed dogs roaming the streets or cherries the size of a peach. However, we didn’t find anything like that, even the huge catfish in the cooling pond got to be this big only because no one ever tries to catch them and the tourists keep on throwing loaves of bread at them!

Most importantly and, once again, contrary to our expectations, we did not hear any horror stories about massive deaths, birth defects, and cancer rates among the people who were directly exposed to the accident and its aftermath. Sergei says that his health is as normal as it can be for a 50-some year old, despite his three-month stint in the most dangerous area in the world. He definitely looks strong and healthy, while continuing to take groups into the Zone on the regular basis. I sincerely hope that the same is true for all other “liquidators” and civilians from the affected area.

A few hours later our group had gathered in a beautifully decorated restaurant in central Kiev. The dining room was made to look like a farmer’s hut, perhaps, similar to what the evacuated village homes in the Zone used to look like. Our table was full of the hearty Ukrainian food, simple yet delicious, along with the inevitable bottles of horilka, the wonderfully smooth local vodka. Despite the soothing effect of alcohol, the conversation was rather serious.

We had just visited one of the most unique and important sites of our civilization – a living monument to our ability to create enormously powerful technology and our inability to safely use it. A monument to the heroism of regular people who were brought in to save the planet, sometimes at an enormous cost to their own lives and health. I want to thank these people from the bottom of my heart and hope that such memorable names as Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima will help our civilization to prevent the future nuclear disasters on the planet Earth.

Photo album: The Chernobyl Zone

Keep on traveling,

Lenka info@lenkatraveler.com