Voices from Chernobyl

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

This is the translation of the original Russian.  This is from the interviews that the author did from people from Belarus.  There was a nuclear reactor accident in 1986 at Chernobyl.  This is the interviews of personal accounts of people who were there, people who helped with the cleanup, people who suffered from the radiation, or people who watched their loved ones suffer and die from the effects of the radiation.

Powerful and sad.  I had to take a break from reading this one, before continuing on.  This is not a fiction book, this is real people telling their stories.  And the nuclear accident happened in 1986, and these interviews were from the 90s, so this wasn't that long ago.  This happened in my lifetime, it's not some long ago event.

The first part, the fireman's wife.  She was so worried about her husband and just wanted to take care of him and be by his side.  Neither one really knew what was going on, or how dangerous it was for her to be next to him so much.  She was just heartbroken as she loved her husband.  And she was pregnant at the time.

Another story that really stuck to me was one of the men was helping with the cleanup and afterwards his clothes were thrown away, but for some reason his son wanted the hat.  So he gave the son the hat, and his son wore that hat all the time.  That is until a couple years later his son had a brain tumor.  The man broke down after that and couldn't talk anymore.  Oh wow, the guilt, because he had given his son the hat.  He didn't know how that hat would hurt his child or he never would have given his son it.

The baby born without the holes to pee and poop and the parents having to be in the hospital manually helping the child pee every half hour.  The children in schools never smiling, never joking, never playing and being children.  The child who was in the hospital so much, that he thought it was their home.  The people who could no longer be parents, or if they did become parents, their children were born with many problems. 

It was just heartache after heartache.  Not to mention, how many of those heartaches could have been prevented if people were told what was actually going on and warned what radiation was and what it would do to them, and to their children, even to their unborn children.