Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk,
Ukraine in 1948. Though she started her
career as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre and won many
international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature. Her ‘Voices from Chernobyl’ is a compilation
of interviews with the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident that
occurred on 26th April 1986.
It is the first book to present the personal accounts of the
tragedy. This is the oral history of
those affected by the disaster like the self settlers, refugees from Tajikstan,
firemen, soldiers, pilots, officials and bureaucrats.
Voices
from Chernobyl, begins with the story of the young pregnant wife of Vasily
Ignatenko, named Lyudmilla Ignatenko. It
was Vasily, the fire fighter who reached first at Reactor IV of the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant in the night after the explosion. There was a tall flame and smoke. Everything was radiant including the
sky. At seven in the morning Lyudmilla
was told that her husband Vasily was in the hospital. On reaching hospital, the policemen shouted,
“The ambulances are radioactive. Stay away.”
With the help of a doctor friend, she entered the hospital and saw
Vasily. He was all swollen and puffed
up. As he needed milk, she went outside
and bought milk. As he and other
patients like him started throwing up because of the excessive use of milk,
they got put on IVS. The doctors said they had been poisoned by gas. They didn’t say anything about radiation.
As
there was a sea of people in the evening, Lyudmilla couldn’t get into the
hospital. She came to know that all the
patients were being taken to Moscow that night.
When all wives decided to go with them, they were asked to bring dresses
for them. When all came running back with
the bags, the plane was already gone.
Even though she was six months pregnant, she decided to go to
Moscow. It was not easy to find the
special hospital for radiology, where the Chernobyl victims were admited. She had to bribe and beg many to enter and
meet the head radiologist, Angelina Vasilevna Guskova. When she asked whether she had kids,
Lyudmilla not only hid that she was pregnant but said that she had two
children, a boy and a girl. She knew,
otherwise, she wouldn’t be allowed to meet her husband. She was allowed to spend half an hour with
Vasily.
There
were twenty-eight from Pripyat. They
were all sitting on the bed, playing cards and laughing. When she got some privacy she hugged him and
kissed him. But, the next day everything
changed. Some were knocking on the walls
with their knuckles. The doctors said
everyone’s body began to react differently to radiation and what one person
could handle another couldn’t. Vasily
too started to change. The burns started
to come to the surface. They came off in
layers. The colour of his face and body
changed to blue, then red and then grey-brown.
In fourteen days he died. It was
the victory day, 9th May. As
the body was very radioactive, it had to be buried in a Moscow cemetery in a
special way in sealed zinc caskets. They
were heroes of the State. So, they
belonged to the State.
Two
months later she went back to Moscow. When she visited the grave, as she
started going into labour, she was taken to the hospital. It was a girl. She called out “Natashenka’. It was the name
her father suggested. Though she looked
healthy, she had cirrhosis of the liver and had heart disease. Four hours later Natashenka died. Her body too was taken away by them. In Kiev, Lyudmilla was given an apartment in
a large building. The survivors like
Lyudmilla were living there apart from the people who worked at the Station. That’s why the place is called Chernobylskaya,
where the invalids with bad diseases live.
Often they die in a minute when they walk or sleep. Such is the power of radiation, even after
years of explosion. Unfortunately, there
are so many atomic reactors throughout the world. More countries are building the same too. Here, no doubt Lyudmilla’s words, as an eye
opener, give us a timely warning. Thus,
Svetlana aptly presents the testimony of Lyudmilla
and reacts to the human enthusiasm for nuclear power.
-------Thulasidharan V
No comments:
Post a Comment