On the human side of the disaster
Makhno said:
gravitas, thanks for starting this thread. In a world increasingly insensitized to large scale disasters, its easy to forget that each such disaster is felt primarily at an individual human level.
The best book I have read on the human impact of Chernobyl was Svetlana Alexievich’s “Voices of Chernobyl”.
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_alexievich.html
Though the actual more accurate Russian translation would be “The Prayer of Chernobyl”. Svetlana talked to survivors, relatives, evacuators, government officials and recorded their stories.
This book is not for the faint hearted. It illustrates better than anything else that not only Chernobyl was a disaster – the way the Soviet regime handled it made it 10 times worse than it could have been otherwise. Yet those people who sent an army of 20-year old conscripts to shovel radioactive remains – the conscripts whose bodies fell apart while they were still alive within the next week – never saw trial. One of the aspects I rarely see in any coverage of Chernobyl is that it was more than tragedy - it was a crime. But then, the Soviet state never cared about lives of people when a goal was supposed to be reached, so it was horribly consistent.
Svetlana paints pictures that will forever sear in your mind. A kitten sitting behind the window of abandoned house – so thin you’d think it was a toy – who ate the all the leaves from a potted geranium. An old woman preparing to leave her house, and all she has in her hands is an icon and a cat – yet the evacuators have to force her to leave the cat behind, because the fur of all animals is radioactive. A government official, who cites all the people blaming him for deaths of their relatives while his own daughter is dying from cancer. And unbelievable love of an evacuator’s fiancée, who looked after her husband on a hospital bed while his flesh was prying away from his bones, until he was finally sealed inside a metal coffin to be buried away with the radioactive waste – a woman whose life is also now over because she got an almost lethal dose simply by looking after him, but nobody could stop her from doing it.
I finished it in one sitting and was shaken for the rest of the day. But guess what? Next day rolled over, routine kicked in, and I slowly started to forget.
I guess that is also natural human reaction – there is too much pain in this world, so if we constantly took all of it to heart we’d destroy ourselves.
Nonetheless, we need reminders, if anything, to simply put things in perspective. And realize how amazing and problem-free are most days of our lives.
and ,,um,,check your spelling before someone says you've been drinking