Remembering Chernobyl

... I see "liquidators" running with old-fashioned protection suits into a huge pile of rubble and carrying some nuclear fuel parts, graphite or metal parts with their hands from the one side of what has been the roof of a reactor hall to the other side trying to "clean it up". They run for their lives. For a very long 90 seconds. Then the next group is sent into the rubble.

... I see the journalist Lyubov Kovalevskaya entering an evacuation bus in the nuclear workers' city of Pripyat' then. And I hear the thin voice she has as a consequence of her thyroid problems years later.

... I see helicopters throwing sand into a burning hole.

... I see 16-year-old Katya in Kiev, 90 km south of Chernobyl, scared to death by a danger she can't see, she can't sense, getting on a train for Leningrad to escape from radiation. She has never moved back to Kiev. This was the "sudden end of my childhood" as she said years later. Katya is my wife.

... I see black-and-white pictures of smiling "pioneer" children marching on the streets on the May 1st demonstration receiving high levels of radiation - 5 days after the explosion, hardly anyone had been told about what had happened.

... I see black-and-white pictures of the "bicycle race for peace" starting 10 days after the accident from Lenin Square (now Independence Square) in the city centre of Kiev with thousands of spectators along the street.

... I see Gorbachev on a TV screen after a terribly long 18 days of silence explaining to the Soviet and international public what happened at Chernobyl.

... I see water trucks "washing" the streets, soldiers with gas masks and I hear commands over megaphones, voices crying and Geiger counter sounds.

... I see hundreds of thousands of people like war refugees carrying all their valuables in their suitcases and hastily leaving their houses and their pasts behind.

... I see overcrowded Soviet-style hospitals.

... I see old women carrying wooden buckets with "fresh" water from a well to their homes some 15 km away from the reactor, whom I  met when I was on a Greenpeace nuclear campaign excursion to Chernobyl in 1996.

... I see thousands of candles at a mourning celebration on Kiev's Independence Square in 1996.

... I see the red face and hear the cynical laugh of Valery Krilkorov from the Union of Chernobyl Victims who I met with in 1995 and who was dead when I contacted his organisation 2 years later.

... I see pale-looking teenagers with worried, big eyes at a child's therapy centre in Kiev queuing up for a health check.

... I see myself being scared when I realised that my Geiger counter didn't work while I was taking samples from the soil in what the liquidators had called the "red forest" 1 km from the "Sarcophagus" in 1998.

... I see the words "Remember Chernobyl" beamed on a wall of the Sarcophagus by Greenpeace  Russia and Greenpeace Ukraine.

--Tobias Muenchmeyer

Tobias is a political analyst for Greenpeace in Germany. He wrote this remembrance on 26 April, 2005, the 19th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.