Turning the pages back...

May 4, 1986

The following is an excerpted story of an unnamed old woman from the village of Ilnytsi, Polissia district, taken from a 43-page illustrated booklet issued by the environmental monitoring and lobbying group Greepeace International, "Testimonies: Chernobyl Papers No. 1."

"We were evacuated at the first day of Easter, (May 4, 1986). First they transferred us to the Makarievsky region, Kyiv oblast, and settled us among local residents. Our cattle were collected and evacuated first, we were evacuated the next day.

"[For] four months we lived among strangers, and then after five months they transferred us to new housing in the Yahotyn region. We stayed there over the winter. The new houses were constructed badly, they were cold and wet. They were built on water-logged soil and the land was not leveled properly...

"In the spring when the snow melted we faced a new disaster: the water did not flow away. The walls caved in and the houses collapsed...

"So we returned home... Our life is not too hard... They often measure soils here for radiation, but they do not tell us the levels. Some Americans visited us here recently - they carried out some measurements and quickly disappeared.

"We have lived here for almost a decade now. It is a pity that [the] people at checkposts do not allow our relatives to visit us. We have to travel almost 20 kilometers on foot to leave. They do not allow our people with cars to cross the checkpoints.

"But in general it is not bad here. Recently they have even allowed children from outside to stay with their grandmothers here in the summer."

Source: Testimonies: Chernobyl Papers No. 1, p. 31 (Amsterdam: Greenpeace International, 1996).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 28, 1996, No. 17, Vol. LXIV

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