Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

Author:Svetlana Alexievich [Alexievich, Svetlana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B016QMCBKM
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2015-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

He:

You know, we all had a military upbringing. We were oriented toward blocking and liquidating a nuclear attack. We needed to be ready for chemical, biological, and atomic warfare. But not to draw radionuclides out of our organisms.

You can’t compare it to a war, not exactly, but everyone compares it anyway. I lived through the Leningrad Blockade as a kid, and you can’t compare them. We lived there like it was the front, we were constantly being shot at. And there was hunger, several years of hunger, when people were reduced to their animal instincts. Whereas here, why, please, go outside to your garden and everything’s blooming! These are incomparable things. But I wanted to say something else—I lost track—it slipped away. A-ah. When the shooting starts, God help everyone! You might die this very second, not some day in the future, but right now. In the winter there is hunger. In Leningrad people burned furniture, everything wooden in our apartment we burned, all the books, I think, we even used some old rags for the stove. A person is walking down the street, he sits down, and the next day you walk by and he’s still sitting there, that is to say he froze, and he might sit there like that another week, or he might sit until the spring. Until it warms up. No one has the strength to break him out of the ice. Sometimes if someone fell on the ice someone would come up and help him. But usually they’d walk past. Or crawl past. I remember people didn’t walk, they crawled, that’s how slowly they were going. You can’t compare that with anything!

My mother still lived with us when the reactor blew up, and she kept saying: “We’ve already lived through the worst thing, son. We lived through the Blockade. There can’t be anything worse than that.”

We were preparing for war, for nuclear war, we built nuclear shelters. We wanted to hide from the atom as if we were hiding from shrapnel. But the atom is everywhere. In the bread, in the salt. We breathe radiation, we eat it. That you might not have bread or salt, and that you might get to the point where you’ll eat anything, you’ll boil a leather belt so that you can feed on the smell—that I could understand. But this I can’t. Everything’s poisoned? Then how can we live? In the first few months there was fear. The doctors, teachers, in short, the intelligentsia, they all dropped everything and left. They just hightailed it out of here. But military discipline—give up your Party card—they weren’t letting anyone out. Who’s to blame? In order to answer the question of how to live, we need to know who’s to blame. Well, who? The scientists or the personnel at the station? The director? The operators on duty? Tell me, why do we not do battle with automobiles as the workings of the mind of man, but instead do battle with the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.