Kat Gale’s Reviews > Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster > Status Update

I looked him in the eye and I said: “Why are you chasing one another? Why are you killing?” And he looked like he felt ashamed. “All right, ma’am, not so loud.” But when they’re together, they’re different. If there’d been three of them, or even two, they’d have put me up against the wall. When you’re one-on-one you can still talk to a person.

There’s only one government there—the man with the gun. In the morning I put the kids on the train to Astrakhan, I told the conductors to transport them like they do watermelons, to not open the door. [Silent. Then cries for a long time.] Is there anything more frightening than people?

Oh, I don’t even want to remember it. It’s scary. They chased us out, the soldiers chased us. The big military machines rolled in. The all-terrain ones. One old man—he was already on the ground. Dying. Where was he going to go? ‘I’ll just get up,’ he was crying, ‘and walk to the cemetery. I’ll do it myself.’

They had black spots all over their bodies. These spots would appear, then disappear. About the size of a five-kopek coin...Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room? There were seven of them in the hospital room...I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. –Nikolai Fomich Kalugin

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth. I worked hard and honestly my whole life. But I didn’t get any fairness.