She watched Chornobyl Burn - Olena Mokhnyk's Story

Note: This was a piece which I wrote for the Kyiv Weekly on the twentieth anniversary of the Chornobyl Nuclear Catastrophe in 2006. The Kyiv Weekly stopped publishing its English language edition some time earlier in 2014. So here is just the copy as I have it from my personal archives which I came across today while going through some files for a book I'm working on. There were photographs in the published article which Olena had supplied, maybe she will be kind enough to scan a few for me to include here.

When she dreams, she doesn’t dream about things that are contemporary but rather from her childhood – and the events that happened before the catastrophe at the Chornobyl NPS on April 26, 1986, twenty years ago.

When the ChNPS started to burn early in the morning that April, Olena Mokhnyk, now twenty-eight years old, was asleep in her bed in the city of Prypyat. The city was built by the Soviet government to house the employees of the ChNPS. By 1986, the city had grown to a population of about 50,000. In the morning, like all the other children her age, Olena got up and went to school.

“When we got to school that Saturday morning our teachers were already aware that there was something wrong. We were given some type of tablets to take but we never swallowed them. Instead, we went to the bathroom and spit them out,” Olena told Kyiv Weekly.

In retrospect, it is probably fair to suggest that these were iodine supplements, since the authorities must have known something about the effects of radiation and how iodine deficient organisms would absorb radioactive iodine and how this might affect early childhood development.

“When we were sent home from school that morning, we all wanted to go and watch it burn, but along the way some parents directed us to go home,” said Olena.

Though that night, Olena together with her older brother and sister watched Chornobyl burn from their balcony.

“Not only could we see the fire, we could see lights being shone from above. It was as if something was shining down from the heavens!” Olena said with a look on her face as if she was living through the experience all over again.

Olena’s family learned first hand that something terrible had happened from Olena’s uncle who worked at the plant. He had been on an early shift sitting in the exact place of his colleague whose grave became Chornobyl and the concrete sarcophagus that covered the plant once the fire had been extinguished. Later her uncle returned to work at Chornobyl, feeling the guilt that his colleague had lost his life.

On April 27, everyone in Olena’s family listened to the fixed wire radio, which was present in practically all Soviet homes at the time.

“We heard the familiar voice of a local poetess who told us that there was going to be an evacuation,” said Olena. We gathered all we could take with us and made our way down to the square in front of our building. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, but it was about 3 hours before buses began to arrive. As we drove away from the place that I would not return to for nineteen years and traveled towards Kyiv, the people in charge of the buses wanted to leave us in some village in the middle of nowhere! But our parents and others demanded that we had to be taken to Kyiv,” Olena explained all the while as if in a dream.

Alone without parents

When they arrived in Kyiv, Olena’s parents decided to send their children to their maternal grandmother’s in Kharkiv, as distant a place they could think of in order to provide the appropriate care for their children.

“When we arrived at my grandmother’s some news had already spread regarding to what had had happened. Our grandmother was a pharmacist and when we got there she didn’t waste much time in taking us to the local radiology laboratory. My brother, sister and I stood there and we were checked with a dosimeter. The doctors quickly scurried out of the examination room. We waited. Then the door opened, and in walked the doctors dressed up in what looked like space suits,” Olena expressed as if she were still a child.

The doctors decided that all the children should be scrubbed down. “After we went through that procedure, they tested us with the dosimeter again. All the areas of our skin that were washed showed a normal reading. Then they ran the dosimeter near our heads. The readings went well over normal, and that is when they shaved our heads,” said Olena.

Olena and her siblings were then sent to a pioneer camp on the outskirts of Odesa. It was there and outside the camp that they faced the harshest words from children of their own age who were not from the evacuation zone.

“They called us hedgehogs,” said Olena running her fingers through her now neck-length hair. Their hair, which had started to grow back, was bristly and truly looked like the bristling hairs of a hedgehog.

“It was difficult at times, because all we had was our older brother who would look out for us but he wasn’t much older than we were,” said Olena.
During the months that followed, the children were visited by their parents a few times, and it wasn’t until six months later at the end of November that they were all reunited in Kyiv.

Shattered dreams, closure

While still in Prypyat, Olena had been told by her teachers that on account of her good grades, she would be skipping a grade, partially due to the fact that she had been attending school with her older sister. When she arrived in Kyiv, this was one of her greatest concerns.

“I was always asking my mother if what I had been promised and whether I would be going into the fourth grade would come true. But her reply would be, ‘We’ll see!’”, said Olena.

Olena together with her family were often ostracized as if they were to blame for their predicament.

When they first moved into the apartment they were provided with, it was empty and her parents had a hard time finding work. Her mother and she were always at odds with the teachers at the school as they tried to ensure that what she had been promised back in Prypyat would come to be.

Needless to say, the promise never came true, like many of the other promises made by people and the government. “For years now I haven’t even bothered trying to get the subsidies that I’m entitled to, as it is more a headache than worth the while. But my mother still goes through the whole process of getting all the different pieces of paper in order that she still collects her benefits,” Olena explained.

What seems to be more important to Olena is what she experienced last year when she returned to Prypyat for the nineteenth anniversary of the accident. She then returned not only to the family’s old apartment, but also to her old classroom. However, each of those more recent experiences she has had are stories in and of themselves. The game goes for the recollections of her sister and brother of a catastrophe that happened twenty years ago, but that first journey home for her can be considered closure and maybe someday soon she will start to have other types of dreams.


Vasyl Pawlowsky Independent Consultant

The commentary of this was first published on the WPawlowsky.com site.

Twenty-five years ago – Chornobyl – Where were you?

For the most part anniversaries are usually a time for celebration, however, today is not one of those moments. Twenty five years ago today the world experienced something that it had never experienced before, a nuclear catastrophe that made Three Mile Island look like a spitting contest in a hurricane. In the light of the nuclear disasters in Japan as a result of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami, there are many who are beginning to question the nuclear energy programs worldwide. However, while Japan lives its own catastrophe and is dealing with things short term, there are many, who to this day still living with the events that happened quarter of a century ago.

There have been more than one occasion where I was in a position that I was sitting in Ukraine and had the task of reporting on “Where were you that day in history?” I personally, cannot pinpoint exactly where I was, but I'm quite certain it was either in South Lancaster, Ontario or up on the Ontario-Quebec border sleeping in a tent, as part of a weekend training session for a trip which would take me from Vancouver, British Columbia to Montreal, Quebec by bicycle. It was only when I arrived home a few days later that I had heard of what had happened. Though many years later while living in Ukraine I met people, who became my friends who had lived through that whole nightmare.

Two of these friends were Iryna and Olena Mokhnyk, five years ago it was my task to not only do my little piece for the Kyiv Weekly, but to put a Canadian journalist friend of mine Marie-Claude Malboeuf of La Presse together with Olena [ed. Article in French], as the former was doing an expose on the human tragedy of Chornobyl, for a special issue in La Presse twenty years after the catastrophe. Subsequently, Marie-Claude won a Canadian Newspaper Award for her work, however, I only discovered this quite recently. Five years later Marie-Claude is again covering Chornobyl and is also closely covering the recent events in Japan, however, I can't help to think just how many people like Iryna, Olena and their brother Andriy had to live through everything that happened twenty-five years ago, not only in Ukraine but also to the north in Belarus, and how many more will live through a similar nightmare in the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan.

Last week, I revisited the topic of Chornobyl for my radio segment called Kultural Capsule on Ukrainian Roots Radio – Nash Holos. It churned up a lot of different memories of experiences in my life that relate to the topic of Chornobyl. I spent some time thinking about my friends Iryna and Olena, stories of other friends who were told that they would be marching in the May Day parade on Khreschatyk, Kyiv's main street, back in 1986 and then there was my own trip into the Exclusion Zone and Chornobyl with a United Nations delegation back in 2002 headed by a man from Japan who was all two familiar with radiation as a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. I wondered, what Kenzo Oshima has been thinking about since the recent events have struck his own country. Will Fukushima Prefecture become an Exclusion Zone like the one I had visited with him in 2002?

However, as I prepared my program which you will be able to hear on May 1, twenty-five years after the darn Soviet bureaucrats kept on making out that nothing at all had happened to the world at large, I came across one particular piece of music which I wanted to share with any of you who do happen to read this. The piece is called Song about the Shuhayster by Tin Sotsya. The Shuhayster is a Ukrainian mythological forest man, though this song in particular is dedicated to the Chornobyl. This piece was also done in Belorussian and appeared on a CD dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the Chornobyl tragedy called Chornobyl Wind, though this song was originally done for a tribute album to GODS TOWER a well known Belorussian folk-metal. For four months it remained at the top of the Belorussian charts.




While the future segment of Kultural Capsule was already in the can last week, this morning I was looking through my mail and it came as no surprise that my friend Stepan Pasicznyk aka Ludwig, whom I had interviewed a while back for my segment, also had something to offer up on anniversary which is far from a celebration.





I would be more than happy to hear from anyone who reads this as to where they were 25-years ago when “the world was changed for good that day.”