The Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986 divided the lives of thousands of people into two: before and after the accident. Two of them are teachers Adam and Klavdia Voronets from the Gomel region in Belarus, who were once among the liquidators of the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. They recalled the first days after the accident to DV.
"Nobody told us anything"
"Nobody informed people. On the fourth day after the tragedy, a few lines appeared in the newspaper: there was an accident, the consequences are being eliminated. Only our colleague, a physics teacher, said that it was very dangerous and that we had to run. But the authorities wouldn't allow it - so as not to cause panic," recalls Adam Voronets about the first days after the Chernobyl accident in 1986.
He was 33 at the time. He lived with his 28-year-old wife Klavdia and their two children in a village in the Bragin district, where Adam and his wife worked at the local school.
Klavdia tells how two days after the accident in Bragin they held a sports festival, for which students from all over the Gomel region arrived. Suddenly, many of them felt unwell. "The children were fainting, blood was flowing from their noses. We immediately called an ambulance, but they told us it was from the heat," the woman recalls.
Her own children also spent almost the entire weekend outside: playing in the sand and running through puddles after the rain. Two weeks after the Chernobyl accident, the authorities remained silent, and on television they showed tractors diligently plowing the fields.
It wasn't until May 11 that they began evacuating the children. "They put them in pioneer camps, and the adults continued to work as before. Then the military came to the village and started washing the houses. And we teachers started washing the school. We had to remove the top layer of soil around the building and bury it in the cemetery. We also did agricultural work," Adam recalls.
No one was talking about an imminent evacuation at the time. They prepared the school for the new school year, and then the children were returned to the village. "I still remember it like it was yesterday: there were soldiers in the school, and a military band greeted the buses with the children. Everyone was so happy to be going home. But on August 28, the school principal came back from a meeting and told us that we were going to be evicted,” says Claudia.
She and her husband Adam left the village in mid-October. They were later recognized as liquidators - for their participation in the work of decontamination of the school and the evacuation of the children. When it was time for them to retire, they were counted every month in the danger zone for three.
The village where the liquidators lived was declared safe, although the two neighboring villages - one half a kilometer and the other three kilometers away - were radioactively contaminated. The children from the village were not entitled to any benefits or special treatment, but Adam and Claudia managed to fight for the children of the village to go on vacation abroad every summer. For 25 years, hundreds of children have joined this program.
In 2016 The Voronets family, along with other liquidators from Belarus, Ukraine and Japan, were received by the Pope. The audience was organized by the International Education Center in Dortmund, Germany, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident and the anniversary of the other major nuclear disaster - that of Fukushima.
Adam and Claudia never received any gratitude or recognition from the local authorities. In 2006, Adam ran for MP, but, according to him, was fired from his job for this reason. Two years later, Claudia was also released - “for political reasons“.
"All our money goes to medicine"
The two say that many of the displaced died young. The most common diagnosis: cancer. Adam and Klavdia also have serious health problems, and 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, their daughter fell ill with cancer.
“Before the liquidators, we had the right to go for treatment once a year, we also received two weeks of additional vacation, and almost all our medicines were free for us. But in 2007, all this was taken away from us. Now we spend our entire pension on medicines“, says Adam Voronets. And his wife adds: “They took away all our privileges. Even in our documents it no longer says “liquidators“, but simply “victims“. Back then, no one asked us if we wanted to participate in the liquidation of the consequences. They told us that we had to get involved, and we did. And today, no one needs us“.
Author: Tatyana Nevedomskaya