Natalia Nikolaychuk cannot say the name of her hometown without starting to cry, and simply refers to it as “the other life.”
Pripyat, a city where thousands of Ukrainian families once happily lived, has turned into a ghost town after it was evacuated in 1986 after an explosion at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the deadliest civil nuclear disaster in history.
A product of Soviet urban planning, Pripyat was the closest town to the power plant. It was set up in 1970 to mostly house families that worked at the plant. In 1986, the town had over 45,000 residents – all of them evacuated the next day after the April 26 Chornobyl nuclear disaster. More than 2 million people in more than 5,000 cities and villages in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were affected by radiation. But 28 years later, for many it is the psychological trauma that runs deeper.
On April 27, a day after the explosion, Pripyat residents were told to take “some bare essentials” for a maximum three-day leave.
“Though somehow my husband knew we were not coming back,” Nikolaychuk says.
Nikolyachuk, who is now 60, worked at the nuclear power plant’s chemistry lab, while her husband Petro Nikolyachuk was the plant’s electrician engineer.
“I remember regretting not taking the iron. But I did take a bucket, I thought it was necessary,” the woman recalls with a sad smile.
Nikolyachuk’s daughter Maryna, 36 now, was an eight-year-old back when the explosion happened. The most precious thing she left at her home in Pripyat was a stuffed raccoon. For her younger brother Semen it was a toy duck named Peeka.
“He was reproaching my parents for that duck for many years,” Maryna Nikolaychuk says.
But their mother’s had to leave her husband behind.
On the day of evacuation Petro Nikolaychuk didn’t leave with his family. He stayed to work with a liquidation team for two weeks, and then worked two-week shifts for three more years. Surprisingly, it has not affected his health. Many liquidators developed tumors, blood and thyroid-related diseases, as well as psychological disorders as a result of their work.
Petro Nikolaychuk knew the scale of the disaster, but didn’t think much about his own safety as “there was so much work to do.”
His daughter’s strongest memory from the evacuation day is her mom crying and all the people in the bus trying to comfort her.
“Someone said something like ‘Don’t cry, we’ll come back here soon’ and she shouted ‘We will never come back here, don’t you understand!’ and this ‘never’ actually made me feel the tragedy even though I was just eight,” Maryna Nikolaychuk recalled.
This year is the first time when the mother does not sense that the sad Chornobyl anniversary is coming.
“Maybe it’s because we have this other grievance in our hearts – all the lives lost during EuroMaidan and the Russian invasion,” says Natalia Nikolaychuk.
The family is happy with the state care they receive. Like other families from Pripyat, the Nikolaychuks got to chose among a number of cities of where to relocate. They picked Slavutych, a city in Chernihiv Oblast purposefully-built for the evacuated personnel.
Maryna Nikolaychuk says they also needed psychological help, but that wasn’t offered.
“Even we, children, had to deal with losing a home and even burying our friends who died of radiation,” she says.
Kyiv-based psychologist Alla Dashko says home loss is a much bigger problem than it can seem.
“To lose a home means to lose the feeling of safety which is the basic need of every human. For some, this can lead to losing the value of life,” Dashko explains.
Yet Nataliya Nikolaychuk’s memories from “the other life” are pleasant.
“The town looked like a bird – with its central street, a square, and white houses on both sides just like wings,” she recalls.
Her daughter’s happiest childhood memories are also from Pripyat. The young woman prefers wearing perfumes that have the scent of pine needles because they remind her of Pripyat, surrounded by lush forests.
“You know, I’ll always be from Pripyat,” she smiles.
Her mother is even more nostalgic. Sometimes she goes to the Chornobyl museum in Slavutych to see her old apartment’s windows in one of the Pripyat photographs.
“Even after all these years it still feels like we lost our home and never got a real new one,” Nataliya Nikolaychuk says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].
