‘I still have the liquidator’s medal, which he pressed on me.’

Prize catch: John Lampen on the Chernobyl liquidators

An unkempt stranger once fell passionately in love (or maybe lust) with me on a public bus in Minsk. It was not a good experience. He was drunk and disinhibited, and I couldn’t understand most of his Belarussian advances. He knew no English. His clothes were shabby, and he was not very clean. He looked older than me, but I now think he had probably aged prematurely. His attentions were attracting the notice of other passengers, but no one came to my assistance. The presence of my wife Diana made the situation even more difficult. The man was unwelcome, embarrassing and more than a little scary. There was not much room to feel pity: I was simply thinking, ‘How can we get away?’

And then I realised that he was a ‘liquidator’, one of the thousands of workers who damaged their health beyond repair during the Chernobyl clean-up. Just possibly he was one of the soldiers ordered onto the roof of Reactor 4. They had to move radioactive debris during a single ninety-second shift – long enough to send many of them to reinforced concrete graves.

I still have the liquidator’s medal, which he pressed on me. A strange, undeserved souvenir, but it helps me to find compassion for him.

The recent BAFTA Awards for the superb film series Chernobyl brought back memories of the catastrophe for many. It has always been important for Diana and me because we have worked with many hundreds of Belarussian and Ukrainian children who were affected to varying degrees. For the awful, gripping story of 26 April 1986, I recommend Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, by Serhii Plokhy. It is an instructive, moving and horrifying account of heroism, guilt and suffering. Plokhy shows in detail how the flaws in the Soviet nuclear industry can be traced back to the character of the communist system; but his book is relevant to us too when some of our public voices urge us to get our economy and industry ‘back to normal’.

But the truly great book to emerge from the disaster was Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for her work. It is a collage of voices collected in interviews, with almost no commentary. They are voices of anger, horror, resignation, nostalgia, bewilderment, faith and generosity. I will leave you with one quotation from a section called ‘The Children’s Choir’: ‘Daddy kissed Mummy and I was born…  I used to think I would never die, but now I know I will. A boy was lying next to me in the hospital. He was called Vadik Korinkov. He drew little birds for me, little houses. He died. Dying isn’t frightening. You just sleep for a long, long time and don’t wake up…  I dreamed I died. I could hear my mummy crying in my dream and woke up.’

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