40 years after families survived the Chernobyl accident, they face war

0:00You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow Up First wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. Today on State of the World, 40 years after families survived the Chernobyl accident, they face war. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening.

0:40I'm Greg Dixon. Forty years ago, in April 1986, there was an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was the worst nuclear accident in history. Then the plant was in the USSR. Now it's in northern Ukraine. The accident was a shared trauma for Ukrainians and Russians. But now Russia's war on Ukraine has torn them apart. And many families who endured the accident and nuclear fallout four decades ago are now enduring a war that has lasted years. NPR's Joanna Kikisys introduces us to some of them. In this Soviet-era high-rise in Ukraine's capital, the memory of Chernobyl lingers in every corridor.

1:24Some of its former workers and their families live here, forever shaped by the events of that terrible day, April 26, 1986.

1:37In a phone call from that day, an emergency dispatcher and a firefighter talk about an explosion at the third and fourth reactors of the nuclear power plant. The dispatcher asks, are there any people there? And the firefighter responds, yes. Zoya Peravoshchenko's husband, Valery, was one of those people. He was on shift as the reactor sector foreman when Zoya got a call from her brother.

2:10She says, he asked me, is Valery home because there's been a big accident. And everything inside me just went cold. At the time, Chernobyl workers and their families lived in a town near the plant. Zoya rushed to the local hospital and found her husband on the third floor. His face was so red and he had tears in his eyes, she says. And he told me, you know, I could not find Valery Hodomchuk. He died. Hodomchuk was a pump operator. He worked with Zoya's husband. Zoya recalls how Khodimchuk liked to fish and how he always shared his catch with friends. He was Chernobyl's first victim. His body was never recovered from the site of the explosion.

3:01His wife Natalia spoke to a Ukrainian blogger in 2020, and she described how she kept the last shirt her husband wore before he headed to work that day. It smelled like him, so I did not wash it, she says. We buried it in a symbolic grave for him. Zoya's husband, meanwhile, was flown to a hospital in Moscow. He had burns and radiation poisoning. She was allowed to visit him a few weeks later. His skin was peeling off, she says. His voice was hoarse. And then his brain began to swell. so he fell into a coma. He shocked doctors by awaking a week later and asking for a beer. Zoya was thrilled he had some kind of appetite.

3:51She rushed to the supermarket that night. And when we came back the next day, she says, I asked the doctors, how's Valeti? And they said, he is no longer with us. He was buried in Moscow. Soviet authorities shut down the Chernobyl plant and moved some of the surviving workers and their families to a high-rise apartment building in Kiev. Zoya lived on the third floor and Natalia on the seventh. We were both widows who went to Moscow to visit graves, Zoya says, and that's how our friendship started. Back at their apartment building in Kiev, they also got to know Valentina Ananenko, the wife of another Chernobyl plant worker.

4:39Valentina's husband had heart problems because of the radiation, but he survived. Radiation is invisible, Valentina says. It's not like the war now. We hear explosions. We see all this blood and death. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Zoya's grandson joined the Ukrainian military. Natalia knit wool socks and belts for Ukrainian soldiers, and Valentina helped. The women also learned to live with constant Russian drone attacks. I pulled this old mattress into the hallway, Valentina says. That's where my husband and I slept. Hallways could protect against shrapnel and shattered glass. Zoya and Natalia moved their mattresses there too.

5:29Then, late on the night of November 14th of last year, Zoya heard Russian drones flying very close to the building. She says, we woke up at about half past 1 a.m., and drones were being shot down right outside. They were Shawhead drones, which are like small jets with explosives, and one flew right into the high-rise of the Chernobyl families. Valentina, who lived on the ninth floor, felt her entire apartment shake. The whole place filled with smoke and we could not breathe, she says. And the seventh floor was on fire, Natalia's floor. Natalia came to Zoya's apartment barefoot and in her nightgown.

6:17Her legs were burnt and so was the hair on her head, Zoya says. My grandson tried to spray burn cream on her legs. Natalia had literally run through the fire in her home, pouring water on the flames and herself. Maybe she was trying to put out the fire there, Valentina says, or maybe she was just looking for something. She had photos of her husband and all these books about Chernobyl. An ambulance took Natalia to the hospital. By morning she was in a coma, Zoya says, and she didn't make it. Everything burned in Natalia's apartment. Valentina takes us there. Oh, and that was her bad, huh?

7:07People here say she took the hit for our building, Valentina says. Forty years ago, Natalia's husband was the first person to be killed by the explosion at Chernobyl. He was consumed by fire in a place he was trying to protect. And decades later, his wife ran through flames to do the same. Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, Kiev.

7:37That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.