April 26, 1986.
At the Chernobyl nuclear plant, near the city of Priatiz of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, A security experiment evolves into a nightmare. Within seconds, the reactor 4 explodes. Heaven is illuminated by an eerie blue light. A cloud of radioactivity rises above the station, invisible, wild and murderous.
No one knew – or did not want to know – the size of the disaster.
Firefighters, without protective equipment, are thrown into the battle with flames. Many of them will die in the next few days, having absorbed deadly doses of radioactivity. In Priati, a few kilometers away, residents continue their lives as if nothing happened: children play on the streets, families ride in the park.
The evacuation of the city will start 36 hours later. People leave within a few hours, with the promise that they will return in three days. They will never come back.
Chernobyl is the largest technological disaster of the 20th century. Radioactivity did not know borders: Sweden, Germany, Greece, and even countries in North Africa accepted the invisible wave of infection. Hundreds of thousands of “liquid” – soldiers, workers, scientists – were recruited to limit damage, sacrificing their health and lives.
The Soviet leadership initially tried to hide the accident. Only after the first recordings of radioactivity in Sweden factories was it forced to admit the truth. But the price had already begun to write: deaths from acute radioactive disease, an increase in thyroid cancers, genetic abnormalities, a wound in the environment that remains open to this day.
Literature found one of its most tragic issues in Chernobyl. Svetlana Aleksievic, with her award -winning book “Chernobyl: a time of the future”he gave voice to the invisible heroes, the mothers who lost their children, to the men who returned from the “no -eyes, no person” station, to the ordinary people who learned in the most violent way that the invisible can kill.
Today, almost forty years later, Chernobyl is not just an abandoned landscape – a ghost in the nature that regains its space. It is a reminder of how easily the control can be lost.
Where arrogance, opacity and lack of respect for man and nature lead.
And above all, it is a voice: to remember those who have been silent to save the rest.