Radioactive Citizens

Today, around twenty people and all of them elderly live in the village of Paryshev situated about ten kilometers from Chornobyl. We came here accompanied by Police Major Yaroslav Homenskiy. Paryshev is one of the most densely populated villages in the Chornobyl zone with a population of 150. The population of Chornobyl is about the same

All of these local residents have earned the right to live and die on their native soil. They were evicted and then returned. They were again evicted and returned again illegally, secretly crossing the border. And so it continued until the Zone Administration acknowledged defeat and issued a regulation On the Life of Residents of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. A shop on wheels comes once a week to supply the so-called self-settlers with basic food, matches, soap and other staple commodities. The local police visit them not to enforce law but to ask whether assistance is needed and if so – what kind of.

Those that returned to the zone are mostly elderly people. Each of them had their own reasons, but they all had to adapt to the lives their ancestors lived on the land they cultivated. Beekeeping, animal husbandry (poultry and pigs), firewood in the stoves in their homes became the content and meaning of their existence.  Their life throughout the year is subject to the calendar of Mother Nature. As one of the residents of the zone said, “There is no such notion of time. There is no rush here.”

A primeval silence reigns here. A person involuntarily shudders when it suddenly is interrupted by the buzz of a chainsaw. A grandpa wearing a quilted jacket stands behind a gate. “To hell with this sharp-toothed anti-Christ bastard! It drives me up the wall,” says the old codger, pointing his chainsaw towards the garden. “Cut down all the birches in the valley. Oh how beautiful they were. Gave lots of juice.”

Behind the house are signs of war between the old man named Ivan Semenyuk and a beaver. The conflict began when the water in the canal that flows next to the garden where the beaver lives dried up. One morning the pond that Ivan had dug with his own hands long ago, had bred fish in and sat on the banks of every morning with his fishing pole got empty. All that was left were dying fish flipping their tails on the silt bottom of the pond. But the beaver’s canal was full again.

The livid Ivan caught the beaver in a trap. But when he and his neighbor took the beaver to give it the axe, the poor animal exuded “tears the size of hail almost like a human being”. The old codgers felt pity for the beaver and released it. When the sentimental neighbor tried to pet the beaver goodbye it bit off his finger and now Mykola “has nothing to pick his nose with”. Now, the ungrateful beaver is threatening the birch trees behind Ivan’s house that provide the grandpa with excellent juice.

The village of Zalissya, unlike Paryshiv, is the least populated in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. There is only one resident, a woman by the name of Rosa Otroshko. She is without exaggeration unique and should be an object of scientific research.

After graduating from high school she entered the Taras Shevchenko National University, and than worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature until her retirement. She never married and did not have any children. She says smiling, “I had thirty kids in each of my classes and the class register became my husband,”

She survived despite radiation, harsh living conditions and ice water in which she stood up to her waist whole night and half a day when the ice in the swamp gave in. Help came only the next day. Rosa lost consciousness when she saw the flashing lights on the roof a vehicle. When the police officers ran up, she had no pulse. Much to the surprise of doctors and fellow patients that wagered their hospital cutlets on when Rosa would eventually pass away, she survived and returned back home to Zalissya.

When parting, Rosa dedicated a poem to us and wrote it down on a piece of paper. For some reason, the poem was in German.

We returned from the 30-km Chornobyl zone thinking that people there are special. Not picky, strong-willed and good-natured. Was it radioactivity that makes them like this.