"I realised that nobody was concerned about us. I realised that
nobody was taking care of us after the disaster. It was our own
problem and we were the only ones who could deal with it. At that
point I felt very lonely. I was the only one who had contact with my
child and it was only through me that my child could be heard."


Hanna Kozlova lives in one of Kiev’s never-ending concrete suburbs. Just like many other middle- aged Ukrainian women her nerves are on edge. The words tumble out of her mouth faster than the interpreter can follow. She has related her story many times. A professional actress, she bursts into tears at the right points in her account of her family’s misfortune. But her tears are real enough, because Hanna clearly is marked by Chernobyl.

Hanna originally came from a Ukrainian village, which was so small that it did not have an electricity supply until 1962. She therefore experienced the Soviet Union’s material development as something very positive. In the early 1980s she lived with her husband in Pripyat, the town where the workers of the big new Chernobyl nuclear power plant lived. There were 50,000 people of 33 nationalities living in the town. ”I can remember the very first girl who was born there. I saw the town grow. I gave birth to a daughter. I was a real patriot, not just because I ought to be. I was a true homeland patriot. I loved my country and all 15 republics. I thought that we were all equal,” says Hanna of her past. Her husband had a good engineering job. As a patriotic Soviet citizen Hanna actively participated in the activities of the Komsomol organisation.

1986 was appointed the International Year of Peace by the United Nations, but both the USA and the Soviet Union were rearming like never before. Back then Hanna was very fearful of war. Her family had been through a number of wars and unusually her grandmother had been saved by a German during the war. ”A German was going to shoot her, but another saved her. My grandmother told me that she cried when the Germans later withdrew and she saw that the one who had saved her was dead. They had entered each others’ lives. We cried too when she told us that story. She used to tell us that not all Germans were the same.”

Hanna worked for the young Pioneers*. Children came round with cookies, collected money for a peace fund and wrote letters to the US president about bringing peace to the world. On 25th April she arrived home late from a meeting. Just after she had gone to bed she heard and felt an explosion and immediately thought that a war had begun. ”I went out, it was a beautiful night, the moon was shining, there was obviously no war going on, perhaps the sound had come from a military camp** nearby. In the middle of the night someone came and knocked on the door. I asked my husband to open it. Some people said there was a fire at Chernobyl. They’d knocked on the door of the wrong apartment.”

The following morning her husband went off to work and Hanna wanted to go to her vegetable garden with their 41⁄2-year-old son Viktor. A man on the street advised her to stay indoors, but she went anyway. When she passed the station she noticed that men wearing masks were washing the streets. She wondered what was going on. There was also a strange metallic taste in her mouth. Iodine pills were handed out but Hanna did not take any. She simply could not believe that anything serious could have happened.

When they arrived home again they went up to the ninth floor to look out at the fire but they still did not understand what had happened. She tried to call her husband. ”My husband wouldn’t get away from work, even though he wasn’t a Communist. He had a sense of responsibility for a lot of people. That was how we were brought up – you don’t just leave work – we felt responsible,” explains Hanna.

The children were sent to stay with her brother in the town of Vinnitsa. Some people found out that they were from Pripyat and they were examined straight away. They were so radioactive that they were immediately taken to hospital. When Hanna arrived she was also examined. Her hair and feet in particular were very radioactive. They took all her clothes and shoes and gave her new ones.

Being a true patriot Hanna went on the May Day demonstration, even though she was in hospital. During the celebrations she became sick and fainted. She thought it was due to sunstroke. Her husband was also admitted to hospital with acute diarrhoea. He was very sleepy all the time.

It was not until her son began to vomit and became more seriously ill that Hanna fully realised that the situation was a disaster. ”When I heard the diagnosis I just didn’t believe that this could have happened to me. It could happen to anyone else but not to me. Not to my child. I will never repeat the diagnosis. I screamed at the top of my voice and refused to listen to anyone. When I was told that there was nothing they could do I just refused to believe it. When my child had an operation I was told that the result was not yet certain. I refused to believe that too.”

His entire thyroid gland was removed and he lost his voice. His larynx was completely deformed. Often after a thyroid operation some of the diseased tissue is left behind. It is only possible to find this by using a specific type of radioactive iodine. As a mother simply trying to help her child Hanna was suddenly confronted with a mass of foreign questions. She was completely helpless and did not know what to do. The boy was sick and should be given radioactive iodine as medicine. Where should she obtain that?

She began to write letters in several languages to doctors in various countries, asking for help. There was a forthcoming international symposium for doctors to be held in the town of Kharkiv. ”I imagined that I would get into the conference room, fall on my knees and beg them to help my child. I couldn’t have cared less how high ranking they were. I would have asked them all – I would have asked from my heart – because they were all parents, they all had children.” Hanna fantasised theatrically about going there, but once she found out about the conference it was already over.

Hanna blamed Chernobyl for almost everything. Chernobyl had ruined the lives of her family. Had it been only herself or her husband it would have been alright, but not her children. But then she met a woman on the street who had an almost prophetic influence on her. ’You are the only one who can help your son,’ the woman told her. She had to carry on with life. She was the mother and no one else could take care of her son. ”I cried and went to pieces. I felt I had to do something. I didn’t know what, but I had to do something”.

When her son Viktor was about to have his second operation Hanna succeeded in making contact with a French organisation that had just begun to work in the Ukraine. Through them he was able to travel to Paris and have the operation there. Hanna felt that her prayers had been heard, but with her exaggerated mother’s instinct she found it very difficult to hand the boy over into the care of other people. She prayed even more to God in that period. ”The first time my son came back from Paris after the operation I met him at the airport. It was winter, but for me it felt as if spring had come. My son came back at one o’clock in the the night, but it felt to me as if the sun were shining. For the first time I cried tears of joy. You just can’t put it into words.”

The family now celebrates Viktor’s birthday twice a year – his real birthday and the anniversary of the day he had the operation. They meet and say a prayer for everyone who helped them - for their families, their health and so on. Over the next couple of years Viktor went to France once a year to be checked. It was like a dream for Hanna. Viktor had had his operation and the French gave him all the pills he needed. But there were other children who didn’t have access to the same sort of medicine.

Some doctors wanted to give Hanna’s telephone number to other mothers who felt similarly disheartened. More and more women called her and asked about everything from medication to which authorities they should approach.

Because of the lack of information Hanna decided that they should make a demonstration. This was quite a bold move in the Ukraine at that time, but the women placed themselves in front of the government building. They expressed some demands but the government officials would not listen to them because they did not represent an organisation, ”They were just a group of mothers”. Some of the demands they expressed were to get radioactive iodine treatment and to have the medicine available for all children. The children should be treated in the Ukraine.

Small interest groups were a new phenomenon after the Ukraine became independent in 1991. At one of the meetings there was an American woman who asked the obvious question, which the others had not considered: ’If the only reason you can’t be officially accepted is because you aren’t an organisation – then why not set simply form an organisation’.

”Everyone in the group gave me their addresses. They all had the same purpose and the same sad story,” Hanna remembers. She had a lawyer help set up the terms of reference. The organisation was given the name ’Marked by Chernobyl Atom’, which referred to the operation scars the children had on their necks. The organisation’s logo depicted children with only one wing, the other having been cut off. ”It symbolises that these children will never be ’fully fledged’. They are not the same as they once were. They will never be the same again.”

”There is a difference between ’children of Chernobyl’ and ’children marked by Chernobyl’,” explains Hanna. ”Many of the organisations that helped children of Chernobyl also helped children of high-ranking authorities. They were children who came from wealthy backgrounds, and therefore the situation was abused for their interests. There are many organisations that help ’children of Chernobyl’ but not so many that help ’children marked by Chernobyl’.

Following the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of capitalism’s endless hunt for profit it became difficult for many people to understand why Hanna wanted to work with an organisation without being paid. A Japanese fund helped them to pay their telephone bills and to establish an open medical centre in the Ukraine where children could be treated. Some poor children received $50, $30 or $10 per month. It was the Japanese who collected money for the children. They also bought a computer and a fax machine for the organisation. People were constantly coming in and out of the apartment, which had been turned into an office. Hanna felt that it was the will of God that all these people were able to come.

The organisation also sent children on holidays abroad. One year a busload of children was on its way to Slovakia. At the border the children got off and the border guards checked the bus for radioactivity. When the children got on board again the bus suddenly became radioactive. The guards became afraid and did not know what to do. At first they thought that there was someone smuggling radioactive material. When they began to check the children they discovered that it was the children themselves who were radioactive.

”The border guards would not allow the children into the country,” remembers Hanna. ”The Japanese paid for our journey. We were supposed to go to Tatry and drink mineral water there. I had to ring the ministry of health in the Ukraine, which contacted the ministry of health in Slovakia. It was only after nine hours, by which time the children were very hungry, that we received permission from the ministry of health in Slovakia to continue our journey”.

It became more difficult to obtain money for all the activities, so the organisation was dissolved. However, the work with the children of Chernobyl is as necessary as ever and will continue to be so for many decades.

Since Chernobyl Hanna has lost faith in medicine and her principle is to avoid it. She would rather eat something natural. She collects birch tree juice in the forests around Kiev. First she greets the trees politely and apologises for taking their juice.

She and her husband have high blood pressure and she believes that the birch tree juice helps. She drinks the juice half an hour before she eats. She is sure that the birch trees cannot have been contaminated. ”Birch trees act as a sort of strong filter. If I drink tap water I think it’s far more contaminated than birch tree juice. People in Chernobyl grow many things, especially vegetables – they eat them and they sell them. Do you think they take in less of the contamination than I do when I drink the juice?”



About EarthVision's 20 Years 20 Lives Project.


- Meeti Grigorij Sorikov, Pensioner, Belarus
- Meet Galina Bandazhevskaya, Pediatrician, Minsk, Belarus
- Meet Valentina Smolnikowa, Buda-Koshelevo, Belarus
- Meet Alexander Filippov, Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
- Meet Igor Komisarenko, Direktor of the Komisarenko Institute for Endochrinology and Metabolism, Kiev, Ukraine
- Meet Constantine Checherov, Nuclear Physicist, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia / Slavutich, Ukraine
- Meet Natalia Ivanovna Ivanova, Deputy Director, Vesnova Orphanage, Mogilev Oblast, Belarus
- Meet Danilo Vezhichanin, Mayor, the village of Yelno, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine


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* ‘Young Pioneers’ was an organisation for 10-to-15 year olds. It can best be compared with the scouting movement, but the pioneers also learned about Communist principles. At age 15 they could join the Komsomol organisation.

** Today one can see a giant antenna towering over the forest XX km from the Chernobyl power plant. It is the remains of a missile warning system. Together with a similar structure 200 km away it could warn of a possible missile attack on the Soviet Union. After the Chernobyl disaster these military works were abandoned because of the radiation.

Text: Mads Eskesen
Translation: Angela Heath

Photos: Mads Eskesen and Gabriala Bulisova

The story is based on interviews in 2004 and in 2005 by Marianne Barisonek and by Mads Eskesen