Chernobyl's hidden toll: How silence masked a radioactive tragedy for years

I was brushing my teeth when the breaking news came over RIAS—the Radio in the American Sector: the reactor disaster in Chernobyl. It was a Tuesday morning, three days after Block 4 of the nuclear power plant had exploded on April 26, 1986. There had been an accident, the report said, and people had been affected.

At the time, I was studying Slavic and German studies in Leipzig, and until that moment, I had heard absolutely nothing about the catastrophe. How could I have? Neither the radio stations nor East German television reported on it, and even the "Western broadcasters" had barely any information at that point, as I later realized.

I knew that nuclear power could be dangerous—but I had no idea how dangerous. On the contrary, apart from RIAS, my only sources of information were those of the GDR, and they lulled us into a false sense of security. Academics from the East German Academy of Sciences described the reactor type in Chernobyl as "fundamentally safe." Well, what else would they say? I thought. Chernobyl was too far away for us in the GDR to be affected.

Over the next few days, though, I grew skeptical. RIAS painted a dramatic picture from the scene: dozens had already died, hundreds of thousands had been evacuated from the area around Chernobyl, and the worst nuclear accident in history would have long-term health consequences.

A Feast Like the One at KaDeWe

Still, I didn't feel at risk. Quite the opposite—we threw ourselves at the salad that had suddenly appeared in our stores. Fresh salad, especially at that time of year, was unheard of in the GDR. Friends from the West told me it had been sent to the East because no one there would eat it anymore—the fear that it might be contaminated was too great. We didn't care. How could a radioactive cloud from Chernobyl possibly reach fields in Western Europe?

In the summer of 1986, I traveled to Ukraine with a few fellow students to work in Kyiv. The so-called "student summer" was one of the few opportunities to practice Russian with locals and spend our holidays somewhere other than the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea.

The markets in Kyiv were overflowing with fresh mushrooms, blueberries, blackberries, and fruit juices—for us East Germans, it was a feast like the one at KaDeWe. We ate everything and only briefly wondered whether it might be "dangerous because of the radiation." Our hunger had a clear answer.

Then we saw children with strikingly pale skin, toddlers being pushed in strollers because they couldn't walk, children who looked sick. For the first time, something like fear crept over us. But we reassured ourselves: We had been far away when the reactor exploded, and that was months ago now. What could possibly happen to us?

The Truth Only Hits After the Fall of the Wall

From September 1986, I spent half a year in the Russian city of Smolensk—a standard part of the curriculum for Russian studies students at the time. Smolensk is about 500 kilometers as the crow flies from Kyiv. There, too, we went to the markets, though they were far sparser than those in Kyiv. There were mostly apples, nuts, potatoes, and cabbage.

In October, the market closed—no more fruit or vegetables. Throughout those months, there was not a word about the reactor disaster, as if Chernobyl had never happened. Even the Russians we spoke to seemed unaware of the catastrophe. Their worries were more about getting anything to eat beyond white bread, kefir, and varenye. The fear of starvation loomed larger than the fear of radiation.

I only truly grasped the scale of the disaster shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wrote an article about Ukrainian children who were supposed to recover in Germany. Some were orphans, their parents having died from the effects of the explosion; others suffered from severe illnesses—siblings with tumors, cancer, or weakened immune systems. I still wonder: How are they doing now?