The four of us were playing dominoes. I am looking at the player next to me, and his face is changing: now it's yellowish, now it's greenish. Then he jumps up and he starts vomiting badly. Apparently, he received a large dose of irradiation. What should I do? I shout out to my friend: "Vityok, start the engine! We are going to the hospital in Ivankov. Someone goes with a bottle of water, I rip it out of his hands, jump into the car and go ahead. The irradiated person is getting worse and worse ...

But I am still convinced that with 90% of liquidators the dose does not correspond to what they had received. Both ways. Because at first they were given individual dosimeters, in the shape of a pencil. Well, it equaled to taking a regular pencil and looking into it. Because these dosimeters, they were stored in the emergency stock, it is not known how many years, then, after they were taken out from the emergency stock, they were all to be checked, operated, which did not take place in reality. And therefore, what they showed there, it's all wrong, you know. Then they went to the collective doses, that is, they do not take into account what you have received individually, rather they consider the whole platoon, and calculate the average. So, here where we are sitting now, let’s say, roughly 0.5 roentgens per hour. And where are you sitting – 300 roentgens per hour, because it's enough to stretch out a hand and that’s it, but it was necessary to count on the average, so to speak...

One day a doctor comes up and says: "Guys, do you know what? Let’s do away with being bored, go dancing today. There will be pretty good dances, go for dancing!" Well, we were fools to go for these dances. And there's a dumbhead there yelling: "Comrades! The doomed men have come!" They ran their ways from the dance floor, nobody remained but us. Take my word for it – it occurred at the sanatorium in Irpin. That’s how we went to dance. They were afraid to be contaminated with radiation by us.

It would not have been possible to explain that child, why it is not allowed to go out into the street. We told them that radiation was there, and they watched out of the window and would say: "There is no radiation there! The sun is shining there as before, the grass is green, that’s all. And it wasn’t allowed for us to pick up the berries. And we are the Polishchuki, we have grown up on this. It was not allowed to go down to the river, to go fishing, because radiation was all around there. And as for the babies who were born, their first word then was not mother, and it didn’t sound anymore, but the word radiation could be heard more than tht. Because it was such an enemy that we did not see. Do not go there, do not stand there, do not run near the houses – as far as the children were concerned. So, in fact, that tadiation and the fact that we had been left in that area – the childhood was stolen from our children. Because they were deprived of things. The apples with us, as you know, there were plenty of them back in 1986, and we walked around, looked at them like in a museum, for they could not be eaten because radiation was in there. But the children climbed up the apple trees, picking those apples.

We were extinguishing the gas fountains, we have been extinguishing the gas fountain for 15 days. We are in the know of such things – we know how to handle them. But how the radiation will impact, as a matter of fact, we did not know then. So, each of us was given a command to fill out a statement that we are going there voluntarily. We wrote such a statement that we go there voluntarily. Maybe it was connected with insurances, with something like that, but for us it doesn’t matter. We were wearing the epaulets and were in the know of everything, and after all, we have children, families here, and who should have gone if not us?