by Holly Morris (autrice del documentario The Babushkas of Chernobyl"
[...] Almost all of them are
women, the men having died off due to overuse of alcohol and cigarettes,
if not the effects of elevated radiation. About 116,000 people were
evacuated from the Zone at the time of the accident. Some 1,200 of them
did not accept that fate. Of that group, the remaining women, now in
their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of a group that defied
authorities -- and it would seem, common sense -- and illegally returned
to their ancestral homes shortly after the accident.
I've been filming and interviewing this unlikely community since 2010.
The Zone's scattered
ghost villages are silent and bucolic, eerie and contaminated. Many
villages were bulldozed after the accident, others remain -- silent
vestiges to the tragedy, and home to the ubiquitous wild boar. Still,
other villages have 1 or 2 or 8 or 12 babushkas, or babas -- the Russian
and Ukrainian words for "grandmother" -- living in them.
One self-settler, Hanna
Zavorotnya, told me how she snuck through the bushes back to her village
in the summer of 1986. "Shoot us and dig the grave," she told the
soldiers who nabbed her and other family members, "otherwise we're
staying." Then she handed me a chunk of warm salo --- raw fat -- from
her just-slaughtered pig.
Data: 08.11.2013
Fonte: www.edition.cnn.com
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