A Chernobyl Widow’s Tragedy, Forty Years Later

Nataliia Khodymchuk’s last evening at home was like many that had come before. She stayed in the neat confines of her three-bedroom apartment in Kyiv, slicing garlic to preserve and knitting socks and scarves to send to Ukrainian soldiers. She moved slowly; the November light faded outside her windows as the darkness of early winter crept in. Typically, Nataliia called her daughter around dinnertime, but she wasn’t feeling well that night and decided to settle in early, on a patterned green couch in the hallway. She called the corridor, with its two thick walls, her “bunker.” It was her best protection from Russian air strikes.Nataliia, who was seventy-three, lived on the seventh floor of a blocky Soviet-era apartment building on Kyiv’s Left Bank, not far from a power station. Locals called the complex the “Chernobyl House” because it was largely populated by families who had been displaced from the Soviet city of Pripyat, in 1986, following the nuclear disaster. Nataliia’s husband, Valerii Khodemchuk, had been the first person killed in the meltdown, and he was the only victim whose remains were never recovered—his body was lost in the nuclear reactor, buried beneath thousands of tons of concrete and steel. He