Photos of Sasha Sirota

Go to photos of Sirota's visit to Pripyat. Return to Chernobyl Poems Home Page

Sasha Sirota with his friends on the road from Pripyat to Chernobyl, with the reactor visible in the background.

Near the Pripyat supermarket (April 26, 1999)

Sasha's wedding, June 30, 1999.

Lyubov Sirota writes: "Behind my son on his wedding photo stands his good friend and class mate Aleksandr Amel'kin. It was with him that my son ran along the shore of the river Pripiat' playing, on April 26, 1986 (almost right by the Chernobyl nuclear station). After the evacuation these friends lost each other for many years. And it was just a year ago that they found each other again and Sasha Amel'kin became a witness at his friend's wedding... When they met for the first time after being apart for 12 years, they sat for a whole day in Sasha's room and reminisced about their childhood. Then, in the spring, they visited dead Pripiat' twice together--the city of their childhood. And there, in the overgrown, neglected school, in their own classroom, they met yet another classmate by chance--Sasha Beliaev, in whose soul there was also a vacuum, since he, too, had been suddenly torn away from his child's memory of the city of his youth. To live further, to go into the future, these children had to return to their past (if even to the radioactive Pripiat'), in order to fill this vacuum and not repeat their parents' mistakes."

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