Toxic memories

Chernobyl | A 20-year-old disaster continues to haunt Eastern Europe, but children from Belarus are finding a haven in the United States | Jamie Dean

In the eerily empty town of Pripyat, Ukraine, where 47,000 Soviet citizens once lived, a rusty Ferris wheel sits in a desolate amusement park against a bleak landscape, serving as a stark reminder of a city frozen in time. Five days before the park's scheduled opening in the spring of 1986, Reactor No. 4 exploded less than a mile away at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, spewing a cloud of 190 tons of radioactive material over millions of unsuspecting Europeans, and spawning the worst nuclear accident in history.

It took nearly 36 hours to evacuate Pripyat's residents, mostly workers at the doomed power station and their families. They have never returned to their homes. This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which displaced more than 300,000 people across portions of Ukraine, Belarus, and Western Russia, and consigned millions to live in large swaths of radioactive-contaminated areas for the last two decades.