(an experiment to abbreviate text to the strictly necessary)
excerpted from: Voices from Chernobyl – an oral history by Svetlana Alexievich

“We buried the forest. We sawed the trees into meter and a half pieces and packed them in cellophane, and threw them into graves. I couldn't sleep at night. I'd close my eyes and see something black moving, turning over – as if it were alive – live tracts of land – with bugs, spiders, worms – I didn't know any of them, what they were called, just bugs, spiders, ants. And they were small and big, yellow and black, all different colors. One of the poets says somewhere that animals are a different people. Birds and trees and ants, they're closer to me now than they were. And I think about them, too.”

I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them.”

“I'll tell you, every person dies just like an animal.”

“And I'll add this, any living creature has a soul, even insects.”

“Radiation scares people and it scares animals. And birds. And the trees are scared too, but they're quiet. They won't say anything.”

“The forest animals have radiation sickness. They wander around sadly, they have sad eyes. The hunters are afraid and feel too sorry for them to shoot. And the animals have stopped being afraid of humans. Foxes and wolves go into the village and play with the children.”

“Yesterday I chased a wolf and a she-wolf out of the school, they were living there.”

There was a rabid fox here during the spring, when they're rabid they become friendly. But they can't look at water. Just put a bucket of water in your yard, and you're fine. The fox will run away.”

“I met a wolf one time. He stood there, I stood there. We looked at each other. He went over to the side of the road, and I ran. My hair stood on end and my hat rose up, I was so scared.”

“We shot the dogs and cats.” “Horses, when we took them to be shot, they'd cry.”

“There were cages open in the yards. Rabbits running around. The otters were shut in, we let them out, if there was water nearby, a lake or a river, they'd swim away.”

”We didn't kill the turtles. If you ran over a turtle with your jeep, the shell held up. It didn't crack. Of course we only did this when we were drunk.”

“Someday they'll find the remains of some very strange burials. Scientists call graveyards for animals bio-cemeteries. These are modern day temples. There lie thousands of dogs, cats, horses that were shot. And not a single name.”

“Now the cuckoo is cuckooing, the magpies are chattering, roes are running. One morning I looked out in the garden, the wild boars were digging.”

“There are now pike in the lakes and rivers, without heads or tails. Just the bodies floating around.”

“The kids draw Chernobyl. The trees in their pictures grow upside-down. The water in the rivers is red or yellow. They'll draw it and then cry.”

“After Chernobyl there was an exhibit of children's drawings,one of them had a stork walking through a field,and written beneath, “No one told the stork.””

“Used to be, you'd be in the forest and you'd hear human voices, you'd run toward them. Now people hide from one another. God save me from meeting a person in the forest.”