Halflife.

• Author: Hirsch, Liz
• Position: Berlin residents after Chernobyl nuclear accident, 1986 - Column

Radioactive-Schmactive: We'll All Be Dead in Half an Hour," proclaimed Mad magazine during the fallout-shelter craze of my childhood. But when Chernobyl melted down in 1986, 1 was living with my two children in Eastern Europe and I learned what it's like to experience a nuclear disaster.

It had been a hard winter in Berlin. Smog--much of it blown over from East Berlin, where they still burned brown coal--was our most serious environmental concern. Then Chernobyl exploded in the first week of spring. The air was finally clear, but now an invisible horror descended on us from the East.

In the brilliant warm weather that followed, I tried to readjust my image of blue, sunny skies to "radioactively contaminated, deadly air." I listened tensely to the weather report. Scientists told us we'd know the worst after the rain: Only then could they measure the exact levels of contamination in our air, water, soil, and food.

"People are cautioned against ingesting fresh vegetables and milk," they warned. "One should not go out in the rain. Pregnant women and children must stay inside with the windows tightly closed. If one must go out, avoid touching plants and outside surfaces, because of the radioactive dust. Clean your shoes very well before reentering your home."

As the nuclear cloud veered first up to Sweden, then down to Italy, a desperate thirst for information competed with my wish to screen out the overwhelming reports.

Then came the day it rained.

I was furious when my sixteen-year-old daughter, in only typical rebelliousness, disobeyed my instruction to bring her six-year-old brother directly home from school and stay inside that day.

"Oh, Mom's got radiation on the brain," she thought, her mind on more important teenaged things. So she took her brother cruising downtown with her friends while I was at work.

I spent the night of the nuclear rain worrying whether the kids, by being out in it, had already inhaled their deaths. Hot particles of plutonium and ruthenium had been reported in Sweden that day. All around me, the lilac and jasmine bushes burst forth like a night blooming in the desert of Berlin's grim gray buildings. But the lush growth and blossoms were heavy with radioactive raindrops.

The next week, I tried to think of a safe place for my son to play outside. Grassy parks were out: Hot particles had been found clinging to blades of grass in southern Germany. Our neighborhood playground had a chain across the entrance with a sign...