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From the front line…

It’s not where you go, but how you get there.

BY JACQUELINE CURZON

Cop26 in Glasgow is still demanding political attention with a few days to go. A notable invitee evidently caused a bit of a racket with a gaseous emission all of his own, which went down rather badly. The summit has received largely negative press over the various global transport means the attendees used to reach Glasgow. For a UK councillor such as Phelim MacCafferty [Green Party] to fly to Glasgow, using 137kg of emissions, rather than using his brain and taking the train (20kg of emissions) shows blatant disregard for effects of climate change. If it weren’t a climate summit it would be almost comical. Add to the equation the spiralling temporary cost of hotel rooms (average being a 3000% increase), where for a tidy £1400 you could book a room normally costing £42. One can see why this prompted the booking of 2 Eastern European cruise liners to function as floating dormitories, and other delegates were of necessity forced to book rooms as far as 130 miles away, all of which added to the farce. As the desperation became more time critical and public, the Scottish Government appealed to residents to open up their homes for conference goers to access their spare rooms. This was called the Cop26 Homestay scheme. I have a friend who was in the fortunate position of being able to offer such a delegate his spare room, but not all folks have the luxury of space or tranquility for such an offer to be practical. It would be interesting to find out how many total air miles were covered by the delegates present for the summit. Add to that several likely tons of fast food waste, plus delegates coming from countries with limited vaccination programmes and we could perhaps have made a case for zoom attendance, or Cop26 Stay-at-Home scheme.

The RMT Union quickly announced strikes by their train drivers, designed to cause further disruption, and taking the biscuit were strikes by refuse collectors. In a city which had already reduced bin collections to once every 3 weeks, how could such striking be tolerated? NHS Scotland have admitted they have cancelled or rescheduled hundreds of f2f appointments in order to minimise traffic volume. How thoughtful! Assistant Chief Constable Bernie Higgins, the gold commander for the event, said police on the ground ‘will facilitate unlawful protest, to a point’ being fair, friendly and accommodating.‘ And that’s just towards the protesters, who will presumably glue themselves to pavements, doors, vehicles etc causing maximum disruption. Patrick Harvey, co-leader of the Greens, the bedfellow of SNP, has publicly said he supports ‘use of direct action’ by climate change protesters, urging them to be ‘creative.’ Forget the Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and the others, let’s just Humiliate Britain on the world stage. Can’t think why the Summit wasn’t scheduled somewhere else? Anywhere else, to be ‘fair and accommodating’ to the 25,000 delegates and 125 world leaders.

Now to some fascinating obituaries. Viktor Bryukhanov (85) built and managed the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl until April 1986, when a completely unexpected but devastating explosion scattered radioactive material across the northern hemisphere. Bryukhanov was largely made the scapegoat for the failings and sentenced to 10 years in the penal colony of Donetsk. One of four children of a glazier and a cleaner, Viktor Petrovich Bryukhanov was born in Tashkent in 1935 and moved to Ukraine after completing his degree in Electrical Engineering. By 1970 he had risen up the ranks to the position of Deputy Chief Engineer at Slavyanskaya thermal power plant, and the same year was tasked to build a massive nuclear power plant, alongside a city - Pripyat - to house its workers. Within 14 years the VI Lenin Nuclear Power Station at Chernobyl was up and running, generating power for 30 million homes and businesses. The plant ran with four RBMK nuclear reactors, an operating system the west had rejected because of design flaws. Nonetheless in 1986 Pripyat boasted a population of 50,000 residents with schools, reasonably well stocked supermarkets and sports facilities. Despite a Soviet minister claiming the odds of a nuclear meltdown being 1 in 10,000 years, there had been issues with construction, including the substitution of a regulation non-flammable roof on the machine hall, with a highly flammable bitumen roof. This was to add a layer of certain catastrophe to probable disaster. The accident happened on Friday 25th April 1986 in Reactor 4, which Bryukhanov had signed off as having completed all safety tests 3 years earlier. In fact it still had one test to run : - to assess the plants ability to keep the reactor cool in the event of a power cut. At the last minute the test was delayed, which left the test in the hands of the more inexperienced night staff. After less than one minute running the test, it was obvious things were going very badly wrong, and the reactor was in danger of exploding. Bryukhanov was called out 30 mins after the explosion, when Geiger counters were registering high - but not critical - levels of radiation. Readings showing 100 times higher than normal were simply dismissed as being faulty. By 7am the fires appeared under control and Bryukhanov sent a report to Moscow indicating that the situation was stable. He quoted a radiation reading showing high, but not apparently deadly, readings, reassuring them that mass evacuation of Pripyat was unnecessary. Unbeknownst to the managers, the counters were never going to reach these gargantuan levels, recording instead only the maximum readings preset for the machine. Decisions were passed back to Moscow, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, where a meeting scheduled for Sunday was downgraded and delayed until Monday. A commission arrived in Pripyat by late Saturday evening and realisation then sunk in as to the enormity of the disaster. The evacuation began on Sunday, some 36 hours after the explosion, too late for the many who would perish from radiation sickness. Today, Pripyat is mainly a ghost town, beginning to come alive. The hospital is still as it was, as if everyone had simply run away, with beds, bottles and blankets hastily discarded and clothing thrown into piles with hazard tape flapping idly in the breeze. Playground equipment lies rusting and still, like a mechanical predator waiting to snatch at new lives. Scavengers have broken into parts of the reactor, stealing souvenirs, including the famous shutdown switch AZ-5, which could have been turned off; the residential tower blocks are encased in monstrous, suffocating vegetation and animals run around, wary of people but evidently surviving on something. A very few residents refused to leave in 1986 and miraculously are still alive whilst others are requesting to return, arguing after 35 years, it cannot still be dangerous, although Geiger readings would disagree. A recent documentary showed that the main hall had a new replacement protective casing built over the original in 2016, a large steel structure called the ‘New Safe Containment’ is expected to last around 100 years, which should protect it for further generations. Sentenced to 10 years in a famous closed doors show-trial, Bryukhanov and five others were accorded full responsibility for the disaster, which does seem disingenuous and unfair. After serving half the sentence he was released and moved to Kiev where he worked for Ukraine’s Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

This week’s news mentions that Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, has returned from his visit to Auschwitz, describing it as ‘a life changing experience.’ To state this is almost to belittle it, but I suppose there are few words which could sum up the enormity of evil, abuse and degradation which took place there. This leads me indirectly to the obituary of Lili Stern-Pohlmann (91) a Holocaust survivor who died at her home in London. She was born in Lvov, Poland, in March 1929, and lived with her family in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter, where she and brother Uriel enjoyed a happy childhood. In summer 1939 they were on holiday in Poronin, Poland, when war became inevitable and they dutifully curtailed their holiday and returned to Krakow. In August 1939 her father Filip Stern put his wife and two children on a train to Lvov, where their grandparents lived; this was to be the last train to depart Krakow before war broke out the following day. By June 1941 the city of Lvov was retaken by German troops, and a ghetto was set up in November. By spring 1942 deportations to the death camp Belzec had begun, and the Sterns went into hiding. His wife, Cecylia - a talented dress designer - would hide in a shop with Lili, whilst the father would take her brother Uriel with him to his carpentry job. After only one day of using a safety message known only to each other, Filip failed to repeat the message, it later emerged that he had been arrested. Cecylia contacted one of her German customers and asked if she would hide her daughter. Lili then stayed with this kindly, if somewhat eccentric, woman called Frau Irmgard Wieth, who was attached to the German occupying forces. When Cecylia realised the ghetto had been liquidated, she also sought safety with Frau Wieth, who agreed to hide her with Lili. The apartment was in a SS controlled area, with the Head of the Ukrainian police living in the flat downstairs. For this incredible act of bravery Irmgard Wieth was made a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1968. After the war, Lili was one of 123 Jewish children brought to the UK under a programme led by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld. Arriving on her 16th birthday, she remarked it was ‘like a fairytale.’ A year later her mother joined her, both being the only survivors of their family. She spoke tirelessly on the Holocaust, saying ‘If we, the last generation, don’t talk about it, then that’s it! I owe it to posterity.’ In 2007 she was awarded the Commander’s Cross of Polonia Restituta, and in 2020 was appointed MBE for services to Holocaust education, awareness and human relations. May her message live on.

Jacqueline Curzon

PHOTO: LARA MINSKY PHOTOGRAPHY

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