Milena Čakić was 22 when the Chernobyl catastrophe happened and worked in a laboratory. She still has a vivid recollection of the events back then and she believes that although we should have learned from Chernobyl we actually have not. Her daughter Tamara conducted the interview.
For an ordinary time-witness of the Chernobyl accident in Slovenia, I decided to interview my mother. We conducted the interview in the afternoon in the relaxed atmosphere of our living room.
My mother, Milena Čakić was born on 28th of January 1966 in Maribor, Slovenia, which was at that time a socialist republic, a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After she finished secondary school for chemistry she started to work in a laboratory. In the year 1986 she was already married and lived in an apartment in Maribor with her husband. She hadn’t had any children back then, so her family was actually her husband and her parents. Today she is a mother of two daughters and lives in a house together with them and her partner. She runs a firm which produces rubber products.
When Milena hears the word Chernobyl she gets an image of greyness, radiation and diseased, exhausted people in that area. For her, the concept of ‘nuclear threat’ is mostly connected with warfare, nuclear weapons and terrorism. At the time before the Chernobyl accident Milena didn’t know much about nuclear energy production, since people in a socialist regime were not much acquainted with it. Back then she accepted nuclear power plants and nuclear energy production as a necessary evil.
However, people were not asked about their opinion, because that was the time of socialism in Slovenia. Of course, people had their own opinions and views, but they did not have any power or influence. As she remembers they also did not talk about nuclear energy a lot, such discussions started mostly after the Chernobyl accident.
Read the full interview