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It's 1986, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In Soviet Ukraine, an equipment test of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor goes horribly awry.

Wins carry radioactive particles into the sky, eventually blanketing the Western USSR

and Eastern Europe, with toxic dust that the union of concerned scientists later estimated

would lead to tens of thousands of early deaths.

70 miles downwind lives 11-year-old Max Levchin.

A Jew from Kiev, Levchin lives in a grim workers' paradise.

Levchin's mother is a physicist who works as a government research assistant.

She overhears news of the leak and realizes the reactor may be on the verge of a catastrophic

meltdown.

She and her husband hurriedly gather their two sons and grab a few belongings.

They trudge through the acid rain mist as they head for the train station.

Max overhears his mother say, this is bad, very bad.

As they chug 500 miles toward Crimea, they can see a steady stream of fire brigades and

ambulances heading in the opposite direction.

When the Levchins arrive in Crimea, they and other passengers are stopped at a checkpoint

set up to screen people coming off the trains from the north near Chernobyl.

A guard runs a stick up and down each person.

When he gets to Max, the guy got counted beeps.

The guard switches to a lower setting.

...