On April 28, 1986, the Soviet news program Vremya made a 14-second announcement about an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. One of the plant’s nuclear reactors had been damaged, the broadcaster said. Mitigation actions were being taken, aid to those affected was being provided, and a government commission had been formed. The rest of the Soviet Union hummed along, making plans for the upcoming May Day holiday.

Although I lived just 100 miles from the border with Ukraine, it took me three months to begin attaching faces and names to the incident. I was vacationing with my mother near Sochi, on the Black Sea, when a group of women and children entered our hotel. They were Chernobyltsy, “people of Chernobyl.” They had a startled air around them, and the mood in the hotel became tense: Most vacationers wanted to avoid the “radioactive” intruders. I was too young to be afraid, so I befriended a girl named Katya, a 5-year-old with remarkable dimples.

In the years that followed, as perestroika and glasnost revealed the scale of Chernobyl, I kept thinking about Katya, with whom I had played so obliviously on that pebble beach. Where did she go after that summer? Did she manage to stay healthy? Did she even get to grow up?

Decades later, the German historian Melanie Arndt set out to answer the same questions about kids like Katya. Her book Chernobyl Children, translated by Alastair Matthews, is a pioneering history of the event that focuses on what happened to its children by tracing an ongoing disaster that stemmed from the world superpowers’ race for technological supremacy.