O lena Maruzhenko remembers her mother sobbing when Soviet police told them to evacuate their home in the village of Korogod in northern Ukraine. Just 12km away, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had exploded, sending a shaft of blue light into the night sky and throwing clouds of radioactive material into the surrounding area. Local authorities told Olena and their mother that they would only need to leave their home for three days. They had no idea that the worst nuclear disaster in history had unfolded. “We believed we would definitely return,” Olena recalls to The Independent as the world marks the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. “The 26 April, 1986, is a date that is forever etched in my memory with black sadness. We could not imagine leaving our homes without knowing where to go.” Olena and her mother were among 350,000 people who were evacuated from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.…