April 26th 1986. A nightmare scenario became horrific reality: the Chernobyl atomic power plant exploded. The early summer heat and insufficient security measures exposed the emergency workers to extreme risk. One of them was the young artist Dmitrij Gutin. During the last days of his military service he was posted to the highly contaminated 30 km. zone around Chernobyl to work on the construction of a railway line. He died just short of his 40th birthday, after many painful years of suffering the effects of radiation poisoning. While researching and filming this project filmmaker Christoph Boekel met numerous victims of the atomic catastrophe. His own wife was one them and she, too, died of cancer. It is the fate of these individuals that he documents.