Chernobyl survivor Janina Scarlet flees the Soviet Union with her family as a child, only to find new challenges in America.
Janina Scarlet is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, a scientist, and a full-time geek. A Ukrainian-born refugee, she survived Chernobyl radiation and persecution. She immigrated to the United States at the age of 12 with her family and later, inspired by the X-Men, developed Superhero Therapy to help patients with anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Her book, “Superhero Therapy” released on December 1, 2016 in the U.K. and on August 1, 2017 in the U.S.
This story originally aired on Sept. 29, 2017 in an episode titled “Migration.”
Story Transcript
So I have a question for you guys. How many of you have ever wished that you could have had a superpower of some kind? Or a magical ability or some kind of a supernatural ability? Me too.
My origin story began when I was about three years old. I was born and raised in Ukraine and this is actually my first memory. It was May Day, which is our Labor Day and I was sitting on my dad’s shoulders, my parents were holding hands and we were marching. The air smelled like cotton candy and I was holding a red balloon. There was music and dancing, and then there was a scream to my left.
They looked and there was a woman on the ground and she was convulsing and there was white stuff coming out of her mouth. Some people ran to help her and other people ran to call the paramedics. Then other people started falling down. Some of them were also convulsing and some of them just were not moving at all.
I remember that feeling of utter horror, not knowing what was happening. My parents held hands. They kept me on my father’s shoulders and they ran all the way home.
A few days later, we found out that a week prior to the parade there was a massive explosion about two hundred miles from us in the Chernobyl Nuclear Radiation Plant and we were all infected. We had to seek immediate iodine treatments.
I somewhat remember the harvest of that year. The plants and flowers were the biggest and most amazing that Ukraine has ever seen. We had apples the size of watermelons, all beautiful and extremely toxic.
We were all affected differently. The way that the radiation exposure affected me is that it pretty much shut down my immune system. I spent many months at the hospital. I would get frequent nosebleeds, for which I had to go to the emergency room. And every time the weather would change I would get severe migraines and seizures.
A few years later, the Soviet Union collapsed and, with it, so did the economy. Most people lost their jobs pretty much overnight. Some people, like my dad, were able to keep their jobs on the condition that they would get paid twice a year. People were starting to get angry. People were starting to drink, and they were becoming very aggressive.
Their aggression quickly turned toward Jewish people, and the amount of anti-Semitism very quickly rose to that that it was in World War II. For those of you that might not know, Ukraine was invaded during World War II, and the particular city where I’m from was burned to the ground. Several concentration camps were established there, and most of my family were slaughtered with a few exceptions like my grandmother, who was taken as a slave to Germany.
So after the Soviet Union collapsed, aggression once again turned toward my people. It was no longer safe for us to live there. Some of the minor acts of aggression were kind of like when my neighbor Vicky came up to me. I was eight and she asked me, “My mom says you're a kike. Is that true?” She was seven.
I just shook my head and she said, “[spitting] I knew it. You're a kike,” and she walked away.
We filed for refugee status with the American embassy because it was no longer safe for us to live in Ukraine. That year of excruciating background checks, interrogations, finding out whether or not we were eligible to move to United States was hard enough, but keeping it a secret from the people around us that was a lot harder.
I remember one day walking with my older brother and a gang of teenagers surrounded us. One of them asked my older brother, “Is it true you're moving to America?” I expected them to knife us for treason right there.
My brother said as sarcastically as he could, “Oh, yeah. We’re moving to America.” Of course, to me, that sounded terrifying and I immediately jumped to my brother and I said, “Michael, what are you saying? He's lying.”
And the leader once again turned toward my brother and asked, “Well? Are you moving to America or not?”
My brother said, “Oh, yeah. Tomorrow.”
Thankfully, the leader took it as a joke and said, “Oh, forget it. They're lying,” and left us alone.
That entire year, it felt like I was holding my breath. And finally, on September 15th, 1995, I was able to breathe with relief when we landed at JFK Airport. It was a Friday.
It was a Friday that brought a lot of hope. It was a Friday that brought freedom. It was a Friday that allowed me to believe that we will no longer have to hide the fact that we were Jewish, that we would no longer be faced with anti-Semitism.
I was twelve and I was starting seventh grade. Kids can be cruel in seventh grade, and a girl that didn’t speak English that came from a radioactive country, I made an easy target.
So some of the kids would ask me things like, “So, are you contagious?”
“Do you glow in the dark?”
“Are you radioactive?”
On most days, I just wanted to die.
A few years later I watched a movie which forever changed my life. That movie was the X-Men. For those of you that don’t know, the X-Men tells a story of Marvel superheroes, all of whom are mutants.
When the movie begins, there is a little boy on the screen. He's being torn away from his parents during World War II. His parents are being taken away to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The boy uses his powers to bend the walls around them to try to argue, to try to fight for his parents’ life and I realize that boy has super powers, and I want them.
I realized as I was watching the movie that every single hero of the movie had some kind of a genetic mutation, kind of like me. And that most of them, like Wolverine, for example, received their genetic mutation from being exposed to radiation, kind of like me. And the X-Men were required to register so that they could be controlled or, if necessary, exterminated. I knew what that felt like.
My favorite X-Man of them all was Storm, and the reason why I liked her is because she had a very special connection with the weather, like I do. I later learned about Storm’s origin story. When Storm was six years old, her parents were crushed by an airplane that landed on their house. Her parents were killed, and little Aurora Monroe, Storm’s real name, barely got out alive.
As a result of this experience, she developed severe claustrophobia, which means fear of tight spaces. And even as an adult, when she was in a tight space she would have severe panic attacks and have a hard time functioning.
But if anything was to ever happen to her friends, to the X-Men, none of that mattered. She’d be willing to face her biggest fear if it meant helping others.
Storm taught me a lot. Storm taught me that your origin story does not make you a victim, it makes you a survivor. And that your very story, the very thing you've been through is actually your super power. It’s the first time I rethought my own origin story. And I thought, Wait a minute. I want to use stories to help other people.
So I went on to study psychology and then proceeded to my doctoral training first in neuroscience and then in clinical psychology. Then when I was doing my postdoctoral training, I was working at Camp Pendleton with active-duty marines with PTSD. Many of them would tell me over and over and over again, “I wanted to be Superman. I failed.”
Doesn’t that just break your heart? Some of the most incredible men and women you've ever met, who’ve seen some of the most atrocious things you can imagine, believing themselves to be a failure because they developed a mental health disorder.
So this one day I was working with a marine and I decided to challenge him. I said, “Well, does Superman have any vulnerability?”
He said, “Well, Kryptonite.”
And I said, “Right, right. Kryptonite. So if he's vulnerable to Kryptonite, does that make him any less of a superhero?”
And he said, “No, of course not.” And then he got it. Then the smile spread on his face and he said, “I see what you did there, doc.”
I've been using stories like that for years now. I've been using stories to help people understand that what happened to them is not who they are. What happened to them is what they’ve survived, what they’ve overcome, and they can use that to become the very hero that they are today.
In doing so, in this connection, I too have been able to heal. I too have been able to find my life purpose, my own post-traumatic growth in finding a way to connect with people and help people.
Up until recently, I thought that my past was behind me. A couple of weeks ago, there was a march, a demonstration in Virginia. There were people marching down the streets wearing swastikas and saluting Hitler and chanting anti-Semitic and racist remarks. I was triggered. I was angry and I was really sad believing that history was repeating itself, believing that my family and I were no longer safe again.
But then I saw something else. I saw the counter protesters. There were a lot of them. Not only in Virginia, but they were all over the world. There were thousands and thousands and then millions of people pouring out their support to those who needed it. There were people standing up to hatred and standing up for love. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had the world in my corner. Now, I’m no longer afraid because I know I am an X-Man, because we are X-Men. Thank you.