Very much the product of a 12-year-old, Serguei Krutko's painting, with its broad, unsteady strokes - almost as if finger-painted - features a large yellow sun above an industrial site.

Titled, "The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station," it depicts the cause of the Belorussian youth's eventual death.

Beside it hangs a more finely painted picture by 14-year-old Elena Antonyuk, titled "We Are Still Living in the Affected Zone." The painting is of two women caring for a man lying in bed.

Part of the touring exhibition "The Children of Chernobyl," the two works hang in the Indian Trails Library, 355 S. Schoenbeck Road in Wheeling, with about 45 other pieces created by children sickened by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Most, if not all, of the children whose pieces hang in the library have died from excessive radiation and nuclear poisoning after making the works in 1995 or 1996.

The exhibition, started by The Chicago Athenaeum, has toured throughout the United States and internationally. Library and museum employees Friday set up the works, which will be displayed until the end of February.

The children whose work makes up the exhibit had lived in what is called the "Chernobyl Exclusion Zone" - the area where radioactivity rained down on millions of people after the nuclear power facility's No. 4 reactor exploded and released radiation 200 times more lethal than that at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"I've dubbed the whole place the 'Zone of Sorrow,'" said Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, the Athenaeum's director, who has visited the zone twice. "It's like looking into St. John's apocalypse."

More than 2.2 million Belorussians - including more than 800,000 children - were exposed. Forty thousand children have died already.

The exhibit was the idea of Narkiewicz-Laine's mother, Charlotte, who was in the former Soviet Union looking for lost family members.

"What she found were thousands and thousands of people who were being displaced," Narkiewicz-Laine said. "Then she started to find all these medical centers for testing children."

Charlotte Narkiewicz-Laine, who worked for the museum but is now deceased, thought the exhibition would increase awareness of the plight of the people who live in the exclusion zone. She started a foundation that has brought toys, clothes and art and medical supplies. However, because of the political situation in Belarus, the work had stopped for the past two years. It just now has restarted.

The museum, which has sites in Chicago and Schaumburg, waved the fees for the exhibition as part of a new push to be more active in Chicago area communities, said Kristin Kaufman, the museum's director of education, who hung the pictures Friday.

Chris Reading, the library's head of outreach, said she was looking for a high-quality exhibit like the one it had two years ago from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. From previous dealings with the Athenaeum, she learned of the exhibit.

"We do hope to have schoolchildren come in and see the art works," she said.

The exhibit can be seen during normal library hours, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Call (847) 459-4100 for more information.