"Kids in the Azovstal bomb shelter called me Aunt Soup"

Natalya could make pizza from dough on water and some canned food. Under incessant shelling, she cooked food for all the inhabitants of the bomb shelter every day.

For quite a while, kids could not remember her name, so Natalya suggested that they call her Aunt Soup.

We ran to Azovstal because we are both employees of the steel plant, and so…

Well, I just know that when the left-bank part of the city was shelled in 2014, I was at work and people were evacuated to bomb shelters then. I knew that they were adapted to such emergencies. That is why we certainly decided to run there, as there were already massive shelling attacks. Well, we had a bomb shelter that was pretty well equipped.

Since we had families with children, and I was very sorry for those kids – my husband is an orphan himself, he was raised by his grandparents – so I just understood how important it is for a child to have a family – mum and dad. And I said... Many people were afraid to go out to the surface in order to cook even some basic stuff, cook some kind of soup, and put some tea on fire.

I said, “Guys, while I am in the bunker, I’ll be cooking for everyone, well, if you don’t mind.” Well, and everyone agreed. Without the help of other guys, men, nothing would have happened. As long as there were less massive shelling attacks, they brought…, they went somewhere and found something, some kind of pots, and some kind of ladles. They brought all this to me.

So my every day began with me waking up, cooking breakfast for children, some kind of pancakes, something so that they could... so that they did not feel they were amidst the war, the longer the better. As their mums used to cook them breakfast every day. I said... I had eight children. After breakfast we had tea. Then cooking of soup followed it. That is, we had continuous cooking exercise on a fire.

The poem that Uncle Sasha wrote (Uncle Sasha is a man who is a pensioner)… He chopped wood for us. From the moment he settled in our bunker, he chopped firewood all the time. He is an energizer, he needed some work to do. That is, he is a person who could not sit still. And so he wrote me a poem:

The name Aunt Soup was used because there were some small kids. The youngest inhabitant of our bomb shelter was only four years old, and he could not remember my name. I asked, “Do you eat soup?” – “I do.” I said, “Well, look, let’s do it this way. If you can’t remember [my name], don’t worry. Call me Aunt Soup.

Well, we just take aunt and add soup. Will you remember it?” And so he said it from the first try, he said Aunt Soup. So all younger kids, they all called me Aunt Soup. Later, they learned to say Natasha [Natalya], but Aunt Soup just stuck to me. Aunt Soup, and that was it. I don’t know why, but it came to my mind, because we basically had only soup on our menu. For your understanding, I am not a cookery expert at all. I am a heat power engineer, a boiler operator, by my profession. I worked part-time giving lectures at the training centre, so I am generally very far away from cooking. But I am a bit of a perfectionist, as I am trying to bring everything to some kind of…

Well, I need things to be perfect. This cheered me up a little, plus the kids who all the time wanted something tasty from me.

I had a little flour, so I made kind of pita bread or lahvash. I put what I had on that pita bread, that is, some stewed meat, some peas and a little cheese that some parents gave me. And so we produced pizza out of all this and distributed it among the kids. Surely, their happiness knew no bounds. Well, in peacetime, I would never have thought of adding some kind of porridge to flour.

But since there was very little flour, I had to add some kind of porridge, invent something to make it more satisfying and cook sufficient amount for a kid not to remain hungry. I remembered that somewhere once I had a chance to hear that there are the so-called hrechanyky (cutlets with buckwheat). Since we had buckwheat porridge with meat in the dry rations, I could not invent anything else but add a little flour to the buckwheat porridge, mix some baking soda with vinegar and make pancakes from them. I called them hrechanyky (buckwheat cutlets/cakes).

We also had some barley porridge with meat in our dry rations. I did everything in the same way, but only I added other sort of porridge. Some parents gave me some rice. I boiled that rice, added some sugar and a little flour – and we had some new dish. I called them rice cakes. They were sweet.

If you want to see some daylight or night, you go outside. To be honest, I have never spent so much time underground. I can’t imagine how people could stay there up to two months and did not go outside. This whole situation, it is just ... when a lot of people stayed in one room, and everyone kept their worries inside them. Some people let their worries go out.

I was very afraid that someone could be wounded and we would not be able to help. Well, a person would be just dying slowly, and we won’t be able to do anything, because we didn’t have any medicines, nothing. That is, the closer to leaving, the more realistically you assess the situation and understand that there are no medicines, you can’t give any help, and you can’t go anywhere, that’s all. Honestly, I did not expect that the whole world would know about us.

I mean, about such a small number of people, and that they would start looking for ways to evacuate us. There were a lot more people in the city, and everyone tried to leave, well, whoever wanted to. That is why, to be honest, I personally had no hope, almost zero hope. The more time passed from the day of our coming to the shelter, the more it seemed to me that everyone who stayed down there was unable to see that progressing destruction. When you go upstairs every day, you understand that yesterday there was something, but today it simply does not exist. Well, and it’s kind of sad.

My parents remained there [in the city] and it is a pity that the family broke up like this. They are there, while we are here. It’s just... just hell. I would not wish anyone to experience what we went through. Our life values have changed. We understand that what was valuable before, does not make sense at all now.

In the past, I used to call my friend and say, “What dress have you bought today? – And I bought new shoes today.” While now I call and ask, “Are you alive?” And this happens when 21st century’s technologies are around us, when everything is available, and you just ask a person if he or she is alive? I get messages….

People changed their phones and sent lots of messages... Everyone asked, “Are you alive? Are you alive?” I just cannot even believe that we survived. There is still hope left, and I would like everything to be as it was before, and for Mariupol to be back to Ukraine, as it had been in Volnovakha. And in Mariupol [previously]… I want everything to be fine. I dream of peace. I hope people will find their relatives, and there will be fewer dead. Well, war is still a very hard thing, and it is scary, very scary.