"My son takes off his hat and all his hair is grey. The child is only eight years old"

“They did not sleep and did not eat but were only busy killing us. However, life gave us a chance to leave the house and a shell hit it at night,” recalls Tetiana, a resident of Mariupol.

“The most challenging situation was when, after 8 March, I realized that I needed to write some badges with contact details for my son and my daughter. My son is eight years old and the baby girl is only eight months old. To tell your child that you can die is a horrible feeling. If I was doomed to die, I wanted us to die all together then, so that everything ends sooner.”

“A shell hit near our house. Darkness, pieces of mud flying, I could not see my husband. I shouted to my kid’s godmother to check if they were alive and heard silence in response. They had been outside and now there was deathly silence. It seemed that I died. Then they shouted back, “We are alive!” I saw my son who asked, “We are not going to die, are we?” – “No”. He took off his hat and I saw that all his hair was grey while he is only eight years old,” Tetiana says.

For me 24 February started at 05:45. I remember it clearly, as my mother called me and said, “Wake up. The war has started.” The first seconds, maybe minutes... I asked, “What war do you mean? This cannot be true.” As this already happened in my life before. We are a family of IDPs and this is our second escape from the aggressor country. During those three seconds, I was thinking what to do, who to grab, and where to run.

My husband and I got up and already heard that there were some explosions, so clear and so terrible. Our two kids were still sleeping, but we anyway got the kids ready, took our pets, got into the car and drove to my mother who lived in the city centre. We lived on Metalurgiv Avenue, near Ilyich Iron and Steel Works, and my mother lived on Matrosova Avenue. We took the kids, took their [birth] certificates and our passports, and left. We dropped by a fuel station near Epicentre [construction supermarket]. We stood in the queue for gasoline because we remembered how we could have interruptions in fuel supplies, while the car should be in running condition.

We refuelled the car and at that moment, somewhere near the exit to Berdiansk, we could hear not just explosions but, you know, some flames from the side of the airport. We covered the children in the car, but still remained staying in the queue. We then came to my mother. She has a private house and so we decided that we would be more comfortable there. I also have a middle sister, and she decided to come to our mother with her husband too. However, it turned out that they could not come to our mother right away and we waited for them for some time to get together.

The day of 24 February... It was so chaotic and I refused to believe that there could be such a war, that there would be military aircrafts, that they would be not just killing, but rather annihilating us all. I did not want to believe it. I had students in Sartana [village near Mariupol] and we stayed in touch with them. I had my friends and colleagues and they said that it was something terrible. Well, they sometimes texted me about it. What was the most difficult for me during this entire period – these were probably two particular situations.

The first situation was when, after 8 March, I realized that I needed to write badges [with contact details] for my son and my daughter, for any unforeseen case or emergency. There was already the second hospital and the third maternity house [shelled or bombed], and the Drama Theatre was the next one on the list. I had to write the contact information and tell my son (who is eight years old) that if we don’t escape, if a shell hits, then he had a badge. “Some people would definitely come; they would be looking for us, taking us out. Then if you don’t remember in stress, you will give them the badge with all the phone numbers to be contacted.”

Well, it is a hideous feeling. I refused even to think that my child could die. Everyone can die, but not a child. My son said, “Mum, but we will live, won’t we?” We will live, but there is this thing. And the second most challenging situation in my life was when a shell hit Okhotnik [a cafe in Mariupol?] directly and the building just collapsed. This was not our own housing. It consisted of two parts. We rented one part and lived in it and the other part was unfinished construction, but it had a basement and a decorative fireplace, which was not suitable for cooking at all, but saved us in fact.

When that shell hit right in Okhotnik building (this is in fact two houses away from us), I simply do not know how this whole structure did not fall upon us. It folded like a deck of cards and then unfolded as if it was inflatable. The doors and the windows were blown off, and we were under that pile of rubble. For two days, explosions thundered around the perimeter without interruption.

When all this happens, all this rubble falls upon you, and you don’t see your husband, you don’t see your kid’s godfather… You shout, “Guys, are you alive?!” And hear silence in response. At that moment, when the shell hit, they were outside. They were busy covering the windows, which shattered, with plastic film. There was just silence. A total deathly silence. At that moment, it seemed to me that I just died.

We went outside a minute later and it was all flying and exploding around us. We shouted, “Guys!” And heard them shouting back from the front of the house, “We are alive!” This was when I felt I nearly died. And at that moment, I saw my eight-year-old son. He asked, “Mummy, we are not going to die, are we?” I said, “No, we cannot die. It won’t happen.”

My son said, “Mum, what is it?” I looked at him and said, “Everything is fine, sonny. You are so handsome, so nice.” And he said, “I was so scared!” So, those were the two terrible situations for me. However, thank God and the guardian angels, in this terrible situation... when explosions thunder from both sides, and roughly speaking, there are only five houses left intact out of 35 on our street... And we are lucky, as our house is structurally intact, although it is left without windows and doors. And you have houses on your street where entire families were buried alive [under rubble] after the air bombs were dropped. You see your friend who comes at six o’clock in the morning and says, “I don’t know what to do. I have neither a flat nor a house. My father-in-law has been killed.” He is standing with his face white, you know, and you start dying together with him. You are dying.

I don’t know why, for what purpose, they just buried us. They uninterruptedly... And we counted. We counted, while staying in our small yard, that 24 aerial bombs were fired from the area of Okhotnik to the philological department’s building of Mariupol State University. All these streets in this sector [have been covered] in one attack of two or three airplanes – 24 aerial bombs. We counted it personally. They did not sleep and did not eat, but only kept shelling and firing at us. It seemed it would be easier if you just died rather than to live on and look for a way out, look for how to live further. How to leave.

Problems with food supplies began on or around 1 March when it became clear that the city was surrounded and that nothing could be delivered from the non-occupied part of Ukraine. I have a baby. She is only eight months old and she is on artificial feeding. Infant milk formula is important for her. It is the most important thing for her. While other food items could be replaced or something could still be found, figuratively speaking, then milk formula is essential or vital.

So my sister and I headed off in the direction of Obzhora food store. There was no telephone signal anymore at that time. Our neighbour said that there was still Kyivstar telephone network signal and one could find a spot where one bar of phone signal indicator could still be caught. And so we went there. You know, perhaps for the first time in my life after 2014, specifically while staying in Mariupol, I had a blind bodily fear.

We walked up to Obzhora. Thank God, our military were there at that moment. They said, “We have some milk formula.” We took several cans and thanked them. Those guys saved us. That was the second last time when we managed to get through to our relatives and told them that everything was good and we were alive, that we were holding on and everything would be fine.

Everyone who was in Mariupol would agree with me that after 8 March havoc began. Water was no longer delivered and fire broke out here and there throughout the city. There was a catastrophic shortage of food. That is, we only had food for the kids. We ourselves tended to eat once a day because everything else we had was for the kids, to keep them more or less fed. My husband and our neighbours’ husbands decided to go and scout for some food.

At that time, Metro [hypermarket] was ransacked and there were some warehouses left in Soniaschnyi micro-district. Our men went there and managed to get some pasta and flour... They also found some porridge for my little baby. Thanks to those food supplies our family was able to survive until 30 March, until the time we left. We left the city on 30 March. That is, we saw how our city was destroyed, and how the Drama Theatre was hit. A few hours before that, before the strike on the Drama Theatre, my husband drove to our close friends. He took some of that pasta to bring it to our friends. They just drove by at that moment.

It took us rather a long time to leave. Twenty-five checkpoints, but the guardian angel helped us. The military of the Russian Federation lived on our street, in abandoned houses. They looted in the neighbourhood and felt like landlords. They first came to our street on 21 March. They guarded the street thoroughly. It was impossible either to leave it or to enter it. They threw their weight about. They preferred to quarter themselves in nice houses.

They broke in brazenly, using foul language. On 30 March, one of our acquaintances... They thought that we had died. When Okhotnik was hit, the whole street died. He came, and they had a 30-minute shift change (some came in and others left). During these 30 minutes all our family got into our car. My sister and her younger sister got into another car and we were taken to Melekine. We stayed there for one day and the next day, after we spent the night, the Red Cross came and brought some humanitarian aid. The vehicle was not equipped for transporting people. It was just for cargo deliveries.

That morning, at 5 o’clock in the morning, we left Melekine. We came to Zaporizhzhia at 8 o’clock in the evening. I think we were lucky. Our guardian angels led us. There were Russian career military and the Kadyrovites. It was difficult to pass through. It happened that they did not want to let people go. They allowed themselves to say some humiliating things.

They provoked some conflicts, insulting our country. They probably enjoyed it but we consciously endured it in order to leave and get to the non-occupied part of the country. We left. Thank God, we got to Orikhove in a day. Two Ukrainian soldiers met us there. You know, everyone cried when we saw our soldiers. I was happy. I was just happy to be on my homeland and all those 30 days of March were left behind me. Although I realized that I was leaving my home completely for the second time and it was hard. Yet I believe that the war will end with a 100% victory.

This mutual support makes us very different from them. Even when some families face some more serious challenges – I mean the loss of their loved ones, then this price... It should only be victory. And victory can be achieved only when all our borders are under the Ukrainian flag, from Donetsk to Volyn, and Mariupol. I really believe that I will return to the de-occupied Ukrainian Mariupol. I will return to the de-occupied Donetsk. When exactly will this happen?

I would like to return to Mariupol very much because the city became a second home for me during those eight years. When I saw how it was mutilated, it was deprived of everything... They flattened it as if going through it with a steamroller. They took people’s lives, took everything. They filthily called it “liberation”, although they literally and figuratively liberated, or rather freed, us from our lives. However, there will be Victory. Ukraine above all!