She stayed in her apartment without light, water, or gas. Shells were falling very close. Her daughter-in-law was wounded by a cluster mine, and hospitals no longer had enough bandages even for injured children.

Taisiia from Mariupol remembers the day when the house caught fire after a direct hit. The blast wave sucked smoke into the windows, the plastic was melting, and she realized: if she didn’t run out now, she would suffocate. Together with her dog, she rushed outside under the shelling. “Machine gunners are coming, the house is on fire, a body is spinning on the asphalt… Where should I go?” she recalls as a journalist.

Taisiia left the city at random. In the streets — women with children, cats, parrots. Men were pulling people with disabilities in wheelchairs along the roads. She remembers how one old man couldn’t bear it and died right on the way. The family of the deceased left the body by the roadside because they had to save the children.

Through fire and ruins, Taisiia reached Mangush. Together with her dog, she sat down right on the ground near a kiosk and ate a piece of bread — the first in many days. From there, volunteers took her to Berdyansk, and then to Zaporizhzhia.

“When we crossed our checkpoint and heard the Ukrainian language, I cried for the first time,” she recalls. “I understood: I was home.”