Stories that you confided to us
Alina kept a diary about how she and her family managed to survive during the blockade of Mariupol. Apart from the constant threat to life and the acute shortage of food and water, despair and an understanding of hopelessness added as the evacuation was not possible.
“What do I feel? That we are under the rubble of a huge building. We are calling for help and hear the answer, “Hold on,” but no hand is given”
4 March.
Nerves on edge and sleepless night.
Telecommunication signal is still missing, as well as everything else. There is not any information about the evacuation. In the morning, we ate the last portion of soup, dropped our things and Mosia in the bags and ran off to the work office under shelling. First, it is the city centre, and second, there is a bomb shelter here.
We just barely made it there. As soon as we sat down and caught our breath, a shell hit the roof of the office building. The roof was broken and the window was blown out.
“BUT! There came hope for the evacuation. The main thing was to wait until the green corridor is announced.”
As the roof was hit, we decided to go down to the bomb shelter. The bomb shelter was overcrowded. They found a room for us – a dressing room on the ground floor. There were two walls on each side.
There are 12 people, including us, in a room of about 15 square metres. The guys lay down for the night on the floor. A bed for Demid was made under the table, while my mum and I slept on the chairs. The telephone signal was getting worse and worse.
5 March.
In the morning, information about the green corridor came in.
The telephone signal disappeared completely. We ran home with Sasha and packed a suitcase for the evacuation. We then picked up other family members and ran to the Drama Theatre for the evacuation. Thousands of people were waiting there in a huge queue.
“In half an hour, the military appeared and said that the corridor was cancelled. With bags hanging on our shoulders, we dragged ourselves back to our dressing room.”
Our food supplies were running out. Ania came and said that there was no hope for the corridors and our only task was to survive in this hell at any cost.
6 March.
There is no electricity, water, telephone signal, food and hope.
We went up to the office and took what would help us survive: some water, various sorts of cereals, and warm clothes. We began to figure it out where to get food.
Ania came and brought some fried dumplings, two chickens, three red-fin Mullets (fish), two Dorados, a salmon, some lard (pork fat), and something else, I do not remember what.
We are in luck! We are cooking our food on the fire.
7 March.
There is no electricity, water, gas and telephone signal.
The boys managed to get some drinks and a little bit of food. We sleep on the floor, fully dressed and with our shoes on. The room is so dark that it is impossible to tell if your eyes are open or closed.
8 March.
There is no electricity, water, telephone signal and green corridor.
There is not any understanding of what is happening. We do not know anything at all. It seems to me that this kills you no less than the absence of everything else.
We went home with Sasha. What we saw was horrible. People in the yards take apart everything they can and light fires to cook some food. Inside our flat, everything is more or less good so far, just the plaster came off in some places.
Yesterday, the boys bought two net bags of potatoes. We cooked some chicken soup on a fire for lunch and roasted some red-fin mullet fish on the same open fire for dinner.
“The evening was marked by heavy bombing, and it was very scary. Well, I am scared all the time, basically. I am afraid that our building of the Culture Centre could be hit and we would die.”
I console myself with the fact that the walls here are one-meter thick, that there are no windows in our room, there are two walls from each side, and there are two more floors above us. But damn... It is still scary.
9 March.
No changes. Except that today, the bombing is heavier than usual.
In the afternoon, some planes came and dropped their bombs. In the evening, shelling from some heavy weapons was incessant. I really hope that our walls will protect us. I am still insanely scary.
I did not tell you about our Moses. We walk him in the room next door, but he is running out of his food and toilet sand. Tomorrow we need to go home to our flat to fetch this. When will this all end?
“We are terribly tired. All the time, I am trying to remember the moment when we committed SO MANY sins, for which we found ourselves SO DEEP in trouble. When will it end? I pray, even though I have not done this in a long time.”
10 March.
A week of life in the dressing room has passed.
Today we planned to go home, but we did not risk it. Planes bombed the city all day long. They hit our building.
The building rocked badly.
In the morning, we started the power generator and boiled some water. We had oatmeal for breakfast and then stewed some potatoes on the fire for lunch, amid an air attack.
Lord, help us, please. Save us. I pray that tomorrow a green corridor is announced and we could get out of this hell.
“There are a lot of people in the city. No one has left it. Bomb shelters are full up, there is no food and water is running out.”
11 March.
Today, the weather is much colder and everything is covered with snow. Planes have been bombing Mariupol since morning.
Sasha and I took a chance and went home – things were awful there. As soon as we went up to our flat, shelling began and I hid in the stair vestibule, while Sasha took cover in the bathroom. The walls were shaking and the doors were blown off. I thought that would not come back to Demid.
Somehow or other, we managed to take some food and toilet sand for Mosia, another pair of shoes and dry socks, and dashed back to the building of the Culture Centre. When we came, our boys had brought us three bottles of water from the spring.
There is almost no hope for a green corridor now.
"What do I feel? That we are under the rubble of a huge building. We are calling for help and hear the answer, “Hold on,” but no hand is given”
Absence of any news gets hard on our mind and stresses us out. We plugged up and sealed all the holes in the room not to have strong draft. Our breathing is intense.
Thank God, we are only 12 people in the room.
Lord, please help us.
12 March.
It is frosty outside. At night, a mine landed somewhere nearby.
The walls shook, a window in the hall shattered and the door to the street on the first floor opened. Now it was even colder to sleep on the floor.
I prayed all night that the next time a shell strikes somewhere else, but not our place. I also prayed about the green corridor.
“Every day there is a feeling that it cannot get any worse than this, but a new day comes and you realize that it can, here it is. To be honest, I no longer believe in our rescue.”
In the evening, Max came with the news. The news was just “the best of the bunch”, but the most terrible one for me was that an aerial bomb was dropped on the school that Demid attended. The school is right behind our building. There is no more school. It is just gone. The SCHOOL.
13 March.
Shooting and shelling continued all night, all morning, and now it is half a day. They shoot from every sort of weapons.
Actually, over all this time, I no longer have any living cell left inside me. I feel scared all the time and everything inside me shrank to microscopic sizes because of fear.
We decided to turn on the power generator in two days. We gave some electricity to the neighbours in the bomb shelter and we can hope that they will give us some space on the fire for cooking soup.
“It is getting more and more dangerous to make a separate fire for yourself because of the approaching shelling. Lord, help us. Save and protect us. I hope it will all be over soon.”
14 March.
We are holding on. The days have merged and have become equally terrible.
If a month ago somebody had told me that I would be able to live without taking a shower for two weeks, to sleep in a down jacket and ugg boots on the floor of the dressing room in the Culture Centre, I would have laughed in their face. However, it turned out – I am able to do it.
We actually eat quite well, thank God. What saves us is our own food supplies and what the guys from the bomb shelter bring us. Today, we got some parts of frozen and thawed red fish and a package of coffee from them. For breakfast, we had two spoons of buckwheat and a quarter of a tomato. For lunch, we added some water to yesterday’s soup and boiled it. We got three ladles of soup + three pieces of Tuk crackers per person.
16 March.
We have been living in the dressing room of Molodiozhnyi (Youth) Culture Centre for thirteen days now. There are no improvements.
If you ask me what real hell looks like, I know how to describe it. Hell is when there is no electricity, water, heating and telephone signal, and something constantly explodes and collapses near you.
“And you keep guessing what are you going to die from? From hunger? Dehydration? Or you will suffocate under the rubble of the building you are hiding in?”
Today we made an attempt to take a bath. Is it really possible when the air temperature in the room is +3? One score out of ten.
It was rather a doubtful pleasure. I would say I did not get cleaner.
17 March.
The fourteenth day of living in the dressing room and the most difficult day so far.
It is not only for very strong shellfire that is hitting very close, but also because the hope that we will be rescued has practically vanished.
“There is no hope. It is absolutely clear that there will be no corridors and nobody will come to evacuate us. We are just meat.”
We are meat that is still alive, but that is not for long, apparently. There are only bad thoughts in my mind. Thoughts that we are crappy parents, because we allowed this situation where our child went through this hell. A feeling of guilt before Demid and feeling of horror from what is happening.
18 March.
Today a hellstew is again right very close by.
Finally, we were able to catch some radio signal. We listened to some news, alas, only Russian news. According to the news, the fighting was going on in the centre of Mariupol – we felt ourselves in the thick of the events and history.
Our dressing room in Molodiozhnyi (Youth) Culture Centre is located in the very heart of the city. Perhaps this night will be our last night in the dressing room. The guys from the bomb shelter plan to march off to Melekino tomorrow on foot. They called us to go with them, but we decided that walking 20 kilometres at zero temperature under shelling was too much for us. We will stay and take their place in the bomb shelter.
If God’s will, of course.
What to do next? A question that still gnaws me from time to time.
Naturally, I more often think about waking up, washing my face in an ice-cold bathroom with ice-cold water, preparing some basic food, feeding the child and having something to eat ourselves. There is no any strength left to be able to look any further.
Lord, save and protect us. Help us get through another night.
What I called hell earlier was just a warming-up.
20 March.
Since yesterday evening, incoming shelling attacks have been bursting REALLY VERY close to the Culture Centre’s building.
Somehow or other, we managed to have our dinner, chatted, went to bed and woke up at around midnight from the fact that the door to our room was blown out together with the doorframe. We quickly got dressed and decided to go to the bomb shelter. But not all.
Sasha, Ilya and Denis decided to STAY in the Culture Centre to keep an eye on the bags. I yelled at Sasha and said that I would kill him myself if he stayed. I asked them to put the bags together in another room, lock it and come to the bomb shelter. He seemed to agree.
We ran to the bomb shelter and were waiting for the boys there. At that moment, incoming shelling attacks were hitting the building of the Culture Centre.
About an hour later, Denis came looking like a ghost and with his leg injured. He said that HE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GUYS.
THEY WERE ON THE WAY AND AT SOME POINT, THEY WERE ALL SCATTERED BY A BLAST WAVE.
The horror I experienced was indescribable. The shelling continues and Sasha is gone.
What shall we do? Just wait. And pray. After some seven minutes, I heard Sasha’s voice. I dashed to meet him. He was pale, his jacket in cuts, and he was holding the handles torn off from packages/bags with things. But he is alive!!! Thank you, God! Then it turned out that he had a severe dislocation of his foot, and his ear and arm were also injured.
When we were running away from the Culture Centre, we could not take all the food with us. Then later, we had to come back there several times. We came there and were appalled at the scale of the Culture Centre’s destruction. I do not have any energy to write anything. I feel absolutely done. This is the day. I will say just one thing: it is already 18 o’clock now, and the shelling does not end.
21 March.
Terrible shelling continues all day long. All hell broke loose.
It is impossible to go outside. Projectiles were flying and landing very close. The plaster was coming off the walls. We made several attempts to pick up our things from the Culture Centre. We managed to pick up some, but not all.
A lot of kitchen stuff was snapped up by our neighbours. My sneakers and Demid’s new boots remained in the Culture Centre. I did not venture to go and get them. I hope the neighbours will not find them before me.
We were going to sleep with a terrible thrash in the background that lasted all night.
22 March.
The shelling lasted all night and continued in the morning.
Our office was destroyed. Today our neighbours went to it and picked up all the "unnecessary" things.
Lord, stop this hell. I want my old life to be back.
23 March.
Today we fled the fire accidents twice and changed two bomb shelters.
At the end of the day, we stayed for the night in the basement of a neighbouring house, sitting on gas boilers. There is no more strength to be in this hell. Tomorrow we will go to Melekino on foot...
24 March.
A hike from Mariupol to Melekino – done
The shelling of the city centre continued until the morning. We did not manage to have some sleep or some food. However, in spite of everything, we still decided to go to Melekino.
We left the bomb shelter at about seven in the morning. Shells were flying overhead and were landing somewhere nearby, which made the earth shake underfoot. Another reason why it was difficult to walk was that the road was completely strewn with rubble of buildings.
We had to manoeuvre, bypass some ruins, fallen trees and burned cars. In this part of our way, we ran as best as we could.
The first important destination point was the railway station. We made our way to it via Spartak hotel and some obscure, unknown steps. I have no idea how we got to the railway station. I walked along that way before only once – four years ago. But our gut feeling did not fail us – we saw the station and went further down.
The next point was some kind of dispensary or preventive clinic near the park (I do not remember the name). At that moment, the shelling intensified even more and we saw some planes. Nevertheless, we were moving forward. We reached the dispensary.
The next point was the pier. After the pier was the spit. Then – Sailors village, and so on.
We divided the whole route into parts, which we covered as far as possible.
When we were walking along the Embankment, we saw the shelling of the city from the sea – this was a mere horror...
The whole journey took us about seven hours. We also had to run around in Melekino – it was not easy to find some accommodation there.
But! Hooray! We found ourselves a little room with beds, food and even HOT WATER!
For the first time in almost a month, I am lying in a warm room, in a bed, without a down jacket and a hat on. So, I am going to have a good sleep now.
When quoting a story, a reference to the source – the Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation – is mandatory, as follows:
The Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation https://civilvoicesmuseum.org/
