“The walls were burning, people were burning. We could hear them screaming”

In Mariupol, Olha survived alone with her cat. Her husband was at the front, her daughter in Kramatorsk.

“A period of life began when you did not understand where to run and what to do. All these days we were looking for water. There was food. We were the first to go down to the basement. A lot of people were there later, 8 buildings. The worst thing was if a bomb fell on the house. Everyone was on edge.

There was silence until 4 am. People were waiting in suspense. A bomb fell from an airplane nearby - we jumped up, the children started crying.

A 9-story building from the 1st to the 9th floors was on fire. It was a russian phosphorus bomb. The walls were burning, people were burning. We could hear them screaming.

March 8th. 6 am. The guys brought roses. And a terrible cannonade began.

And corpses, corpses of people. I did not realize that I could be one of them. We were running, looking for food, water, communication. We did not realize that we were living targets. We were being killed with all kinds of weapons.

We saw the first enemy tanker. He was contused and burned. He was a young boy. I realized that this child came to kill us, me. Someone gave him water, but I turned away.

They followed the tanks one after another with weapons. They were aiming at us. And when I looked behind the house, I saw a lot of tanks, they were driving over the corpses, over the cars. They were burning. It was terrible. They did not understand why we were meeting them with hatred, not with “rushnyk”, as they wanted. They kept going. They started clearing the houses,” said Olha, a resident of Mariupol.