“It was impossible to drive out of the yard – dead bodies were lying all around”

Natalya Piven and her husband planned to leave Mariupol on the eve of the full-scale invasion. They did not make it. The couple of visually handicapped spouses had to endure all the horrors in the besieged city. They left in a damaged car under the most severe shelling...

On their way, a telephone signal re-appeared and with it, terrible news came: their son, a volunteer, died on the way from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol. Their column came under fire. Later, when they reached a safe place, they received a new blow – their son-in-law, a fighter of Azov regiment, was killed.

Natalya’s son was 28 years old. Three kids are now left without a father. Their son-in-law was 31 years old and his daughter was only a year and a half when he died.

We were registered in Zaporizhzhia, as our place of residence, but we actually lived in Mariupol, since my daughter married a soldier of Azov regiment (he served in Mariupol where their military unit was located) and they went to live there. She gave birth to a child there. They needed some help and so my husband and I moved to live there too. We rented a flat and arranged a transfer from our work place – we both worked at supermarkets and so we got transferred to similar jobs in Mariupol. We lived in Mariupol and planned to buy some housing there. That’s how we ended up in Mariupol. On the night of 21 February, well, at night, since our son-in-law is from Azov [regiment], he came and told us that he had called his mother to come from Zaporizhzhia and that something unclear was coming. And that we had to leave, at least, our daughter and their baby needed to leave. Our granddaughter is one and a half years old. On 22 February, the mother of my son-in-law came by car and took my daughter and granddaughter out of the city. My husband and I also thought, “If it develops this way, maybe we shall go there too?” We packed up our things and booked a car for 24 February.

On the morning of 24 February, at 6 o’clock in the morning, we woke up from some terrible explosions. I woke up my husband. I said, “Serhiy, it is the war.” We called the driver and he said, “Don’t worry, I’m warming up the car, and I’ll be right there.” Then he called us back in 15 minutes and said, “I am sorry but the exit roads are already closed and we cannot leave Mariupol.”

On 27 February, there were no more open shops and there was no place where we could buy some bread. There was one guarded food store Dzerkalnyi on Budivelnykiv Avenue. That store was more or less guarded (by the police) and there were queues of people there. One had to stay in a kilometre-long queue in order to buy something. Probably from 3 March on, there was nothing at all anywhere. We were thankful to our son-in-law, as he came to us and brought us some food and water. Probably after 3 March on, we had no gas, no electricity, no water, nothing. All the houses, that is, the tenants of each entrance section... came outside and made some outdoor stoves or fireplaces, for each entrance section. They brought their teapots and saucepans there from their homes. They cooked their food or boiled some water there. That is, when an artillery shell flew by, we heard all those sounds. In case of incoming artillery strikes, we fell to the ground.

At that time, we slept in the corridor. We made ourselves a bed in the corridor and slept there. It was very scary. We did not have any contact with anyone. We were on Khmelnytskyi Boulevard. There was a military unit in the next building but one from us. Our howitzers were constantly firing from there, and that’s how we knew that the city was still under our control. There were four wounded people in our basement. It was very hard. It was very scary. An elderly man, who was a former military… In the early days, he told us half-jokingly, “I hear how it flies there and how it flies from there to here.” He kept saying, “They won’t touch us. It won’t fly to us.” And when it [artillery shells] began to fly in and hit directly to our house, he lay down and said,

And he said, “I don’t understand why our brothers are killing us. They are just wiping peaceful people off the face of the earth.” We then went to visit our relatives. We knew that they had their pet cats and we had some pet food. We gave them some Mivina (instant noodles), which our son-in-law brought us. We shared some of those with them... so that they could cook something. We ran to them in short bursts as artillery shells were flying. So we moved to them by bounds. And on our way back, a plane was flying overhead. A plane was the worst thing. The plane appeared and we were just down on the ground. It was 15 degrees below zero and we just got down and were lying there. The plane flew by. We rushed back to our house. And once we entered our flat, our house was hit. The hit was so strong that the house began to stagger. My husband grabbed me and said, “Down to the basement quickly.” At that moment, everyone was running to the basement and it so happened that we were the last to enter it. My husband managed to push me into the basement and tried to close the door. At that moment, there was an incoming strike and a blast or something... A blast wave hit him in the head. He stayed in bed for two days then, he had those...

After that, he had… Only now, he has had a course of medication injections. His hearing got worse a bit. His eyesight had been bad even before that and now it has become even worse. He suffered from attacks of a severe headache. One day, we were about to go outside through the entrance door in order to cook some food outdoors. Our neighbour went out earlier. So we were just opening the entrance door from our section of the building and right at that moment, a shell landed. It killed everyone who was standing outside near that entrance door. By that time, we had been staying in the basement for five days. All the tenants from our building section had been staying in the basement. There were various sorts of people in the basement, those who were waiting for the “Russian world” among them. They said, “Do not worry. These are our [troops] liberating us.” The military, some soldiers, came to us from time to time and brought us some food, which we shared with all the tenants from our building section, including them, for them not to feel hungry. Various sorts of people.

On 18 March at 9 o’clock in the morning, he said, “Let’s leave now”. Leaving was very challenging for us. We could not drive out of our yard because dead bodies were lying everywhere. Having reached the edge of the city, the outskirts by car, we than continued on foot. We walked through private houses area on foot, as there were lots of cars on the way. People were leaving. People were leaving on foot. We were moving on foot too to the first checkpoint. There were some damaged russian tanks standing along the road, and a parade cap was there on top of one of them. There were mines and shells along the way. There was one damaged Oplot tank that belonged to our Ukrainian Armed Forces. The first checkpoint – those were russians, russian soldiers. They were standing there and asking, “But why do you leave Mariupol? It is good here. Russia is here”. They checked all men ordering them to undress fully, while it was very cold outside. They examined all tattoos. They checked our passports, our documents. We then came to Mangush and saw that russians were everywhere. An evacuation bus was standing there but it rather evacuated people in the direction of Donetsk. We asked if there were any buses that ran in the direction of Zaporizhzhia. They said there were no such buses and there had not been any previously.

On 21 March, telephone signal re-appeared and all our relatives started to call us immediately. Our family members informed us – our daughter informed us that our son… Our son was in Zaporizhzhia and he was a volunteer. That day they left for Mariupol to deliver some humanitarian aid. My daughter called me at one o’clock in the afternoon, “Mum, we cannot get through to Zhenia [short for Yevhen].” At around three o’clock in the afternoon we got through – the telephone connection with him re-appeared. Somebody picked up the phone. Well, we know the russian accent, their dialect. The voice said, “Your son…,” he said, “I picked up your son somewhere near Tokmach, I don’t know where exactly.” We realized that by Tokmach he actually meant Tokmak. Our son was in critical condition but he was alive. We drove for 17 hours. It was very hard. They wrote down the details of everyone who was in the car. They wrote down all the passport details. It was cold, it was 10 degrees below zero outside, and the car’s heating system was out of order. Our relatives were able to give us five litres of gasoline and thanks to that, we reached the place.

My husband’s sister met us in Berdiansk. She accommodated us all for the night. At 6 o’clock in the morning, we managed to get through to Tokmak. In Tokmak, they told us that our son died in the hospital. He had been taken to the hospital. At 9 o’clock in the morning, volunteers from Zaporizhzhia informed us that the [humanitarian] convoy came under fire. My son’s wife was near Tokmak and she managed to come there, pick his body up from the morgue and bury him.

We spent a week with them and slightly came to our senses there, a little bit. That’s it... Although it was impossible to recover there because planes flew by constantly. They flew from Berdiansk to Mariupol above the village every day. It was very scary. Mariupol was under constant bombing day and night. A plane was constantly flying and bombing. It flew by, dropped a bomb, then turned around and dropped a bomb again. Sometimes it dropped two or three bombs at a time. The neighbouring villages were already occupied and there were russians there.

In the neighbouring village, they simply shot people to death. My husband’s parents told us to leave. “Leave because there are a lot of collaborators who are waiting for the USSR to come back, which is beyond our understanding.” That is why his parents told us, “Go, you can’t stay with us anymore.” Having returned to Berdiansk, we found that there were no evacuation buses there. Some kind people told us that there were some paid buses we could take in order to leave. When we found that column of fare vehicles in the morning, we realized that those were some ordinary mini-buses. About 20 such mini-buses would be needed in order to take all the people who wanted to leave. At least half of them could fit in then. But there were only seven such mini-buses available. I came up to one mini-bus driver with tears in my eyes and said, “I am ready to travel standing in the aisle, standing or sitting anywhere, just take us on board please.” At that time, the fare was UAH 1,500 per person; they took my husband and me.

When my husband and I were leaving, we had one backpack with documents. One backpack with a change of underwear, a T-shirt, we had nothing else. The bus ride was very hard. There were russians at the first checkpoint on the way. Those russians looked ragged and demanded food. As I understand, the driver paid certain amount of money at each checkpoint. The most difficult part of the journey was near Pology. There were 10 checkpoints with brazen-faced Chechens and bold-faced Buryats.

If they liked something from people’s personal belongings, say, headphones, they took away those headphones in an absolutely brazen manner. We were warned to delete everything from our phones, as they opened everything, even [cloud] storages where photos are stored. That is, they looked through everything, they checked that nothing was left at all, nowhere. While we were staying in Pology, russian military vehicles were moving between Pology and Orikhiv all the time. While we were standing in that column, they were firing along the lines of columns. They just fired so that no one dared to peek out, so that no one came out. The first checkpoint in Orikhiv was our Ukrainian checkpoint.

Those guys who stopped us there, said in our Ukrainian language, “We welcome you”. I went hysterical then, I was sobbing. I understood, “That’s it, we are safe now.” When we came to Zaporizhzhia, my husband immediately... We got off the bus and local police wrote down some information from the men. I was scanning the crowd with my eyes looking for my daughter, my granddaughter, and my sister. That is, I was... They met us. Our daughter rented a flat for us, as we remained... We have a flat neither in Zaporizhzhia nor in Mariupol now. On or around 20 March, our son-in-law came through for the first time, through a video call. He was in Mariupol, in Azov, where they kept defending Mariupol. So he got through to us and said, “I am very glad that you got out of there but I have a big request. Leave Zaporizhzhia and go somewhere, at least to the Western Ukraine.”

We started to look for some accommodation. Our niece also came to us from Berdiansk and her child’s godfather, who lives in Kolomyia, found us a house there. So we all got together and went to Kolomyia. We came there on 1 May and on 7 May, that godfather and some friends, who also came from Berdiansk to Kolomyia, came to visit us.

For us, this is the last straw. The body of our son-in-law is still missing. Every day, we wait for the next exchange because we were informed that the body was immediately taken to Azovstal, and so now, we are following the news and waiting for all these exchanges. The Azov Service, as our son-in-law always said, the Azov brotherhood is a family. Unfortunately, they return very few bodies. We did the DNA and now we are waiting. We are waiting for the exchange. Our acquaintances from Mariupol sent us some photos of our house. Our section of the building is uninhabited. A bomb fell on our entrance section from above. Even the partition walls in our flat were destroyed. There is a video of a flat next door showing that everything burned out there. I know that our Ukraine will tough it out, because all our children, they died for Ukraine.

We know that Ukraine will win. Basically, we dream of seeing our Ukraine as the strongest country, the most beautiful country. And our grandchildren will be proud of it, and they will know at what cost our Ukraine was given to us.