Together with her family, Valentyna hid on the 8th floor in her parents' flat in the 17th Microdistrict of Mariupol.
"We didn't go down to the cellar. Dad said that it made no difference whether you would be buried in the cellar or in the flat. Our house was the only one that survived. It was inside.
Massive mortar shelling. The house was shaking. Locks, doors, windows were torn out. I saw through the window the occupiers come in. They went door to door. They came to us. No one knocked. There's a tank in the yard. And in the flat there was the occupier: "Who lives here? Are there any military?". The boy was 18 years old, looked like a buriat. He saw my shoes. Black laced. Like army boots. He asks whose army boots are. I say, my shoes.
Until March 22, we were in Mariupol. I wanted to go to Ukraine. They didn't let us go to Berdiansk. The people who took us out returned to Mariupol. Queues for filtration in Nikolske. We left through russia. We were there 24 hours," said Valentyna, a resident of Mariupol.
