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By James Verini
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Elyzaveta Fatayeva sitting on a blanket in the basement, next to her boyfriend, when the theater exploded on her. The total construction began to tremble, and she with it. His ears were filled with a massive sound of crashing. His eyes closed for a moment. When they opened, the air was a cloud of masonry dust. She gasped and choked. When he caught his breath, there was a ringing in his ears. Then silence. Then, the other people around him coughed. Then he screams.
She looked for her boyfriend. His face emerged from the dust. She could make out his eyes, and they were enlarged by terror, “like the eyes of a madman,” he thought.
They stood up. Another face gave the impression through the dust, that of a man. It was stained red. He screaming. He couldn’t hear it, until he could.
“Everyone is going up!”
Your cat squatting on the ground, with its claws stuck in the concrete. His mother picked him up and put him under her arm before the 3 rushed to the stairwell. They may only see dust and shapes of moving frames, but they had entered this direction so many times in the past 10 days, since they had fled the siege of Mariupol to take refuge in the basement of the Donetsk Regional Academic Dramatic Theatre, that they can find the stairs with their eyes closed.
The stairwell was a jumble of white-skinned people. Some were sitting, bleeding, stunned, while others struggled to climb up. Climbing the stairs seemed to Elyzaveta “an eternity. ” A guy on the touchdown up screaming. She understood it immediately.
“There is no theater!
He stumbled in the icy air on the east side of the building. Where the roof above the main Auditorium Array now has a large opening into the sky. A few minutes before, there was a country kitchen here. A crowd had been around the kitchen. fires, preparing the noon soup. Elyzaveta’s mom had just brought water. Now the construction had collapsed and there was a hill full of smoking debris in the kitchen position. The children were standing in front of her, groaning.
Elyzaveta refused to look at them. She refused to look anywhere, knowing that if she did she would faint: “Me in a state of stupor, frozen. “He tried to cover his ears with his hands and block his moans, but he knew he was holding the cat. Her boyfriend next to her; his mom doesn’t.
Elyzaveta forced herself to look up. She wouldn’t look at the debris or the children, she told herself, only the other people coming out of the basement, for her mother.
No more explosion. Broken glass and shrapnel-hissing projectiles. The Russians bombed the theater. Someone shouted, “Lie down!” Elyzaveta and her boyfriend dropped to the floor and covered their heads. When they gave up, their mom there again. They ran around the theater to the main entrance, where they discovered a chaotic crowd. of other people who had taken refuge with them. Some fled in panic; others wandered in a daze. Smoke coming out of the upper floors of the building and the basement. The circle of relatives of Elyzaveta and those other evacuees had managed, against all adversity and almost without official help, to make the theater an outpost of humanity in the midst of the siege of Mariupol. In a few moments, everything is gone.
No one knows how many Ukrainians were crushed under the rubble, burned, killed by shrapnel or surprise waves, or suffocated in and around the theater. Estimates of deaths I heard from survivors ranged from 60 to 200, however, the Associated Press found that it can be as high as 600. With Mariupol in Russian hands, there will be a real death toll, or for that matter, any excessive investigation on the floor of the attack.
Later, Elyzaveta asked her mom where she had disappeared. Reluctantly, his mother told him: When he came out, after Elyzaveta, he noticed the bloodied face of a woman among the rubble. The woman was trapped under a limestone slab. to see the woman. She and a boy tried to tear off her slab. It was too heavy. She had to leave.
She in the petrified eyes of the nailed woman.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and ran out.
As Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its seventh month and the world’s interest in it inevitably fades, the destruction of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre demands our attention. Before it was bombed, the theater housed Mariupol’s largest shrine for citizens fleeing the Russian siege. During the approximately 3 weeks of life of the citizens in this makeshift shelter, its population worked together to stay alive. As news of what was happening there spread in Ukraine, it became a national symbol of hope and resistance. Destroyed, it has become the site of the deadliest act of violence against Ukrainian civilians since the Russian invasion on February 24.
The theater stands out from a war that, in its short duration, claimed the lives of thousands of people. It also stands out from the siege of Mariupol, a city assaulted like no other in Ukraine. Mariupol is the ultimate blatant proof to date of Russia’s willingness to commit humanitarian atrocities during a war it says aims to save Ukrainians from themselves, and the theater, the worst known heinous city from the siege, offers a stunning glimpse into Russian motives and methods. It’s hard to believe that Russian forces didn’t know what they were doing when they destroyed the theater, where transient citizens had painted the Russian word “CHILDREN” so giant on the outdoor floor that it’s barely noticeable in satellite images. An Amnesty International report calls it a “clear war crime. “
“That day, we learned that the Russians had come to kill us,” one survivor told me. “They didn’t come to fight with the Ukrainian soldiers. They just wanted to kill us.
The dramatic theatre, as the citizens of Mariupol usually called the building, was bombed between 10 and 11 a. m. on Wednesday, March 16. The exact time is uncertain, as are the precise means. According to an investigation of photographs taken after the attack that was included in Amnesty International’s report, the most plausible case is that a Russian fighter jet dropped two 1,100-pound bombs on the theater. They broke through the roof more or less simultaneously and exploded in the main part. auditorium, more or less level, probably using delayed-action rockets. The extent of the damage suggests two detonations, which would have resembled one for the other people they provided in the theater. It is conceivable that there was only one. however, the shape and length of two debris fields extending from the theater to the northeast and southwest would seem to oppose it. It is also conceivable, though much less likely, that Russian forces would introduce a cruise missile into the theater.
I interviewed survivors in March, at a hospital near Mariupol, where they were being treated, and I have continued to interview them ever since. The following is a narrative based on their experiences, as well as those of others who witnessed the destruction of the theater.
Elyzaveta, a cheerful 19-year-old girl, has lived all her life in Mariupol, about 40 miles from the Russian border. He shared an apartment with his mother in Zakhidnyi, a small residential domain west of the city, and worked in a supermarket, saving for college. In his spare time, he has acted in plays. When the invasion began, Elyzaveta believed the Russians were making noise. Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and subsidized a short-lived insurgency in Mariupol, the city has been on the front line between Ukraine’s right-wing and territory occupied by Russian-subsidized separatists, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. For more than part of his life, the two sides exchanged fire. It was never in vain. Russian President Vladimir Putin was tyrannical, Elyzaveta believed, but not reckless, at least not reckless enough to invade. It was a trust I shared with almost every single Ukrainian I spoke to.
What Elyzaveta did not know was that thousands of Russian forces were converging on Mariupol from 3 sides and from the sky. The separate 810th Naval Infantry Brigade approached by sea, the 150th Motorized Rifle Division crossed the border from Russia, and troops descended from the Donetsk People’s Republic. Russian jets carried out bombing raids and warships introduced missiles. Ukrainian fighters from at least 4 other brigades, battalions and regiments defended Mariupol, but were outnumbered and armed.
At the end of the first week of March, Mariupol surrounded. The Russians headed towards the city center, bombed the main exercise station, power plants, police and fire stations, water and fuel supplies, mobile towers and other infrastructure and survival bureaucracy. They sprayed apartment buildings, houses and grocery store districts. Soon, there was no running water, electritown, fuel, telephone service, or internet in most of the city. Without water, the chimneys spread from one building to another. The Ukrainian government had declared martial law. Online, the mayor trusts citizens that the city government will remain intact and protect them. But then he left Mariupol and the city became, as one theatre survivor told me, “a void”.
The windows of Elyzaveta’s apartment burst. When the air raid sirens sounded, she and her mother ran down the hallway in front of their apartment to escape the shards of glass and shrapnel. On the morning of March 5, Elyzaveta’s boyfriend, a college student, arrived here at the apartment. News had spread that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to open a humanitarian lounge outside the city. Bus convoys piled up in the square in front of the theater. Her mother put clothes and dry food in bags. Elyzaveta put her cat, Zhmenia, which she “handles,” in her purse.
The Mariupol passed unrecognizable. Entire streets were reduced to ashes, covered with the corpses of cars and buses. Shops were closed or looted. A few other brave people crowded around the bonfires outside. The others piled up in the basements. The endless rocket chimney.
Elyzaveta had been to the theater several times, but when they arrived at the building, 3 hours after leaving, she discovered a scene unlike anything she had seen before. A massive, nervous mass of other people and cars had piled up in the square in the icy air, waiting for the promise of a humanitarian corridor.
There is no convoy of buses in the theater. There is not a single bus. The crowd waited for hours. In the afternoon, the police arrived and made an announcement: There will be no convoys today. Maybe tomorrow.
Those who can simply went home. Others, like Elyzaveta, knew they had left their homes for good. The theater was in his house.
On the same day, Elyzaveta moved into the theater, on March 5, along with several hundred others. After the police left, she walked in. “I may move a little bit,” he recalls.
To realize how normal it is, you have to know the length of the theater. Built on the site of a church destroyed by the Soviet authorities, the theater opened its doors in 1960 after 4 years of construction. One of the largest and most giant buildings in Mariupol was the very symbol of Soviet monumental classicism. The exterior was made of Crimean limestone. On the façade, which contained the main entrance, there was a three-story Corinthian colonnade. Inside, a giant atrium dominated the main auditorium which, composed of two opera boxes and boxes, could accommodate a total of 800 people. Hanging on the ceiling was a 1500-pound glass chandelier with 121 soft bulbs. people. In the basement and upper floor were dressing rooms, clothing stores and level, offices and garage areas.
Most of the war shelters I visited in Ukraine housed from a dozen to several dozen people. The largest contained a few hundred. The largest safe haven for the Ukrainian war I have ever seen, in a shopping mall in Poland, with capacity for about 700 people. According to several survivors, the theater would eventually house up to 1,500 people.
Outside its main front, the square, and on its east, north and south sides, a park. Total leadership is known as “Drama. ” In the center of Tsentralnyi district, it is a popular meeting place. In the summer there were open-air concerts. couples met in Drama and descended to Prymorskyi, the beach district, with its beach along the Sea of Azov. In winter, when the theater lit up, there was a Christmas market and an ice rink.
Elyzaveta and her circle of relatives walked through the theater, astride the people. The atrium, corridors, corridors, dressing rooms and offices were already full of people. They were sitting or lying on the ground. They had dismantled the auditorium seats, cushions to make mattresses and pillows. Body odor and mold from dirty clothes thickened the air. The basement, the safest component of the theater, was also crowded, but they discovered a small niche in a wall. It was full of scrap steel. Elyzaveta and her boyfriend took out the scrap metal and placed a wooden platform. They covered it with old papers and then with blankets.
Mykhailo Hrebenetskyi and his wife, Nataliia, arrived at the theater on the same day as Elyzaveta. They drove from the city north of Mariupol, where Nataliia painted at the exercise station. and still not strong enough to return to work as a taxi driver. When the bombing began near their home in the early days of the war, Misha and Nataliia didn’t need to wait to see what happened next. They drove to Mariupol, where his son, Yevgen, assistant machinist at the metal generators in Azovstal, in the eastern part of the city. They moved to their component near the factory.
After the first rockets fell around Yevgen’s house, they held on for a week, until the police told them about the humanitarian hall and theater. They packed clothes and a small amount of food in Misha’s taxi. While Misha was driving, a coolant tube in the car explosion. The car stopped in front of the theater. Misha tried to locate a mechanic in the crowd but couldn’t. When the police arrived at the theater and announced the cancellation of the theater, Misha and her circle of relatives took their luggage to the theater. They hoped to leave the next day.
Newcomers to the theatre were warned not to remain in the auditorium, which was covered with a roof that would gently collapse if the theatre were hit. Unable to locate anything else, Misha to check her luck. He discovered a position in a corridor aspect, near an exit, hoping that they could flee if they had to. Yevgen looked towards the chandelier. What a crisis it would be if it fell.
Near Elyzaveta, in the basement, was Vira Lebedynska, the theatre’s musical director and professor of opera singing at Mariupol Music College. She was originally from Donetsk, where she had lived under the profession of Russian-backed separatists before fleeing to Mariupol. On the first day of the war, a friend proposed to Vira to leave Mariupol. She refused, explaining that she might not be able to prepare her cat for war in such a short time. That morning he went to see paintings in the theater, believing: like his colleagues, that the struggle would end soon. Three days later, she finds herself sleeping in a hallway as her community collapses around her, and kicks herself for not doing the Array. With his cat Gabriel, he settles in the sound recording studio of the theater.
Dmytro Plaksin had discovered a position in a reserve. Like Vira, he was a music teacher, although of a less formal genre, he taught personal classes in the surroundings of Mariupol and complemented them with cryptocurrency mining. Dmytro had played in public concerts the Euromaidan movement that provoked the Russian invasion of 2014, and when this new war began, he tried, unsuccessfully, to enroll in the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine. The day he arrived at the theater, a shell fell nearby, and other people panicked. worry and confusion in his eyes,” Dmytro told me, “and I learned that I could help those other people. “
He had his chance when he met Evgenia Zabogonska, a lighting designer at the theater. On the first full night of the invasion, Evgenia and her daughter arrived at the theater, knowing that it would be one of the safest places in the city to sleep. They were two of the few people who provided that night. Earlier that day, the city government posted online a list of public shelters that added schools, a movie theater, a gymnasium, a philharmonic theater and a dramatic theater. But no one from the government came to the theater to supervise it. No one in the army either. The theater director trapped in a village outside Mariupol that was moving away from the Russians.
Evacuees began to arrive, some with luggage, others only with the clothes they were wearing. Some had driven or walked; others had walked. Many were women, young and old. They weren’t getting any help. Evgenia lived close enough to the theater that she could spend the day from home to eat and wash, however, a few days later she told me: “I found out that someone had to stay and help.
Evgenia did not enjoy caring about other people on this scale, let alone a population of displaced and traumatized people who multiplied day by day. What I knew was the theater, where she had been directing since she was a teenager. and each and every room, each and every and every closet, each and every one and every hallway.
Her husband, Sergiy Zabogonskyi, an actor, joined her. The theater’s chief concierge followed, entering the theater with his family. They joined Vira in the recording studio. Then came the administrator, two security guards, and an organization of actors. The lead engineer of the theater lived nearby and sought to intervene. Dmytro presented his services, as did other volunteers among the hosts. Now Evgenia had a stick.
Although the government left the shelter to fend for itself, police and infantrymen from the Territorial Defense Forces arrived to help. They brought food, medical supplies, mattresses, clothes, toilet paper, toys for the young people, everything they could find. People emptied their closets, pantries and vegetable cellars. A team of volunteers, known as searchers, roamed the streets and searched looted markets, department stores and pharmacies.
It was too harmful to make the fireplace out of the theater, and in the first place, the government would not allow them to faint either. The chief engineer had to bring food to his apartment, cook it and take it back to the theater. The theater has been filled, the rule has relaxed. After the bus stop in the square was bombed, loosening the cobblestones, members of the theater built chimney holes along the exterior of the east side of the building, placing pieces of steel fence and cable mesh over it. . A team of loggers picked up fallen branches in the park and dismantled the walls of the runway. In the basement were filing cabinets full of papers, CVs and portraits of actors. These have been converted into bedding and also firewood for fireplaces.
In the basement were the renovations of a restaurant planned for years but never opened. He had been stripped of his furniture, accessories and kitchen utensils, including tiles. But while searching a nearby restaurant, Sergiy found a couple of freezers. The owner arrived here and gave the freezers to Sergiy with his blessing as well as kitchen utensils. The news of what was happening in the theater had spread through Mariupol and other people asked for help. the theater to force the freezers. Now there is a country kitchen. The theater’s running water had disappeared along with the rest of the city, but the theater had a cellular water tank compromised in the event of a fire. He parked in front of the main entrance. When I asked Evgenia if it had made her nervous to take on the duty of sheltering and feeding so many other people in the midst of a siege, she said it was, in fact, “exciting. “
A cook provides his services. Ukrainians are smart for soup at any time of the year, and having worked in restaurants in Mariupol for years, he knew a soup well. Beyond tradition, there are reasons why the soup is suitable for shelter in winter: it hydrates, heats, can be kept warm for hours, can be eaten without utensils and can be soaked in bread, which the cook can cook completely new in it. Sometimes frozen meat or seafood triumphed over him. One day, a load of squid materialized. Another chef, who had worked in France and Italy, tried to help the cook, but he may simply not adapt to the situations and quit.
In the morning, boiling water was distributed to make tea and coffee. The soup was served at noon. To prevent other people from waiting outdoors under freezing temperature, Evgenia and Sergiy installed a dining window in one of the atrium’s convertible windows. rooms, supervised through a team of volunteers. Another team oversaw the registration of evacuees, handwriting their names into a register. of clothing. Volunteers collected shards of glass from windows that shattered with surprise waves and clogged window frames with plywood. The entire volunteer corps eventually became more than 40 people. The doors of the theater were locked at dusk, the government left the evacuee at night.
In the level store, the garbage team discovered a 200-liter steel can, accessory to a play, “Maidan Inferno”, about the protest movement. During the play, a bonfire was simulated on the drum. The garbage team sacó. de doors and burnt garbage, an attractive task compared to what the toilet team faced: there were toilets in other parts of the theater, but there was nothing enough to satisfy the wishes of the population, especially without running water. The bathrooms were also where other people washed their plates and cups. The bathroom crew collected snow from plastic bottles and melted it inside the theater in a cleanup effort, but as one volunteer bluntly put it, “the bathroom was full. “Vira, the music The director, who was part of the team, said: “At least we can wipe our feet with towels for the rain. “
Between the abundance of bacteria and bloodless temperatures, the disease spread rapidly. People have been left bloodless and flu-free, and there has been an outbreak of coronavirus. When a doctor moves into the operating room, he sets up an infirmary in a dressing room. weeks between the beginning of the war and the time when the theater was destroyed, not a single user died, so I can locate it. one-year-old daughter who had food poisoning (many other people had it) and then pneumonia. He may have killed her without problems. The doctor discovered her antibiotics and watched her closely, and the woman survived. To keep her daughter warm, Victoria set up her circle of relatives in a projection booth in an auditorium dressing room.
One day, Elyzaveta left the theater to go to the market. Some had remained open in Mariupol, surprisingly, adding one to a half-mile from the theatre selling passes through a window. While waiting in line, a shell landed near the market. The news came back to the theater and Elyzaveta’s mother screaming her daughter’s call and collapsed. The doctor reported her and gave her a sedative.
People came to the theater with chronic illnesses such as center disease and diabetes. Although his tumor disappeared, Misha Hrebenetskyi, the taxi driver, was still weakened by the operation. Still, he insisted on volunteering in the rural kitchen and brought his wife, Nataliia, and son, Yevgen, extra food when he could. Yevgen and Nataliia took turns waiting in line. Leaving the square in the hallway of the auditorium, they moved to an opera box to the right of the stage, which they share with some others. family.
When she wasn’t running in the country kitchen, Misha was outside the car, looking to fix the coolant tube and keeping away the fuel scavengers who roamed Mariupol’s siphon tanks. He, Nataliia and Yevgen argued looking to escape mariupol on their own. Families were doing that. It was dangerous, but it was possible. Misha thought she could fix the tube enough to take them about 8 kilometers. This would get them out of town but not much else, and he admitted he wasn’t well enough to continue on foot for a long time after that. What would they find? The village was surrounded. Whatever their path, the Russians would stop them. There were stories of kidnappings and interrogations, of evacuees forcibly taken to Russia, or even shot. They would not escape for the time being.
A volunteer hung her battery radio outside a locker room. Yevgen and others came together to catch up with the war. They also read circulars, published by the army, which the infantrymen deposited in the theater. With wartime data restrictions, the circulars were not very informative. The faces of the infantrymen said more. “You can see from his temperament how the war is going,” Elyzaveta says.
There was a guy who lived in the theater who had studied psychology and was looking to help other people with the inevitable panic attacks, depression, and insomnia. But he also began to exhaust himself. Dmytro Plaksin, the volunteer, remembered that the guy had approached him, upset, with trembling hands.
After that, Dmytro made sure to help the hosts solve their problems. It was quiet and warm. His temper never seemed to wane. When I asked him how he had achieved this, he explained that 18 years earlier, he had left the church and later became a Hare Krishna. “I believe in God, karma, eternal life and reincarnation,” he told me.
Dmytro has served several times as a grief counselor, activity coordinator, and mediator. He prayed with other people. He helped in disputes. He played guitar and piano in a concert, a half-century-old Estonian, that was on stage. He asked the men to leave seats in safer parts of the theater, such as the basement or near loading places. walls, to make room for women and children, although it is the duty of the night security guards who live in the theater to refuse other people. Some were belligerent, some were drunk. Some visitors asked too many questions. Dmytro thought they might have been Russian agents. One day he was called to the main entrance. An organization of other strangely dressed people were in the square, acting strangely. He heard that they were patients from a nearby psychiatric hospital.
The only differences that did not reach Dmytro were political. Like the maximum cities in eastern Ukraine, Mariupol is Russian-speaking and had deeply Russophile residents. Even after the 2014 war, many of them liked the Moscow government better than the Kyiv government. Those who didn’t, adding most of the survivors I spoke to, still had a close circle of family ties to Russia. Vira spoke with her sister in Russia after the invasion began. Vira told him: “Do you realize that the bombs are flying over our heads, that you are killing us like the fascists did? Her sister refused to communicate about it. Vira told me, “She didn’t need to hear the truth. ” Another survivor had a circle of relatives in St. Petersburg. When he called them at the start of the war, they told him it was a “security operation. ” Her uncle invited her to move to Russia. She would be happier. The Ukrainian government is a puppet of the United States and Europe, and the United States and Europe are bad, she said. Russia good. When she described the bombing, her uncle replied, “It’s your imagination. “
Some theatre presenters have also taken this position. It was the “zombies,” as the other population called them, who had fallen under the spell of Kremlin propaganda, had succumbed to it with such complacency that they might not do so with their own eyes. . When other people entered the theater, volunteers asked them not to talk about politics. But, Elyzaveta recalls, “you might just feel it. I was in the mood. The pro-Russian hosts were loud and rude,” he said. They constantly complained about situations in the theater. “Some of them said that if Ukraine had surrendered on the first day, we would not have to suffer. “
As the theater was filled with people, the struggle became closer and closer. By the end of the current week in March, Russian forces had taken control of most of the city and were concentrating their fire in the city center, around the theater. the bombings were constant, the detonations resounded day and night. After a rocket hit the park outside the theater, smashing the windows of the east exterior and raining glass in the country kitchen, Evgenia discovered canisters of white paint in the level store. on the floor of the square and in the theater park, volunteers painted “дети” – “CHILDREN”. The letters were perhaps 20 feet tall.
She believes the symptoms will deter Russians from targeting the theater. Some hosts have objected. The Russians obviously intended to kill civilians, they emphasized. There are any and all explanations for why worry that symptoms will attract bombs rather than deter them.
Around the same time the rocket hit the park, counters recorded the largest number of citizens in the theater, nearly 1500. The food and materials in the city were running out. Hope too. Every morning, other people woke up to the idea that the humanitarian hall could open that day. And every day, no bus arrived.
Tuesday, March 15, seemed strange to me from the beginning. In recent days, a giant host organization had given up the prospect of a runner. If it ever existed, it had disappeared, they decided, and now they were organizing their own convoys from Mariupol. They knew that the road, which led from the theater to Prymorskyi, and then along the coastal road to the city of Berdiansk, for a distance of about 60 miles, was fatally dangerous. But it seemed that their chances of survival were greater than in the theater.
Lines of cars are formed in the square. On the windshields and windows were handwritten symptoms that said “CHILDREN” or “PEOPLE. “The doctor left with other volunteers. Evgenia presented a ride, but she refused. Seeing other people leave, those who stayed felt more desperate than ever. “It’s the first time I’ve cried,” one survivor told me.
That night, the theater’s population had shrunk to about 600 or 700 people, Dmytro estimates. This meant that those who stayed dispersed more when they went to sleep, but it was no consolation with the worst nighttime bombings they had. it had never been. Elyzaveta and her mother were, despite everything, able to get out of the niche of the wall.
Evgenia had never worried until that night, she told me. She had been too busy to worry. You may just not sleep and are walking around the theater. Everyone else also seemed to be awake. They prayed by candlelight or heard the rockets. “Even young people can identify the other types of rockets,” he said.
Flames lit up the evening sky, and smoke entered the theater. Around 2 a. m. , a branch near the theater struck. On the projector stand, Victoria Dubovytska jumped on her children to cover them. A stream of air screamed entering the theater.
That night, Yevgen had a nightmare. She dreamed that he was in the theater. Everyone panicking. He looked down and found that his hands were covered with blood. He and his parents got into their car and left. People piled up in front of his car. They looked like ghosts. He looked at his parents. They were also ghosts. When he woke up, he told his mother, Nataliia, about the dream. She said, “Don’t say that out loud. “
The next morning, before Misha went out to the country kitchen, he and Yevgen escaped again from Mariupol.
Elyzaveta slept later than usual. While she was still sleeping, her mom went out to queue for hot water. When she returned to the basement, Elyzaveta stood up, and she and her boyfriend shared the leftovers of boiled fish. They were sitting on the blanket; Elyzaveta’s mother stands. They were talking about going outdoors to get more water for h. Then the construction convulsed.
Almost, in the recording studio, the musical director, Vira, with the head concierge. She looked at her cat, Gabriel. She looked nervous. He heard the sound of a plane passing right over his head. He looked at Gabriel. The cat had his back arched, his hair bristling on his head. Vira heard a loud, high-pitched whistle, and then a snap. “Everything that follows is like a fog,” she says.
She heard the glass shatter and the heavy steel door of the study open as she slammed shut. The plaster was stolen from the walls. The air turned white. She turns sitting, frozen. The next thing he remembers is the janitor’s husband staggering into the study, covered in dust. He stained his cheeks. el crying
“There is no theater,” he said.
He told them they had to faint immediately. Construction on fire. Vira looked for Gabriel. Il passne.
Evgenia backstage, in the reserve, when she heard the whistle. This followed through a flash of soft sparks and the feeling of his cheek burning. She threw herself to the ground and hit through the rubble. Sergiy heard a terrible bang, and then felt his shoulder. crushed through something. A fireplace door had been torn from its hinges and knocked down next to Evgenia.
“Are you alive?” he she.
Her left side had been hit hard by the debris and she had hit her ribs, but she replied, “Yes. “
They learned that they had to locate their daughter. She had last been seen in the basement, in the kitchen of the long-term restaurant. They crossed the level, but it was covered with debris, lighting, and the curtain leveled. They separated to take other stairs to the basement, not knowing which one. , if applicable, would be passable. Evgenia may only see a few meters in front of her and looked at the ground so as not to stumble. The stairs were full of whitewashed people, “like ghosts. “back on the ground, his wife kneeling on him crying.
They discovered their daughter in the kitchen. Already frightened, she was even more frightened when she saw the condition of her parents. Evgenia took her out of the basement, upstairs and out, to the east side of the theater. Evgenia looked at the smoking rubble where, moments before, the country kitchen located.
“Close your eyes,” he told his daughter.
People saw Sergiy and asked what they do, where they are going.
“I don’t know,” he told them.
Misha’s wife, Nataliia, and their son, Yevgen, were in their opera box, to the right of the stage, when the bombs passed through the auditorium. In front of them, the ceiling collapsed and the 1,500 pounds and 121 bulbs of the chandelier sank. to the ground, breaking into the corridors and Yevgen knew how many people.
“There was a flash,” Says Nataliia, “and then everything turned white. “
Yevgen saw a brief glimpse of the sky before closing his eyes and pressing his hands on his ears. Dust fills his nose. ” I think it’s all over. “
He opened his eyes to see that he was still alive. He stumbled through the gap where the door was and entered the hallway. He knelt down, spitting out dust, panting. He returned to the box and discovered his mother. They moved slowly, holding hands, the shapes moved around them in the dust. In the atrium, they heard screams. The basement vomited people. Yevgen smelled of fire.
Nataliia felt a warm humidity in the back of her neck. He reached out. She brought bloody fingers. But I had a bigger concern: I didn’t know where MishaArray was. Just before the explosion, her husband was in the rural kitchen, which was the busiest at this time of day, while volunteers prepared lunch. She and Yevgen walked from the atrium into the square, and then headed to the east side of the theater.
Micha!, they shouted.
Above the opera box, the projector booth also dominated the stage. The explosion sent Victoriia Dubovytska against the back wall of the cockpit, headfirst, cutting off the air. He fell to the ground. Unable to see, he crawled, groping for his children. You may just hear your child cry. He crawled into the sound. Grab his jacket. The complete debris stand. She heard her daughter call “Mom!”from somewhere within it. Holding her son with one hand, she cleaned up the debris with the other. He discovered his daughter on her back still unharmed. The blast had knocked down a pile of blankets folded over it, protecting it from the rubble. It doesn’t even have dust.
“I knew we had to leave the theater,” Victoria says. I thought some other bomb would come. Carrying his daughter and holding his son by the hand, he ran to the stairwell. Other bloodied people were sitting on the stairs. In the atrium, the ground covered with blood. She led the young people around the bodies. “There is nothing I can do to help. I needed to take out the little children.
His daughter crying, but his son calm. He seemed to perceive what was going on.
“Are we going to die? he she.
Coming out of the basement, Vira, the musical director, emerged on the east side of the theater where the country kitchen was or was meant to be. “Don’t look,” her friend’s husband told her. But she did. He saw limbs protruding from the rubble. He saw a very pale boy on the ground, a boy or a girl, he may not say it, the parents kneeling on the body. The shells shook the air. His memory is cut off. ” The next thing I remember is I was running into the sea,” she says.
The entrances to the auditorium were filled with debris, pierced by rays of sunlight. The roof was gone. Smoke was coming out of the basement and upper floors. The façade of the theater was intact, but the square was filled with plywood that flew out of the windows. On the east side, the total construction had collapsed. Screams and groans emanated from the rubble. Dmytro, unconscious, was dragged away.
Yevgen and Nataliia wandered through the rubble shouting, “Misha!” Yevgen saw a pair of legs. He identified them. Frantically, he tore stones. He discovered an arm, but it was not his father’s. He dug more. He discovered his father’s face.
“What is it?” Natalia Yevgen.
“Don’t come here,” he reminded her.
But she did. She saw her husband’s swollen and exhausted face. Black blood flowed from his lips. Crying, he shouted his name. He didn’t answer. Yevgen let go of one arm. He felt his père. Rien. Il’s wrist got rid of the rubble, but with each piece he got rid of, more pieces poured out on his father. He stopped, almost hurting the body. Shells fell around the theater. The fireplace going up.
“We have to go,” Yevgen his mother.
He looked at Misha once.
“Goodbye,” she said to her husband, and then she and Yevgen ran out of the theater.
Elyzaveta carrying her cat, waiting for her mother. He refused to look at the rubble. He didn’t open his mouth. He stood there silently, waiting. That’s what I remembered, anyway. Her boyfriend later told her, as they fled the streets, that she had screamed.
On May 17, after 82 days of siege, Mariupol fell. Ukrainian forces fought their last battle at the Azovstal plant. Most of the theatre survivors I spoke to escaped mariupol on the day of the attack. the coastal road stretched for miles. The convoys continued west to Berdiansk and then north to Zaporizhzhia. to avoid for days on the road, sleeping in fuel stations and on church floors.
When I was in Zaporizhzhia in March, the battered convoys flocked to the city. Survivors filled shelters and the wounded filled hospitals. I spoke to a mother in an intensive care unit. IV coming out of your arm, neck and head bandaged. On the way to Berdiansk, the mother said, they stopped at a checkpoint and let them through. Then the infantrymen opened fire on his car. Her daughter shot her in the head.
A survivor of the theatre I spoke to walked from Mariupol to Berdiansk. When he arrived at the bus station there, he found that the waiting list to board a bus to Zaporizhzhia was several days. She begged a Russian soldier to let her get on a bus earlier. . He was so young, he recalls, that he “looked like a teenager. “She couldn’t walk, he told him, and ran out of psychiatric medication. His face showed no evil and he seemed as bewildered as she did to know where life had taken him. He discovered a place for her. Another Russian soldier gave him a chocolate bar. He still has it.
Yevgen and Nataliia traveled to a town in western Ukraine, where Yevgen discovered a task in a metal factory. Nataliia sews uniforms for the Ukrainian army. Victoria Dubovytska is in the center of Ukraine.
Sergiy’s shoulder still suffers through the fireplace door. Evgenia’s left ear suffered a bruise. After fleeing Mariupol, they went to Russia, where Evgenia’s father lives. Sergiy left for the Czech Republic, but Evgenia and her daughter stayed in Russia to finish the school year. Her daughter tried to forget about her new classmates when they asked her about the war or, more commonly, told her that there was no war or that Putin was right to go to war. They didn’t feel in Russia, Evgenia told me. In July, they joined Sergiy in the Czech Republic.
The Russian-installed municipal government in Mariupol says it plans to reopen the dramatic theater. It’s to see how this can be true. The building, if it can still be called that, is only ready for demolition.
When we look back at this war a few years from now, Mariupol may require a comparison with the cities whose names we know basically from the sieges that razed and depopulated them. It can be discussed along Guernica and Vicksburg, Tenochtitlan and Dresden. Or Leningrad, if you prefer a more ironic comparison for this ultimate ironic conflict. Following its same old line, the Kremlin insists that Ukrainian forces, not Russian ones, bombed the theater.
Theatre lives, in its own way. Vira Lebedynska is located in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, where part of the repertory company and members met again. In July, they staged a play. Elyzaveta’s boyfriend is also there.
Elyzaveta and her mother on the outskirts of Frankfurt, where Elyzaveta works in an electronics factory.
Dmytro Plaksin regained consciousness in a basement. Around him, an organization of other people he didn’t know. He was in an air raid shelter under a building, they said. He had been transported there from the theater and had been unconscious for days. His right arm and left leg were cut off; his teeth were damaged and he suffered a concussion.
After two more days, he accumulated the power needed to walk. Along the ruined streets, he returned home. Corpses lay on the sidewalk. The roof of his apartment caught fire, the windows were broken, and the kitchen was looted. A neighbor came in and confessed, “I had to do it,” he told her. Dmytro told him not to worry. He understood.
He passed from the enemy soldiers and went to the theater. He went to the basement and looked inside the dressing room where he had lived the last week of the theater’s existence. It was charred. His clothes, his passport, his laptop: all burned. Now that he lives in Kyiv, Dmytro still holds the key. Until recently, he carried it with him wherever he went.
James Verini collaborates with the magazine. It was founded in London, where it is a Fellow of War Studies Decomponentment at King’s College. Paolo Pellegrin is a photographer for Magnum. Su most recent book, “Birds,” which is part of a collection of photographs about birds, was published last year. This is the third installment of his series for the Ukrainian magazine.
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