“If you stay you will definitely die”: An Escape from Mariupol

Wednesday night a harried group of ten arrived late in the evening to our hotel for Ukrainian refugees in Krakow – exhausted, grimy, haunted. The group consisted of all women and children, but was actually two families who had met en route from eastern Ukraine and decided to travel together, to protect and care for one another.

After getting her children settled in their bunks, one mother (pictured below the next day) came out to the lobby where we were still sitting around a table and began telling the story of their group, two women and three children.

They were from Mariupol and since the initial Russian attacks had spent 16 days living in a basement. They had little food and no water: they melted snow, and when the snow ran out began drinking from the basement pipes, from the heater, from anywhere in the walls where moisture collected.

The kids were getting sick and vomiting. There was no communication in or out of the city – no phone signals, no internet, no way to send or receive a message. They were running out of options, and time. “If you stay you will definitely die,” she said. “If you run you have a chance.”

The only signal they could pick up was radio, but the Ukrainian stations had been destroyed, and they could only find Russian channels. Those broadcasts were announcing a humanitarian corridor had opened for civilians to leave, but some of the men learned the Russians were ambushing cars on the road, firing on them once in the open. Fleeing cars were trapped in a deadly game, hoping they dodged the bombs as well as the blown-up cars in front of them.

But they were out of choices, and could only accept the terrible terms of praying providence would calculate a path through the random geometry of incoming fire. They were also out of gas, the filling stations were all empty or destroyed and they didn’t know how they would escape the trap in which they were caught.

A neighbor gave them his last 12 liters of gas, and in doing so knew he was giving away his only chance to make it out, and very likely sacrificing his own life to save theirs.

Their husbands and fathers stayed behind too.