Ms. Natalia is from Mariupol. She is originally from Zaporizhzhia. She has three children of different ages, girls aged 29 and 11 and a boy aged 9.
In 2014, Ms. Natalia was fired from her job because she loves Ukraine and had our flag on her desk.
They lived in a 5-storey building, were at home when the war started, school was canceled and they were called from work to stay indoors.
Since 2014, not a single bomb shelter has been built in the city during the war, and we simply do not have any. We have seen the fire for 9 years in a row, every night…
Realizing that there was simply nowhere to go, we organized ourselves and started to bring all the elderly and people with limited mobility to the basement. Then we went to apartments, shops, and pharmacies to help people. Everyone was forced to work to survive. The first days there was still light and water, but then nothing.
People were dying of hunger and lack of medicine in the city. We saw a pregnant woman go crazy due to stress, during a heavy shelling she went out to the center of the yard with her small child and stood screaming, to save them, we had to hit her and force her into the basement.
The mayor told us to stay at home, everything would be fine soon. If not for him, many people would have been saved!
Everyone in our house survived!
We saved every resident of the house, nursed them, begged them.
We believe we survived because we prayed. There was a period when we were heavily bombed for 3 days and a bomb fell on the corner of our house and did not explode. With our strength and prayers we kept the yard as it was before the war. In late March, after the 20th, we were “liberated” by Russian troops. They started sending evacuation buses to Russia.
A friend of mine came on February 24-26 and tried to get into the city to evacuate people, but our military did not let him in.
At the end of May, when we found the opportunity and strength, we left with our children.
The way was long and difficult, through Vasylivka to Berdiansk with a carrier, then along the route Melitopol – Vasylivka – Zaporizhzhia, and there my sister met us, she rented a 1-room apartment in the city. We stayed there for a while and then went to Lviv.
Now we are staying in a cozy shelter, where it is warm and tasty, there are all the conditions and they provide us with the necessary things. We are preparing the documents to go to Norway, where we can provide the children with good medical care and adaptation after all the hardships they have experienced. We are grateful to all the staff for such a warm welcome and the opportunity to live in good conditions after our basements.