On the 24th, I was waiting for my friend to visit from Israel (he repatriated last year). He was supposed to leave at 5AM, but at 4:30 I got a text saying that the flight was canceled, and at the same time he texted me that war had broken out in Ukraine. That woke me up for sure. I gathered all my documents, and my emergency suitcase. After Putin recognized the L/DPR, I knew that the inevitable was coming, but I thought it would be only in Donbas.

By the time we left Mariupol, my wife and I had about a pint of water for the two of us

I remember feeling lost and scared at first – scared of the uncertainty. Hope for a diplomatic solution was quickly dwindling, and was replaced by desperation. We stayed in our apartment until March 4th, barricading the doors and reinforcing the windows with tape. But our neighborhood was shelled a lot, some of the nearby houses got hit. As the windows shook, I realized that they were going to break any moment, and down to the basement we went. We lived in a big building with 8 sectors, so there were about 200 people in the basement, some of them from different buildings, many of them with children and pets. There was one old lady who couldn’t move by herself – she was 97.

We were lucky that the basement was fortified and separated into compartments, like a train, branching into corridors with little rooms in them.

People were trying to set up homes: people brought a sofa and table, hung some curtains, and put up kerosene lamps, flashlights, and candles. We were only sleeping there at first, but when they sent bomber planes (around March 8th), we stayed put for three days. There was no power, and after a bomb blast knocked out all the windows and their frames in our apartment, it became impossible to live there.

We slept in our street clothing, huddled together and wrapped in blankets. Our feet were constantly cold. Some found solace in drinking, playing cards, and cheering each other up. We even joked around. Our mental state was mobilized against panic.

But the little children cried when bombs hit. E verything would shake, and dust rose with every explosion
Fortunately, we had some stores of food left. We had gone shopping the first day, and some store owners opened their doors - under military supervision - and let people take anything except liquor. But we still tried to eat sparingly, since we didn’t know when the situation was going to get back to normal. Our neighbors gave us hot food at least once a day. When our stores started to dwindle, we went to a nearby bakery, got a few bags of flour, and used it for pancakes. I think most people from Mariupol have stories like this.

It was tougher to get water. We rationed drinking water, trying to get rainwater to boil and cook with. We found a boiler at the same bakery and salvaged about 100 liters (26 gallons) of non-potable water.

By the time we left Mariupol on March 20th, my wife and I had about a pint of water for the two of us. That was one of the reasons we decided to evacuate.

Four out of eight sectors of our building burned down completely

Sometimes the shelling got so bad that we had to light our fires in building lobbies. And even that didn’t guarantee safety. There was a young lad who lived in the same basement with us – he went to the lobby to make some tea and something hit the building, riddling his arm with shrapnel. Another guy who went with him was also hit in the leg and got a concussion. My brother-in-law’s dad died – I don’t know how exactly, but my brother-in-law just came to check on him and found his body in the lobby.

Speaking of which, there were many wounded people in our basement. The day of the first air raid, a woman who went out to walk her dog got hit in the head with a piece of shrapnel. They said she won’t last the night, but she survived about a week until her daughter took her away to the closest hospital. I don’t know what happened to her after that.

We live close to a bus station, and they attacked us from that direction. Four out of eight sectors of our building burned down completely. The building across from us, Kuprina St. 19, burned down completely. It was all black and the roof collapsed from a direct bomb hit. There was a kindergarten close by, but it got bombed in the second half of March. A hospital about a kilometer away from us got hit a couple times. By the time we escaped the city, there were DPR (so-called Donetsk People’s Republic) troops were stationed there.

After our district was leveled by the shelling and the bombing, the infantry moved in, and a few tanks stopped in our yard. We came out to them, asked them not to shoot, and told them we were all civilians here. They didn’t look like Russians – I gather they were DPR or LPR conscripts.

One day, there was a rumor that Russian soldiers were giving out water and some humanitarian aid at the fire station. We came there but it was not humanitarian aid, but instead supplies they took from the AFU detachment that held it before. The Russians were ruder than the DPR – they mocked us and told us that all our defenders surrendered.

Most of my friends who were a bit sympathetic with Russia before now hate it with a passion for all the suffering they have brought upon us since the war started. But some people remained pro-Russian until the end. I can’t wrap my mind around it — they are bombing us, they are destroying residential areas, we are hiding in a basement — and some people keep praising the Russian World. Saying that it was all because of the AFU, it was the Nazis’ fault, we are being used as human shields, etc. There was never any Ukrainian military equipment in our neighborhood, and they blew it to smithereens anyway. I don’t know who directed their fire. There was a park right behind our building, and there was a huge crater, about thirty feet across. I never saw anything like that even in movies.

We didn’t need any liberation from anyone

We didn’t need any liberation from anyone. We lived in Mariupol as free citizens, we spoke Russian freely, and no Nazis of any kind ever bothered our Jewish community. Every Hanukkah, they put a giant Hanukkah menorah on top of the Drama Theater.

On March 18th, there was a rumor that there would be buses to Berdyansk leaving from the blood transfusion station at the 17th District hospital. The morning of the 20th, we, along with some of our neighbors, decided to go there because we were running out of provisions.

The bus was so full that we barely fit into it. The first checkpoint was right at the city limits, and they wanted to look for tattoos on everybody. It was very cold outside, I remember shaking from the wind chill, but they told me to pull up my pant legs and show them my knees.

They got us only as far as Volodarsk - it’s right outside the city - and put us up in a school that they turned into a temporary refugee shelter. Our phones still weren’t working, so we didn’t know where my parents were or and whether they had gotten out. It was soon apparent that the buses to Berdyansk weren’t coming. But there was transportation available to Rostov, Russia. Many people decided to go there - it didn’t matter where to run anymore, as long as it was to safety. By the way, in Volodarsk, you could hear the Grad missiles being launched towards Mariupol.

Since our phones weren’t working, we decided to go to my wife’s parents, who live in the DPR, about 40 kilometers from Donetsk. It took us three days to find a guy who agreed to take us there for some cash. We spent a night in a refugee center in Dokuchaevsk, then we managed to get in touch with my wife’s parents, and my father-in-law drove there the same day and picked us up. It was March 23rd.

We spent two weeks at their place, catching our breath. We did not tell too many people where we had come from, but I was pleasantly surprised that people in general saw the situation reasonably: they did not call the war a “special military operation,” they did not say that they had suffered for 8 years and we were moaning after 1 month. Just the opposite in fact; they said that their 8 years paled in comparison to what happened in Mariupol, where the whole city got leveled in one month's time. Of course they said those things very quietly: they remembered where they lived and that they had to watch their tongues.

Sitting in Tbilisi Airport, wondering if we would land in time for the first seder

Then we moved towards Russia, together with another Mariupol Jewish family, that of Maxim, who was wounded during shelling. My in-laws drove us to the border, we walked across it, and on the other side there was a bus waiting for us, sent by the Jewish community of Rostov. We were shocked, in a good sense of the word, by how generous they were with both emotional and material support. They kept asking us if we needed something, anything – clothing, medicine, or whatever.

Many Russians also know what’s going on, but they are just sighing that they can’t do anything. If we mentioned that we got out of Mariupol – in the store, for example, some people commiserated with us, but then added that everything was for the best, that the city will be rebuilt, and so on. I didn’t even argue with those. You can rebuild a city, but can you bring back its people?

We went in a roundabout way, and came to Israel just before Passover. There were about 90 of us sitting in Tbilisi Airport, wondering if we would land in time for the first seder. We did. I thought then that our journey was very symbolic, that we kind of had an Exodus of our own.

When we landed, there were tears in my eyes. My parents arrived the day before – they had gotten out through Moldova, but we couldn’t get in touch with them. It turned out they took the bus towards Berdyansk before we did. People are still coming over, as I keep seeing new faces in our hotel.

I am so grateful to our rabbi, Menachem-Mendel Cohen. He has done so much for the community, and he continues to help evacuate people.

They received us so warmly here in Israel. The day we arrived, the Minister of Absorption herself came to our hotel. She spoke to everyone, asking how she could help. That made us feel so welcome.

But my memories still leave me shaking and shivering.