BEZIMENNE, Ukraine, May 1 (Reuters) – She thought her heart would stop in fear. Earth in the underground labyrinth of the Azovstal steelworks, Mariupol, Natalia Ousmanova, a 37-year-old Ukrainian, managed to flee the Russian bombardments on Sunday.
She is one of about a hundred civilians evacuated from this monster of concrete and rubble.
Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians have found refuge in the underground galleries and bunkers of this vast iron and steel complex built during the Stalin era in the port city of Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, on the Sea of Azov.
“I was afraid the bunker wouldn’t hold,” Natalia Ousmanova told Reuters. “It was appalling,” she says, describing the concrete dust falling on her clothes from the impact of the bombs.
“When the bunker started shaking, I was hysterical, my husband can attest to that: I was terribly afraid that the bunker would collapse,” she said, turning to her husband.
“It’s been so long since we’ve seen the sun,” she said in Bezimenne, a Russian-held village about 30 kilometers east of Mariupol, where the evacuees were taken under an agreement between Kyiv, Moscow, the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
She talks about the lack of oxygen, the flashlight to guide herself, the people huddled in these makeshift shelters, the noise of the bombs.
“You can’t imagine what we went through – the terror. I lived and worked all my life there. What we saw was just terrible.” (Written by Guy Faulconbridge, French version Sophie Louet)