When the moist concrete walls deep below ground and the mold and the cold and the weeks without fresh fruit or vegetables became too much to bear, some in the bunker underneath Elina Tsybulchenko’s office decided to visit the sky.
They made their way, through darkness lit by flashlights and lamps powered by car batteries, to a treasured spot in the bombarded Azovstal steel plant, the last Ukrainian holdout in the ruined city of Mariupol. There, they could look up and see a sliver of blue or smoky gray. It was like peering from the bottom of a well. For those who could not, or dared not, climb to the surface, it was as distant as peace.
The steel plant has a maze of more than 30 bunkers and tunnels spread out over its 11 square kilometers , and each bunker was its own world. Evacuees had little or no communication with those elsewhere in the plant; they would eventually meet on the buses to Zaporizhzhia and compare experiences. In another bunker, the Tsybulchenko family lived among 56 people, including 14 children ages 4 to 17. They survived by dividing among themselves the bare rations that fighters brought down —tinned meat, porridge, crackers, salt, sugar, water. There was not enough to go around.
A room in the bunker became a playground for the children. People found markers and paper and held an arts and crafts contest, with the children drawing what they would like to see the most. They drew nature and the sun. As Easter approached in late April, they drew Easter eggs and bunnies. Again and again over the two months, people in the bunker would hear word of possible evacuations from Mariupol, only to learn they had failed. When news arrived of the U.N.-negotiated evacuation, there was skepticism and fear. But the planning began with decisions on who should leave first.
As they emerged from an opening in the rubble, the family and other evacuees blinked. After two months, the sunlight hurt their eyes.“The weather was brilliant,” said Ivane Bochorishvili, the U.N. deputy humanitarian chief in Ukraine, who approached the plant to await the evacuees. “The one when you are waiting for the perfect storm, like the blue sky.”
Ukrainian soldiers walked ahead and behind the evacuees as they finally emerged, making sure the column of people placed their feet safely.Twenty-one people emerged the first day. The rest came out the next. As the second group met the first, “there were all these hugs and kisses. They’d been in Azovstal but hadn’t seen each other, didn’t know what happened to each other,” said Osnat Lubrani, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine.
In a camp at Bezimenne, near the border, the evacuees said they faced pressure from the Russians to go to their side. The Russians even tried to board the buses, saying they wanted to offer the children candy, but they were kept out.
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