On the morning of February 24, I saw strange flashes in the window. I opened the notifications on my phone and froze in desperation. It was relatively safe in our district, but hostilities were gradually approaching. My father, Andrii, was a professional soldier who had served in the air defense forces for 14 years and then worked in the Mariupol city police. It didn't take him long to join the Territorial Defense Forces.
All the people trying to leave the city using the "green corridor" were fired upon. There was no shelter close to us, only the Drama Theater and a gym in the basement, but
Dad told us not to go there because those places would be targeted.
And he turned out to be correct. On March 6, our yard was shelled for the first time. The shells fell close to the apartment building nearby, the houses around it, and the cars parked in the yard. There were no windows left. We understood that could be the end. At the risk of death, under shelling, and in a wrecked car, we drove to the garage we used as a shelter. I was hysterical; we could hear the shells fired, the whistle of them flying above and landing around. It was like some horrible surrealism you could only find in books.
Once we moved to a safer place – the house of our acquaintances, from where we could see the Azovstal – and on our way to them through Mariupol,
we noticed that the city no longer existed.
Dad told us about the horrors happening in Bucha and Hostomel, which he and his colleagues were told about over the radio. He said that we should go as far as possible from there. On March 18, together with Mom, the woman whose house we lived in, and her 6-month-old baby and niece, we left for Zaporizhzhia. Dad stayed behind to defend Mariupol.
Once we reached the territory controlled by Ukraine, my phone burst with messages, including the ones from people thinking I was dead. That's when we realised that we hadn't heard from Dad since March 11, when he said,
