But that first attempt ended in failure. “My mother was not in her home. The driver spoke to her neighbours who told him she had been sleeping under her blown-out windows exposed to the freezing cold while buildings burned all around her — and that she had moved to a friend’s house that was safer. He found where my mother was staying and then headed to my sister’s but she was nowhere to be seen and my mother refused to leave without her, so he came back empty-handed. I was devastated.”
The next day the driver tried again. “This time, when he went to pick up my mother, my sister was there. They had spent the night together hoping he would return.” On March 24, the day Kateryna turned 78, Maksym got the call he had been waiting for. “We crossed the line,” his mother said.
Maksym said they could barely speak, they were so traumatised. “They had driven through a city destroyed and had seen dead bodies lying in the street and had to negotiate a dozen Russian-controlled and very tense checkpoints.”
Maksym’s sister told him she had nearly died checking in on their mother. “As she arrived one day at our mother’s, she heard missiles incoming and sprinted inside, slammed the door and hit the deck. Two seconds later a bomb hit three metres from the house, exactly where my sister had been standing. She was two seconds from being obliterated. Another bomb fell on a basement 200m away, a direct hit. My sister said 80 people hiding there were killed.”
Mariupol before the war - The Church of the Archangel Michael
Shutterstock / Dmytriy Fursov
Kateryna’s life has been shaped by war. Born in 1944 during the Second World War, her father and mother died at the hands of the Nazis. Now she had reached relative safety in Berdiansk, a port city 85km from Mariupol still occupied by Russian forces but not under fire. There was talk of a humanitarian corridor opening up and Maksym was hopeful he would get his mother and sister to central Ukraine and then into Slovakia within days.
It did not happen. “The Russians turned off the Ukrainian cell phones in Berdiansk which meant that, again, I couldn’t reach them,” said Maksym. “There were reports a humanitarian corridor had opened up and on 2nd April, several buses managed to get from Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhzhia to the outskirts of Berdiansk, but I had no means of telling my mother where to access the buses.
Then, when we did get word to them, they went only to find no buses had been allowed through that day.” There were five attempts to evacuate his mother. All failed. Then last week they found a volunteer with a minivan who agreed to drive them out. Maksym said: “They were not on the official government transport and I was terrified they would be stopped at Russian checkpoints and brutalised. It took them seven hours to journey 200km to Zaporizhzhia, but from there, it was quick to Dnipro.”
Maksym said it was hard to ask his mother how she was feeling. “She has lost a lot of weight,” he said. “She told me that with all the bombing, she was too stressed to eat. When I see footage of her street, I feel shocked she survived.”
For Maksym, it has been “40 days of hell”. “I have many feelings,” he said. “Anger — against the Russian terrorists who want to kill as many civilians as they can. Worry — about the hundreds of thousands of civilians stuck in Mariupol and about the women and children being forcibly deported to Russia — just like in Stalin’s time. But also, immense gratitude to have got them out. My mother told me: “Leaving that hell of Mariupol is the best birthday present I ever had”.”
