The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel. She died.
A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets.
The doctors pleaded with us to film families bringing in their own dead and wounded, and let us use their dwindling generator power for our cameras. No one knows what’s going on in our city, they said.
Shelling hit the hospital and the houses around. It shattered the windows of our van, blew a hole into its side and punctured a tire. Sometimes we would run out to film a burning house and then run back amid the explosions.
There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload photos and video to the world. The stairs wouldn’t have done much to protect us, but it felt safer than being out in the open.
The signal vanished by March 3. We tried to send our video from the 7th-floor windows of the hospital. It was from there that we saw the last shreds of the solid middle-class city of Mariupol come apart.
The Port City superstore was being looted, and we headed that way through artillery and machine gunfire. Dozens of people ran and pushed shopping carts loaded with electronics, food, clothes.
A shell exploded on the roof of the store, throwing me to the ground outside. I tensed, awaiting a second hit, and cursed myself a hundred times because my camera wasn’t on to record it.
And there it was, another shell hitting the apartment building next to me with a terrible whoosh. I shrank behind a corner for cover.
A teenager passed by rolling an office chair loaded with electronics, boxes tumbling off the sides. “My friends were there and the shell hit 10 meters from us,” he told me. “I have no idea what happened to them.”
We raced back to the hospital. Within 20 minutes, the injured came in, some of them scooped into shopping carts.
For several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone. And the only spot where that phone worked was out in the open, right next to a shell crater. I would sit down, make myself small and try to catch the connection.
Everybody was asking, please tell us when the war will be over. I had no answer.
Every single day, there would be a rumor that the Ukrainian army was going to come to break through the siege. But no one came.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
