For eight weeks, the bunkers beneath the Azovstal steelworks held a city’s remnant while war worked through the streets above. Among those who came out alive was Anna Zaitseva, 24, who had sheltered in the plant’s underground maze with her son and her parents. She lost 20lb. Her mother lost the same, and her father’s weight fell by three stone.
Her account of the siege of Mariupol, given in an interview with the Daily Mail and reported by The Mirror in May 2022, describes hunger that reached into mouths and minds. Food in the bunkers ran so short that some of the women began losing their teeth, she said. Men risked death dashing to the surface to collect rainwater from puddles, and civilians drank melted snow to stave off dehydration.
She hid her own hunger to feed her parents. “I would sometimes pretend that I wasn’t hungry and take even less food, so I could give some more to my father and my mother”, she said. Warmth was just as improvised. “We used to light some candles to heat up the water for (my son’s) baby formula.”
The children adapted in ways that cut deeper than the shelling. “All the time (the children) were drawing pictures of food, or playing as if they were in a supermarket and asking, ‘Anna, do you want to buy tomatoes? Do you want to buy apples?’” A pretend grocer’s shop, run from a bunker under a city under siege.
Nights were worse. Civilians trapped below screamed “help me” in the dark, she said, and sleep brought dreams of Russian soldiers bursting into the steelworks and killing everyone. Even the toilet was a gamble with exposure: the only working one sat on the ground floor, open to Russian shelling.
On April 30, she was evacuated from the plant, though not cleanly. Russian forces first held her at a “filtration camp”, where two female Russian soldiers ordered her to strip naked and a man in a balaclava interrogated her. Once through the lines, she learned by phone that her husband had been shot in the legs during a clash with Kremlin troops. Kirill, 22, asked whether she would keep loving him if he could never walk again. She said yes, and pledged her love for good. He remained inside Azovstal.
By the time she spoke, Russian forces were attempting to storm the plant and crush the last Ukrainian pocket of resistance inside Mariupol. Zaitseva had reached the relative calm of Zaporizhzhia with her son, Svyatoslav, one of 18 children who had waited out the siege in the bunker. The steelworks had kept them alive. It never quite kept them fed.
