Thread by @WilliamYang120

"All of them were women, many with children, as that is overwhelmingly who is doing the leaving in #Ukraine today, and I realized the small stories of their lives were telling me something about the broader war, too." nytimes.com/2022/03/20/wor…

"They talked about the randomness of who survives and who does not; the sheer weirdness of the moment things change, when suddenly your body is moving in ways that your brain can’t comprehend."

"One day you are driving to the dentist. The next you are whispering with strangers in a dark basement. It is a moment when instinct — to save your children, to get through the next checkpoint — takes over and emotions are blocked."

"Finally, it is the shocking realization that suddenly, unwillingly, you are a refugee, dependent on the generosity of strangers, no longer a middle-class person in charge of your own life."

"That morning, my daughter had to have a filling fixed, so we went to the dentist. And already when we were driving, we began seeing these terrible explosions. The sky had begun to rumble, and there was black smoke."

"There we were going to the dentist to fix her tooth, and suddenly there’s this background of big black clouds of smoke on the horizon and fighter aircraft. Suddenly, there were these huge flows of cars and traffic."

"At first, we were hopeful. I remember standing near the window washing dishes and seeing out the window that four tanks with Ukrainian yellow and blue flags drove down our street. I just cried with joy, seeing that our tanks were there protecting us."

"Our building was eventually hit by a shell or a mortar. The building itself did not collapse, but the water supply system was damaged. Then there was no power, no water, no heating. On the fourth day, the telephone communication was cut."

""At some point, I remember, trying to catch a mobile phone signal on the balcony. And I looked out over our city — we have such a lively city. There are lots of storefronts and streetlights and trees and water and rivers, cars driving around."

"Somewhere on the fifth day, the Russians took control of Bucha. One night, a woman knocked on our door and, crying, begging my husband to help her husband. He had been wounded."

"He just went for a walk down the street to get a sense of whether his family could leave. And a Russian armored personnel carrier shot him — shot him on both of his thighs. And he couldn’t walk and he was still lying there."

"And so my husband with this other guy, Sasha, somehow got him, somehow brought him in. A doctor lives in our building. She bandaged him. But they didn’t have medicine. They couldn’t call an ambulance because there was none. I honestly don’t know about his fate."

"I just had a feeling that we had to get out of there. Every minute you hear these explosions, these shots somewhere nearby, it’s hard to understand, are you a target? Even if it’s silent, the silence feels ominous. There is just this constant sense of danger."

"And I had a great sense of guilt that I was not protecting my children. I felt like a terrible mother because my children are in danger and they’re suffering. It’s cold and they have nothing to eat. So, we decided to leave."

"It was shelling, it was shooting. We all fell to the ground and covered our heads. Everywhere around us, there was glass exploding, flying glass. My husband put his body over my daughter, the youngest one."

"The bridge was out. So, we had to walk across this piece of metal. Suddenly, again, there was shooting from both sides. There was a sound of the shots hitting metal. We got to the ground, on our palms, you know?"

"And on the other side, there was a soldier, one of ours. He picked up Marina, my youngest daughter. She thought it was all a game. When he picked her up, she laughed."

"I write TV shows. But now I feel like I’m a character in one of them. I didn’t want to leave my homeland. I was satisfied with my country, even with all its shortcomings and all its complications."

"But now I understand that tomorrow is my last day in my country. I don’t want to be a refugee somewhere in a foreign land. I’ll miss my home. I’ll miss my things, our photographs, pictures of my parents. I left my diaries, my children’s toys, my dresses."

Daria Peshkova, 37, office worker at the Mariupol port
Two children, ages 8 and 14: "When it all started, we hoped that everything would end pretty quickly and we didn’t even pack anything. But then the shelling began and the light and the heat were turned off."

"On March 5, they announced a green corridor, a safe passage. So we got gathered all together, a huge column of lots of our friends and people we knew. There’s a lot of shelling, but we still decided we should try to drive. There was about 120 cars."

"We drove through about six checkpoints. They were all Russian. It was about 40 kilometers. But then when we got to the seventh, it was a Donetsk People’s Republic checkpoint. They said only the cars with no men can pass. "

"At 8 a.m., we met and realized that we were again not allowed to pass the checkpoint. So a reconnaissance group of four guys went to find a different entrance onto the highway. They came back and said they’d found a way."

"And we had to pull ourselves together and calmly move down the road. We drove along for about an hour down this road. There was a lot of burned equipment, things on fire. There were dead military men and there were parts of bodies."

"I wasn’t thinking how horrible it was. I was thinking just about the way to get there. We have to get there.

Please, I beg you, convey the message that all of this happened on March 5. That was a long time ago now."

"Now it is a catastrophic situation in Mariupol. People, to get water, they take water from the radiators, from the pipes that heat the radiators. That’s how they make tea."

"There is no civilization in Mariupol. There’s nothing. We survived, but there are hundreds of thousands of people left who are dying from this now. We left the keys for our apartment to our friends because we still had some water left."

"They try to give the water first to the children and then to the elderly. For themselves, they just wet their lips. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s what’s happening."

"They wet their lips so as not to die from thirst. Also, there are almost no windows left in the houses. Recently, it was minus five degrees in Mariupol. People are freezing in the cold."