Natacha came out of hell with a nickname: “In our shelter, there was a 4-year-old child who couldn’t remember my first name, this nickname stuck with me and even the adults called me Madame Soupe!“. They were about forty hiding in the basement of theimmense complex of the Azovstal steelworks, at the heart of the fighting between the last pocket of resistance of the Ukrainian army in Mariupol and the Russian forces.
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Natacha, now a refugee 200 km away, in a hotel in Zaporijjia, recounts this daily life, hidden in fear and hunger. In this factory basement, she opened the changing room cupboards, found clothes, water and dehydrated rations to improve the ordinary: “I tried to invent a recipe for each meal, because children don’t like to eat the same thing… I took buckwheat, beef in jelly, I added a little flour, baking soda and it made dumplings! “
The testimonies of the survivors of Azovstal: the report by Mathilde Dehimi and Eric Audra
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Natacha’s recipes did not prevent Yelena from losing weight. She shows her now too big sweater and tells about this life by the light of a small bulb: “We are still anxious, but we are beginning to relax. At first the situation there was still tolerable, but in the last few weeks it has been really, really tough. No one dared to go into the locker room anymore, even the most courageous. Everyone was waiting to be saved, as the Ukrainian military had promised us.“
Often Yegor, her husband, a blacksmith from Azovstal, went out to fetch water in the crash of the bombs. He remains traumatized:You could hear a lot of different sounds, the Russians tried all kinds of weapons on us, starting with the usual sounds of mortars to bombs being dropped from planes, missiles from ships and bombs with parachutes… It was ‘Tzz boom“.
“You will never have enough fingers to count everything that has fallen on us”
Yegor, an employee of Azovstalat franceinfo
They left behind a hundred men and more than a thousand soldiers, which Natasha thinks of, whispering, “I remain hopeful, they must all survive, we must do everything we can because they give their lives for us…”
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She does not want to say more, for fear of reprisals: she still has relatives inside. According to the Ukrainian authorities, there are still more than a thousand soldiers, including hundreds of wounded inside. A hundred civilians, men would also still be prisoners of the fighting.