Liz COOKMAN
Fri, 11 March 2022,
eFootage from the National Police of Ukraine on March 9 shows the damage caused to a children's hospital in Mariupol by Russian air strikes
(AFP/Handout)
Residents trapped inside Ukraine's besieged port city Mariupol pleaded for help on Friday as family members desperately tried to contact them amid a communications blackout.
The city is without water, gas and electricity, with communications down since March 2.
A few patches of weak phone signal remain the only way for most residents to get news out, and the connection is unreliable.
Channels on messaging app Telegram have sprung up, with friends and family posting pictures and information about their loved ones, hoping that others may know something of their fate.
Yulia, a 29-year-old teacher who fled Mariupol on March 3, said her mother-in-law was able to call only by walking to a tower far from her home and it was "really dangerous for her to get there".
But she had managed to call Yulia's husband today to let them know she was still alive.
"She said she was OK but the attacks don't stop. There are many corpses on the street and nobody buries them. They lie there for days. Sometimes utility services collect them and bury them all together in one huge grave," she said.
- Constant bombardment -
Yulia and her husband are among the few people to have escaped Mariupol since the siege began, having to face checkpoints manned by Russian troops to leave.
After a shell fell 50 metres from a crowd of people hoping to evacuate, some started to beg drivers to take them out, she said, but few people had spare seats.
"On the road, we saw burnt-out civilian cars, some were overturned on the side of the road. We understood that Russians had shot them," she said.
"Two kilometres from Mariupol, we saw Russians, their military equipment marked with the letter 'Z'. We thought that was our end, that they would kill us."
Mariupol has been under constant bombardment for 10 days from artillery shells, and Grad, Smerch and Tochka U rockets, according to city council member Petro Andriushchenko.
Rough estimates by the regional military administration put the number killed in Mariupol at 1,207, but it is thought there could be more under the debris.
Attempts to establish a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians and to take in supplies have failed on multiple occasions, as Ukrainian officials accuse Russia of not abiding by agreed ceasefires.
On Wednesday, three people -– including one child –- were killed and 14 others injured in an attack on a children's and maternity hospital, causing international outrage.
- 'Help us' -
Yana Karban, 30, has not spoken to her parents, who live on Mariupol's Left Bank, since March 2 but spends most hours of the day trying to find news.
Their neighbours managed to find a patch of phone signal for long enough to call their own daughter, who passed on news to Karban.
She received a message that said: "It's a total disaster in the building. They were just hit by shelling and eight apartments are on fire.
"My parents were crying, saying 'help us'. They want to leave the city but it's impossible as the shelling is everywhere –- it's impossible even to get out."
Her parent's neighbours are now unreachable again and Karban is unable to contact anyone in the city herself -– she is just waiting for news about the fires, or if there were any victims.
Images sent to AFP show green and blue-tinged shrapnel that Karban says were found in a wardrobe in her parent's building after attacks in the morning, shared by the sister of another neighbour.
Karban, a PR manager for a tech company, lives in Kyiv but fled on the second day of the war to Zurich via Poland.
The stress means she is now taking Phenibut and her therapist has her practicing Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), a psychotherapy treatment, to alleviate her distress.
"I couldn't even stay in Poland as I was always seeing our flag flying and couldn't stop crying. I never thought that I'd become a war refugee," she said.
"It's more than horrible, your brain just can't process emotionally what is happening. But who cares about mental health –- you just want your parents to stay alive."
str-dc/er/yad
Residents trapped inside Ukraine's besieged port city Mariupol pleaded for help on Friday as family members desperately tried to contact them amid a communications blackout.
The city is without water, gas and electricity, with communications down since March 2.
A few patches of weak phone signal remain the only way for most residents to get news out, and the connection is unreliable.
Channels on messaging app Telegram have sprung up, with friends and family posting pictures and information about their loved ones, hoping that others may know something of their fate.
Yulia, a 29-year-old teacher who fled Mariupol on March 3, said her mother-in-law was able to call only by walking to a tower far from her home and it was "really dangerous for her to get there".
But she had managed to call Yulia's husband today to let them know she was still alive.
"She said she was OK but the attacks don't stop. There are many corpses on the street and nobody buries them. They lie there for days. Sometimes utility services collect them and bury them all together in one huge grave," she said.
- Constant bombardment -
Yulia and her husband are among the few people to have escaped Mariupol since the siege began, having to face checkpoints manned by Russian troops to leave.
After a shell fell 50 metres from a crowd of people hoping to evacuate, some started to beg drivers to take them out, she said, but few people had spare seats.
"On the road, we saw burnt-out civilian cars, some were overturned on the side of the road. We understood that Russians had shot them," she said.
"Two kilometres from Mariupol, we saw Russians, their military equipment marked with the letter 'Z'. We thought that was our end, that they would kill us."
Mariupol has been under constant bombardment for 10 days from artillery shells, and Grad, Smerch and Tochka U rockets, according to city council member Petro Andriushchenko.
Rough estimates by the regional military administration put the number killed in Mariupol at 1,207, but it is thought there could be more under the debris.
Attempts to establish a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians and to take in supplies have failed on multiple occasions, as Ukrainian officials accuse Russia of not abiding by agreed ceasefires.
On Wednesday, three people -– including one child –- were killed and 14 others injured in an attack on a children's and maternity hospital, causing international outrage.
- 'Help us' -
Yana Karban, 30, has not spoken to her parents, who live on Mariupol's Left Bank, since March 2 but spends most hours of the day trying to find news.
Their neighbours managed to find a patch of phone signal for long enough to call their own daughter, who passed on news to Karban.
She received a message that said: "It's a total disaster in the building. They were just hit by shelling and eight apartments are on fire.
"My parents were crying, saying 'help us'. They want to leave the city but it's impossible as the shelling is everywhere –- it's impossible even to get out."
Her parent's neighbours are now unreachable again and Karban is unable to contact anyone in the city herself -– she is just waiting for news about the fires, or if there were any victims.
Images sent to AFP show green and blue-tinged shrapnel that Karban says were found in a wardrobe in her parent's building after attacks in the morning, shared by the sister of another neighbour.
Karban, a PR manager for a tech company, lives in Kyiv but fled on the second day of the war to Zurich via Poland.
The stress means she is now taking Phenibut and her therapist has her practicing Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), a psychotherapy treatment, to alleviate her distress.
"I couldn't even stay in Poland as I was always seeing our flag flying and couldn't stop crying. I never thought that I'd become a war refugee," she said.
"It's more than horrible, your brain just can't process emotionally what is happening. But who cares about mental health –- you just want your parents to stay alive."
str-dc/er/yad
Odessa, a Russian-speaking port city in southwest Ukraine and an important strategic target in the Russian military offensive, is preparing for war. Fighting has not yet started in the city but the war is already creating rifts within families and among friends. FRANCE 24’s Gwendoline Debono report
Jews once again forced into exile from beloved Odessa
The century-old Chabad Synagogue in Odessa used to serve up to 150 worshippers a day before the Ukraine war but now only two or three come
Forced yet again into exile, as so many times in their tormented history, Jews are leaving in droves from the Ukrainian city of Odessa, threatening the last traces of a once-vibrant culture.
The Black Sea port, a place steeped in Jewish history, now sees many joining the throngs as they pack buses and trains heading for Moldova or Romania.
Some will go on to Germany, the United States, or Israel.
Many are old, knowing that they may well never return.
Some have already experienced exile, like Gallina Dimievitch, 87, "a child of war" who fled the Nazis with her parents in 1942, and who is now returning to Israel to one of her sons.
Her husband died on February 24, the day of the Russian invasion.
"I thank God that he didn't see this," sighs the former engineer in a small and seedy Odessa hotel where departing Jews are gathered.
"Today I have to leave the land of my husband and my parents, leave their graves behind me," she says.
There was little choice: her town of Mykolaiev, 100 kilometres east, has been under heavy Russian bombardment.
"I remember my mother telling me about having to flee from the Nazis. I guess I feel like her today," says 72-year-old Clara.
- 'Disintegration' -
For Russia, Odessa has strategic and symbolic importance.
It is Ukraine's largest port and a commercial hub, but also holds a powerful place in Russian history, from its founding by Catherine the Great to its resistance against the Nazis to violent clashes between Ukrainian nationalist and pro-Russian protesters in 2014.
Odessa was home to a very large Jewish community until the 1940s, when it was decimated by massacres and deportations during World War II.
Some 40,000 Jews still lived there before the latest invasion, out of a million inhabitants, according to Rabbi Avraham Wolff, head of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad community in Odessa.
Since the start of the war, around 20 percent have already left, the rabbi told AFP by phone from Germany where he has gone to oversee evacuations.
"It's one of the most difficult times of my life, seeing this disintegration of the Jewish community.
"It has happened just as the community was starting to grow again, with nurseries, schools, orphanages, a university...
"The pain is very great, but now the only thing that matters is to get out and save Ukraine's Jews."
- 'Sick' -
The century-old Chabad Synagogue in Odessa, closed during the Soviet period, used to serve up to 150 worshippers a day before the war.
Now only two or three come to pray.
Olexsander Klimanov, 64, retired, with a grey cap on his head, is one of them.
His family was evacuated, but he has decided to stay.
"My whole life is in Odessa, I'm old, I can't adapt like young people, learn a new language," he says.
"This is not the first time that we have seen Jews take the road to exile," he adds, recalling the discrimination and mass emigration faced by Jews during the period of Soviet rule.
But to leave is to abandon a history, roots, a Jewish heritage that makes this city and its region "invaluable" for the community.
Important figures were born or lived here, such as the poet Haim Bialik and Israeli Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, and it is home to a huge Jewish cemetery.
"We must preserve the heritage," says Anna Bartaret, a young mother about to be evacuated with her two girls aged eight and 10.
A marketing manager, she was very involved in the Jewish community of Mykolaiev.
Her great-grandfather was a rabbi and she fears for the old books of the synagogue, including an 18th century Torah that she kept at her home.
Her face hardens at the mention of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his desire to "de-nazify" Ukraine whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is himself Jewish.
"Putin is sick," she says simply.
She plans to go only as far as neighbouring Moldova, she adds, determined that she will "return to Ukraine on foot when everything is over".
cf/er/raz
The century-old Chabad Synagogue in Odessa used to serve up to 150 worshippers a day before the Ukraine war but now only two or three come
Forced yet again into exile, as so many times in their tormented history, Jews are leaving in droves from the Ukrainian city of Odessa, threatening the last traces of a once-vibrant culture.
The Black Sea port, a place steeped in Jewish history, now sees many joining the throngs as they pack buses and trains heading for Moldova or Romania.
Some will go on to Germany, the United States, or Israel.
Many are old, knowing that they may well never return.
Some have already experienced exile, like Gallina Dimievitch, 87, "a child of war" who fled the Nazis with her parents in 1942, and who is now returning to Israel to one of her sons.
Her husband died on February 24, the day of the Russian invasion.
"I thank God that he didn't see this," sighs the former engineer in a small and seedy Odessa hotel where departing Jews are gathered.
"Today I have to leave the land of my husband and my parents, leave their graves behind me," she says.
There was little choice: her town of Mykolaiev, 100 kilometres east, has been under heavy Russian bombardment.
"I remember my mother telling me about having to flee from the Nazis. I guess I feel like her today," says 72-year-old Clara.
- 'Disintegration' -
For Russia, Odessa has strategic and symbolic importance.
It is Ukraine's largest port and a commercial hub, but also holds a powerful place in Russian history, from its founding by Catherine the Great to its resistance against the Nazis to violent clashes between Ukrainian nationalist and pro-Russian protesters in 2014.
Odessa was home to a very large Jewish community until the 1940s, when it was decimated by massacres and deportations during World War II.
Some 40,000 Jews still lived there before the latest invasion, out of a million inhabitants, according to Rabbi Avraham Wolff, head of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad community in Odessa.
Since the start of the war, around 20 percent have already left, the rabbi told AFP by phone from Germany where he has gone to oversee evacuations.
"It's one of the most difficult times of my life, seeing this disintegration of the Jewish community.
"It has happened just as the community was starting to grow again, with nurseries, schools, orphanages, a university...
"The pain is very great, but now the only thing that matters is to get out and save Ukraine's Jews."
- 'Sick' -
The century-old Chabad Synagogue in Odessa, closed during the Soviet period, used to serve up to 150 worshippers a day before the war.
Now only two or three come to pray.
Olexsander Klimanov, 64, retired, with a grey cap on his head, is one of them.
His family was evacuated, but he has decided to stay.
"My whole life is in Odessa, I'm old, I can't adapt like young people, learn a new language," he says.
"This is not the first time that we have seen Jews take the road to exile," he adds, recalling the discrimination and mass emigration faced by Jews during the period of Soviet rule.
But to leave is to abandon a history, roots, a Jewish heritage that makes this city and its region "invaluable" for the community.
Important figures were born or lived here, such as the poet Haim Bialik and Israeli Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, and it is home to a huge Jewish cemetery.
"We must preserve the heritage," says Anna Bartaret, a young mother about to be evacuated with her two girls aged eight and 10.
A marketing manager, she was very involved in the Jewish community of Mykolaiev.
Her great-grandfather was a rabbi and she fears for the old books of the synagogue, including an 18th century Torah that she kept at her home.
Her face hardens at the mention of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his desire to "de-nazify" Ukraine whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is himself Jewish.
"Putin is sick," she says simply.
She plans to go only as far as neighbouring Moldova, she adds, determined that she will "return to Ukraine on foot when everything is over".
cf/er/raz
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