Outside in the corridor she started calling for her family and found her daughter and grandson, by touch. They were scared but unharmed – saved by a mattress which fell on top of them. “I started calling my husband and son,” she says. “I was calling ‘Serhiy, Misha’. My son replied. I followed his voice and found the flat. My husband was at the front step. If he had made it just a few more inches, out of the flat, that would have saved his life. The entire concrete wall fell on him.”
Serhiy was alive, just. “My son was screaming ‘Mum don’t come here. Run! Run away from here and take Yanna and the baby with you.” I realised he could not move. I said: ‘Darling please wait, I will come back for you.'”
Maryna, Yanna and little Myhailo felt their way downstairs through the smoke and dust – step by terrified step. Down in the car park she begged neighbours to help. “The men went first, “she said, “in the blink of an eye. They came down and said someone was alive but there was nothing they could do. I asked for sheets and bandages and said I would go there myself,” Maryna recounts.
