A Mariupol dramatic arts theater became a lifeline for thousands of refugees after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But on March 16, 2022, the shelter was obliterated when Russian bomber dropped two 500-kilogram bombs, killing people and forcing Liza and Dima t
When Liza and Dima woke on March 16, 2022, they were already running out of time—and food. The night before, Dima had fried a piece of fish over a fire pit. What remained was in a plastic bag, “disgusting” and barely enough to keep them alive as they grew “dangerously thin.”
Then the building shook.
First came the sense that the earth itself was moving. Then a thunderous roar. In the basement, where the refugees had been sleeping after the city’s siege tightened, the walls burst outward. “Dust suffused the air,” Liza later recalled, and she couldn’t see anything—not even Dima at her side. For seconds that felt like “a near-eternity” in her mind, she stayed frozen, staring at where his face had been.
Only his eyes came into focus—pale with terror, smeared under a coating of dust. The terror wasn’t imagined. It was written across him.
“The theater is gone!” a voice screamed from above, yelling through the whiteness. “The theater has been bombed.”
Dima understood what that meant immediately. “A Russian bomber had dropped two 500-kilogram bombs on the building,” he told Liza. “It is on fire. We have to go.”
They grabbed what they could: Dima took his laptop and a folder holding his identity documents. Oksana—Liza’s mother—snatched her handbag and stuffed the still-stunned cat, Handful, under her arm. In the service exit stairwell. people moved in opposite directions at once—some climbing up. others trying to get back down into the basement. believing it would be safer if more bombs came.
Liza described the minutes getting out as slow in the body and stretched in the mind, even though “at most a few minutes” passed from the service exit to the outside.
What had been a field kitchen was gone. It had become a field of rubble, corpses, and dismembered limbs.
The pattern of the day kept repeating itself: shouts; planes diving; people diving to the ground again.
Then they ran among cars fleeing a burning theater.
A minibus driver stopped. It was packed with passengers, but somehow Liza and Dima squeezed in. The vehicle took them about fifteen miles west along the coastal road. and they walked the rest into a small coastal village called Melekyne. It was occupied by Russian soldiers, but the soldiers were “uniterested” in Liza and Dima. They slept in a spare room of a distant family acquaintance.
The shelter that had held them—barely surviving, day after day—had been built only because the city that contained it was being sealed off.
Before the bombs on March 16, the siege of Mariupol had begun on Thursday, February 24, 2022, in the predawn. Russian armored columns, carrying roughly 190,000 troops, crossed from Russia into Ukraine. Forces swept in a crescent north of the port city in southeastern Ukraine. cutting off land routes and setting up fire bases. With field guns. tanks. mortars. and multi-barrel mobile rocket launchers known as Grads. the bombardment began across Mariupol’s eastern outskirts and spread west. continuing for 81 days.
Elizaveta Fatayeva—one of the names in the excerpt—didn’t learn those details the first morning. Few Ukrainians did. The news was “stinting in specifics,” repeatedly showing the same footage of Russian tanks rolling over the border. When President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the nation, he offered solace and fortitude rather than operational detail. “We know for sure that we don’t need war. Not a Cold War, not a hot war, not a hybrid one,” Zelensky said.
For Liza. 19 and an amateur actress with long blonde hair and eyes that looked demure until she studied yours. the threat felt almost familiar. She went to the supermarket where she worked while shelling remained distant enough to be barely audible. Shoppers packed their baskets with more intensity than she’d ever seen, but their faces weren’t clearly panicked.
Her boyfriend, Dima Murantsev—a student in acting—took a different kind of precaution. He went to an automatic teller machine as bank lines formed block after block. Relatives called and texted him one after another. None of them were in Mariupol. Yet they told him it was only a matter of time before the city was obliterated.
Dima answered with images of Ukrainian flags draped across building facades and with the stubborn reassurance of what he was seeing. “Nothing is happening,” he wrote. “No one has entered Mariupol yet.” When his grandmother video-called. she delivered the finality of dread: “That’s it. Dima. this is the end.”.
After waiting for hours, Dima learned the ATMs were out of cash—so were every other machine in the city. He bought a last item from a grocery near his dorm: one of the final bags of dumplings. The dumplings cost 800 hryvnas, about 24 dollars, nearly all he had in his wallet.
But within days Mariupol was encircled. and within weeks survival became something measured in what you could carry. where you could sleep. and whether the city’s basics were still running at all. Power, gas, and water were cut off. Phone and internet service vanished. Windows in Dima’s room shattered. He slept on a mattress on the floor of a common room.
During a lull in shelling. he went outside for the first time in days and saw what the bombardment had already done: “There was complete extermination — opposite the dorm a building was already burnt out. Behind the dorm as well. Residential buildings were burnt.” A restaurant at an intersection had been destroyed; stores and buildings were simply gone.
Liza’s apartment faced the same collapse. Windows were gone. From them she saw krushchevki—the drab apartment blocks built during the Krushchev era—now turned into a hellscape. Flames and smoke rose from blast holes and blown-out windows. Collapsed walls smeared down exteriors.
After another blast shattered her windows, she spent days and nights huddling in the hallway outside her apartment because the idea of staying inside had become unbearable.
On March 5. on the 11th day of the war. police arrived at the dorm with a new piece of official information. Kyiv and Moscow had negotiated the creation of a humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol. The city government had assembled a convoy of buses outside the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater in the city center—what people called the Drama Theater.
Dima ran to Liza’s apartment and told her, “Pack your things, the most essential things only. We are getting out of here today.”
They dressed in pairs of pants and sweaters, stuffed bags with clothing, blankets, whatever food remained, and identity documents. Liza squeezed her cat, Handful—“Handful — — Zhmenya — Handful”—into a backpack because she had no carrying case.
It should have been a short trip. Before the war, walking down Myru Prospekt would have taken perhaps 15 minutes. That morning, cutting through yards and alleyways took three hours because shelling landed as soon as they left one yard.
At Theater Square, the couple found hundreds waiting with luggage. But no buses came. Police arrived later and announced there would be no evacuation that day.
No escape meant the theater became something else.
Inside, refugees pressed in until the building was already “full to bursting” when Liza and Dima arrived. “Instead of columns, people,” Dima said. “Instead of the floor, people.”
There was no water, no food, no blankets, and no supplies. The theater had no heating, and even so many bodies couldn’t raise the temperature enough to make it livable.
They searched for room to sleep and ended up in the basement. where families huddled together to protect small parcels of floor. New arrivals negotiated, pleaded, or quarrelled to get space. Dima noticed a wall recess stuffed with scrap metal. If it was removed, there could be room for the three of them.
They dragged out the metal. They found a wooden palette among debris, slid it into the recess, and covered it with a layer of old personnel files. Then they added the blankets they’d brought.
Over the following 10 days. volunteers led by the theater’s lighting director transformed the building into what the excerpt calls “the most famous refugee shelter in Mariupol.” They built a field kitchen and infirmary. Diesel-powered generators came in. Auditorium seats were dismantled into beds. Crews of scavengers combed the city wreckage for food and medicine.
At peak crowding, the shelter slept 1,500 people a night and, in the excerpt’s phrasing, “few twice as many.” Each day, refugees gathered on Theater Square with their luggage to wait for the buses. The convoy never came.
Liza and Dima didn’t volunteer in the way that others did, not with tools or logistics. They were always waiting in lines—waiting at the field kitchen for hot water or soup. waiting at the generators to charge Dima’s phone so they could watch one of the movies he’d stored. They tried to hold on to their minds, and their ability to live inside the day. They would buck up Liza’s mother, Oksana. They would chase Handful the cat as it wandered alone through the theater and returned to their wall recess in the basement like someone exhausted by the world.
But Liza and Dima were actors, and they couldn’t avoid the pressure that comes when reality refuses to behave like a script.
They were old enough to understand that if they didn’t find a way to interpret the war for themselves—on their own terms—the wrong kind of memories would embed in their minds and drive them to distraction for the rest of their lives. So they acted. They performed scenes from plays they’d worked on together before the war and from pieces Dima had studied. When they could charge Dima’s phone, they recorded those performances.
They found a wooden arm from a dismantled chair that resembled a gun. It reminded them of a conceptual piece Dima had been in about the history of weaponry called A Farewell to Arms. They reenacted it from memory—using the chair arm as a spear, a musket, a machine gun—turning the war into a play.
When they moved through Mariupol. they told Oksana they were scavenging for food. but they were really taking in the devastation: charred remains of buildings they’d known. pools of shimmering glass shards. cars burned and blackened. trees shorn of branches by small-arms fire. gaping tank shell holes in walls. and rubble everywhere—“tons. megatons of rubble. ” the excerpt says. with whole streets and neighborhoods reduced to debris.
They walked to the College of Culture and Arts. Dima remembered how frightened and annoyed he’d been weeks earlier when he’d been practicing for a piano exam. “I’m a real actor. not a musical actor. why do I need to play the piano. ” he’d asked himself—an ordinary fear. suddenly ridiculous when everything around them was coming apart.
The bombing on March 16 didn’t just kill people in the theater. It also cracked Liza’s memory.
Before she fell asleep that night after the catastrophe, Liza and Dima spoke about what happened during the explosion. She realized there was a “chasm” in her memory. She could recall the minutes immediately after the basement explosion. She remembered more vaguely the journey up the stairwell. But her recollection cut out until they were already in the minibus.
She asked Dima what she had been doing while they stood in the remains of the field kitchen.
He told her, “You were screaming. You kept screaming.”
Her screams weren’t only fear. At least not only fear, Dima believed.
She screamed “Putin, die! Putin, die! Putin, die!” over and over.
Afterward, Dima later told the reader: “The only question is why we stayed alive,” even as so many others did not. “There were children. There were newborns. I am sure there were people much better than me there.”
Mariupol Ukraine War Zelensky Russia Russian bomber Drama Theater refugees siege 500-kilogram bombs 190 000 troops Grads humanitarian corridor Theater Square