Azovstal’s wife desperately asks, “Peter, where are you?”

Azovstal, Mariupol: once this name and city stood for Ukrainian heavy industry, perhaps even for pollution. Since the spring of 2022, Azovstal represents one of the most brutal chapters in the war in Ukraine. In May, nearly 3,500 people holed up in nuclear bunkers under the southern Ukrainian steel plant.

The concrete dungeons were the only refuge where the survivors of the Battle of Mariupol could hide from the Russian invaders. The Russians surrounded the factory and a few hundred civilians were released. The fighters of the Ukrainian armed forces, some of whom were seriously injured, were left in the dark.

One of them was Peter S. (37), sound engineer, family man, husband. “My stone,” says Anna S. (37) and looks with her wet blue eyes at the bustle in Zurich’s Niederdorf.

All she has left is a piece of steel around her wrist

Whether her Peter is still alive or suffering: Anna has no idea. And the uncertainty tears her apart inside. “We Ukrainians can tolerate almost anything,” she says. A bracelet with a small piece of steel from Mariupol dangles from her arm. On the finger is a ring with the outline of Ukraine. Next to it is the wedding ring that Peter once gave to his childhood sweetheart.

When war broke out in Ukraine a year ago, Mariupol was one of the first cities to be hit by the Russian barrage. The metropolis on the Sea of ​​​​Azov used to be very beautiful, says Anna. The theater that was bombed to the ground by the Russians: she regularly attended performances there. The maternity hospital they destroyed with their missiles: there she gave birth to her daughter Polina (7). And in the workers’ quarters outside she met Peter.

She was then four years old. “He’s a bad influence on you,” she warned her mother when she came home from an afternoon of playing with Peter, all dirty as a little kid. But Anna was not deterred. “Before we got married, he took me on a two-week hiking trip to Crimea,” she says with a shy smile on her face. “He wanted to test me.” He was that kind of person, Peter: practical, straightforward, loyal.

When the world suffered from the Azovstal fighters

“Wake up, it’s war, we’re going,” he shouted in her ear on the morning of February 24. For a moment Anna thought about the laundry in the basement. But then she too heard the explosions. Peter drove his wife and daughter out of town. Then he said, “I’ll go back soon and get the parents out.” No goodbyes, no hugs. It was the last time she saw him.

On March 8, she still hadn’t heard from him. They persisted in a settlement near the city and watched the war shatter their homeland. Then, on March 8, a text. “I’m alive. Everything is fine,” typed Peter. “What, everything is fine?!”, Anna thought to herself. Before her eyes, the city turned into a burning hell. And right in the middle, her Peter.

Videos from the Azovstal bunkers made the rounds on the internet: totally exhausted fighters, seriously injured, hardly any light, hardly any food, no chance of escape. The world feared for the fate of the encircled. And Anna was close to despair.

Peter survived the hell of Olenivka

Two and a half painful months later, the surrender order came from Kiev: «We give up. You won’t hear from me again. I’m going to destroy my phone now.” With these words, Peter bade farewell to Anna and Polina. Together with hundreds of other Azovstal fighters, he was taken prisoner.

Silence, despair, anxious hope. On June 19, one day after their wedding day, they suddenly received a phone call. “I only know that he said to me: Take a deep breath!” says Anna. One of the fighters must have smuggled a mobile phone into the prison camp.

Then silence again, despair. The horror news came on July 29: more than 50 Azovstal fighters died in an unexplained fire at the Russian torture prison in Olenivka. A list of dead appears. Peter’s name is not on it. Anna receives a sign of life from Peter through an acquaintance whose husband is also a Russian prisoner of war. It is the last time she hears from him.

A sparrow gives her hope

It’s been seven months, seven months of screaming silence in her head. “Peter loved survival games. He can handle a lot,” says Anna. A few months ago she fled to Switzerland with her daughter. Since then, the former employee of the Ukrainian post office has been writing letters to Russian prisons and regional administrations on a daily basis. She asks for a sign of life, a confirmation, at worst a death certificate. “I want to know what happened to my husband. I want him to be able to stand under the stars with his daughter again and go in search of the Big Dipper with her.”

Heap? Yes she has. Through little things like that little sparrow that suddenly fluttered into her room through the open window on New Year’s Eve and headed straight for Peter’s drawing on the wall. The sparrow perched on the edge of the drawing, flapped its wings, stayed there a short while, then flew back into the darkness. “I believe in such signs,” says Anna. “I believe in Peter.”

Source: Blick