The roof of the Radiation Therapy Department of the Mariupol Municipal Interdistrict Regional Oncologic Dispensary, the parts that aren’t caved in, looks like a sieve.
The windows, too, have been blown out by a missile launched by the same Russian plane that somewhat belatedly marked March 8, the International Women’s Day, by dropping a bomb onto the courtyard of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital No. 3.
Someday, the pilot who dropped that bomb and released that missile onto what was obviously a massive hospital campus will face a war crimes tribunal. In that fantasy, the entire chain of command that ordered the attack will wear stripes and sit on a bench beside him.
If that day comes, Andrii Hanych, chief of the Radiation Oncology Department at the dispensary, will make an excellent witness for the prosecution. Hanych, 43, was inside that squat, shrapnel-pocked, single-story building, trying to keep 12 cancer patients alive amid falling bombs, whistling mortar shells, and wild volleys of fire unleashed by unhinged Russian tankists.
Cancer treatment in Mariupol became impossible as soon as the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. Electricity went out within a couple of days. Gas was turned off soon thereafter.Sirens blasted on the first day, maybe two, but sirens don’t work in the absence of electricity.
Besides, what use would anyone in Mariupol have for a siren? What can a siren accomplish in a city under attack? Help you realize that there is no safety?
The 12 cancer patients in Hanych’s care had a range of malignancies: brain tumors, breast cancer, head and neck cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer.
They weren’t Mariupol residents. They came from nearby villages and small towns. Advancing Russian troops deprived them of a place to return, and Hanych had no choice but to become their caretaker of last resort.
This is the story of these patients, their long-haired, guitar-playing, poetry-writing doctor, and their struggle to stay alive amid some of the most shocking war crimes of the 21st century.
—
Today Hanych sees cancer patients in Khmelnytskiy, a city in western Ukraine, near the border with Poland. Here, Ukrainian is the language of the streets and places of business.
Living here, every now and then, Hanych needs to pause to allow his memory to produce the right word in Ukrainian, and inevitably, the missing word, or at least a passable substitute, announces itself. Hanych needs that pause, because Mariupol, the city where he was born, which he love-hated since adolescence, and where he practiced medicine for two decades, like much of Ukraine’s east, went about its daily business in Russian.
Language, any language, is an amalgamation of nuance and historical baggage, especially in Ukraine, where for decades, and arguably centuries, Russia has been trying to strangle the native tongue. For centuries, Ukrainians—Hanych among them—fought back.
Born in Mariupol in 1978, Hanych went off to nearby Donetsk Medical University, returning to practice medicine in 2002. He was named head of the Radiation Therapy Department two years ago.
Hanych had a parallel career, heading the trade union that represents his hospital’s workers. As part of collective bargaining, Hanych insisted that the employment contract be written in Ukrainian.
“For a moment, let’s set aside the argument that documents should be drafted in the national language; I wasn’t especially interested in the legal aspects of this,” Hanych says. “I was mostly interested in demonstrating to my colleagues that they are a part of Ukraine.”
This created no logistical problems. “Everyone read it, and if there was any discussion, it was about the details of the contract,” Hanych says. “There were Russians present, but they knew Ukrainian well enough.”
Hanych’s grandfather, a peasant forcibly relocated from western Ukraine after his village, Lopushanka, was ceded to Poland, was Hanych’s strongest link to the Ukrainian language, culture, and pride. The Ukrainian word for someone like him is западенець, pronounced zapadenets, a person from the west.
Lopushanka isn’t far from Khmelnytskiy, the town where Hanych now finds himself.
“I wish I could have sat and talked with my grandfather some more,” Hanych says. “That, alas, is no longer possible.”
As a high school student, Hanych met two boys, who in 1993, two years after the dissolution of the USSR, held a series of open meetings focused on Ukrainian culture.
Since high school students, their peers, aren’t known for sustained political activity, the meetings were sparsely attended. “Very few people came—maybe five, maybe ten. University students are a big social force, but these two were schoolboys,” Hanych says. “I was impressed by their enthusiasm, their drive, their love for Ukraine, their knowledge of history.”
An association between “blood” and identity is a sure path down a rabbit hole. Hanych is quick to point out that the boys’ love for Ukraine was about history and culture. Roman was part Gypsy. Valerii’s ancestry includes Germans and Russians.
The three became life-long friends.
Fast-forward to 2022. Roman, a member of the Territorial Defense Forces, was killed outside Mariupol seven weeks ago.
Valerii, was hit in the leg with a mortar shell fragment while escaping on foot from the burning Mariupol. It was Hanych who bandaged Valerii’s wound.
As we talk, an air raid siren goes off, evidence that Russian rockets are able to reach Khmelnytskiy. Hanych shrugs it off. He has seen worse. We are speaking Russian, our only common language, and as we meander through literature, the conversation is starting to get more interesting than what you’d get at most bomb shelters.
The novel that shook up Hanych as an adolescent, “The Master and Margarita” is, quintessentially, the novel of Moscow. An interpretation of Goethe’s “Faust,” “The Master and Margarita” is a kind of novel that changes the world. An argument that its publication in 1965 put an end to state-mandated atheism can be easily defended.
Mikhail Bulgakov, its Kyiv-born author, also wrote “The White Guard,” another novel, this one set in Kyiv. It, too, is outstanding. Yet, it’s not the novel that shook up Hanych.
Hanych loves Russian bards, men and a few women, who at the height of the Khruschev and Brezhnev eras took acoustic guitars, and, defying censorship, sang their own poetry, often at home concerts. Some of this poetry was lyrical, but there were also songs of resistance.
Hanych admires Aleksandr Bashlachev, a poet who stands at the exact point where Russian bard poetry morphs into Russian rock & roll. Hanych wrote poetry and songs, too. His stuff is dark, and it’s in Russian. In 2014, after the Russian invasion of Crimea and formation of puppet states in the east, Hanych stopped writing.
“I haven’t written a single song since 2014, only because I don’t want to write in Russian,” Hanych says. “And, seriously, I suffer mightily from this.” An analogous principle applies to speech. Every word uttered in Russian comes at the expense of a word not uttered in Ukrainian.
As Hanych speaks, I experience an urge to respond with twin assertions that Putin is not Russia and that the language is not at fault. I have enough sense to suppress that urge.
The absence of public protests in my former country provides compelling evidence that Putin is, in fact, Russia, in the same way that Hitler was the Third Reich and Stalin the USSR.
As for any plea of innocence of the Russian language, you need to be (1) an ignoramus, (2) a scoundrel, or (3) both, to deny that the Russian language has been a fearsome weapon in Russia’s crusade to flatten Ukraine.
Concurrently, I resist the urge to apologize for the crimes of the country I left as an adolescent nearly 50 years ago, reminding myself that Hanych, as a doctor-poet, is not empowered to confer absolution.
—
The hospital complex, located in the center of Mariupol, sounds more like a tribe than an institution. Entire families have been working there for generations. Hanych’s mother worked as a nurse at that hospital long before he joined the medical staff.
The equipment Hanych and his colleagues use to treat patients has been at the hospital for generations as well. LUCH-1, luch being the Russian word for a ray, is the oldest machine at the department.
Built in 1962, LUCH-1 looks rather like the Soviet space capsule that in 1960 spirited two lovely dogs, Belka and Strelka, into Earth’s orbit. You don’t have to be a radiation oncologist to appreciate its beauty.
There are other good points to that machine, one of them being that you can roll the patients on gurneys right under it. “You know, whenever a conversation would turn to retiring it and replacing it with a new machine, I suggested that we put it in a museum, or build a museum around it in Mariupol, so it would stay here,” Hanych says. “I realize that this would be a difficult thing to make happen, but I nonetheless have warm feelings toward it.”
There are three other machines: Rokus-AM, a newer device, made in Estonia and installed in Mariupol in 1997; a Soviet machine called HDR Agat-VU; and a Chinese machine called Cobalt-60F. The latter has been in use since 2008.
Cobalt-60F seems to be Hanych’s favorite. “We installed motion and distance sensors to control the motion, improving the setup accuracy for patients undergoing radiotherapy treatment as a result,” he says.
Cobalt machines are unable to generate the level of radiation required in modern cancer therapy, and it’s unlikely in the extreme that you could find a single functioning cobalt machine anywhere in the U.S.
To replace them with new-generation machines that require linear accelerators, you need a stable electric grid, reliable water supply, specially trained physicists, and a lot of money. Ukraine was in the process or replacing its stock of cobalt machines, installing 16 linear accelerators since 2014, with plans to install 20 more, but then the war began.
Months after Hanych’s departure from Mariupol, a pro-Russian propaganda website would claim that Russian soldiers had found two explosive devices inside one of his machines. “The devices were placed under gamma radiation machines and rigged to be detonated remotely,” the propagandists wrote. “Tragedy was averted only because nationalists were in a hurry.”
This is, of course, crude nonsense, Hanych says, a dose of fake news in the propaganda war where hospitals are tagged as military targets and marauding Russian soldiers characterized as “internationalists,” while Ukrainians resisting the invasion are portrayed as crazed, drug-addicted, dirty-bombing “nationalists” and “fascists.”
—
Hanych says he could sense the war’s approach well before the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and formation of separatist states in the east.
“Russian films and television portrayed Ukrainian characters as half-drunk or impudent—not in the most flattering light,” Hanych says. “This was happening in feature films, in humor skits, in news shows.”
Russian television and film were reaching Ukraine with no obstacles. The same stereotypes infected Ukrainian television as well. “I took offense when I saw that, but it seemed like many people either didn’t notice it or accepted it as their due. Nobody seemed to object,” Hanych says.
At the same time, Russia started staging “news” shows where pro-Putin pundits railed against Ukraine and the West. “Russia also had financial claims against Ukraine, asserting that Ukraine was diverting their natural gas, that it was sending poisoned candy, and so on, and so forth,” Hanych says.
Defamatory television shows, Putin’s threats, and dire warnings from Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy notwithstanding, Hanych didn’t foresee this year’s war.
“On Feb. 22, I walked out of the hospital to take a stroll around the city. A reporter from Deutsche Welle came up to me and asked a simple question: ‘If Putin indeed attacks, what will you do?’ In other words, a very important question. And you know, at that time I was very confident. I thought we would take up rifles, throw Molotov cocktails at them—and we will defend ourselves. But, deep in my soul, I believed that we had been so well prepared for the attack that the attack will not take place. It’s hard to believe, but I simply didn’t foresee it.”
On Feb. 24, when Russian troops did indeed pour into Ukraine, at least one respected talking head on Ukrainian television urged civilians to stay in place. “That day, I did not yet feel on my hide that the war would begin,” Hanych says.
Russian artillery and aviation first struck the Left Bank of the Kalmius River that runs through Mariupol. Hanych’s girlfriend, Ilona, lived on the Left Bank, near the Azovstal plant.
Hanych lived within a 10-minute walk from the hospital, in the city’s center, on the Right Bank.
That day, Ilona called. “She told me that it had begun, that they have started to bomb her area. I suggested that she relocate to my apartment,” Hanych says. “I confess, I couldn’t imagine that this would drag on. I had confidence in our armed forces. Plus, on television they were emphasizing that there would be no Russian onslaught, because Russia would not be willing to deploy its entire military force against Ukraine.”
As tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders, the television channels, to uphold optimism, broadcast instructions on making Molotov cocktails, also pointing out the optimal way to throw these fuel-filled bottles at tanks.
“On a picture, this is easily accomplished. In reality, it’s complicated in the extreme. Impossible even,” Hanych says.
Though he didn’t believe the war would last long, out of an abundance of caution, Hanych suggested that those patients who could interrupt treatment should do so.
There were 50 patients receiving radiation therapy at his department before the war began. On Feb. 24, 13 patients remained. These were people who lived in distant villages and those who had to travel through territories that the Russians had overrun. On Feb. 25, family members came and picked up one more patient. Now, 12 remained.
As you turn around and look, you see the city, in its entirety, in the distance. We turn around, we look. It’s a terrifying sight. We see smoke rise. Black smoke coming from many, many places. This is something I cannot put into words.
Andrii Hanych
Hanych gets another call from Ilona. The barrage on the Left Bank has intensified, she tells him. He suggests again that she move to his place. She will think about it, she says.
As the day wears on, the nurse, who also lives on the Left Bank, calls to report that she has no way to get to the hospital to work the night shift. Artillery is blasting, public transportation has stopped, and the Ukrainian army has set up roadblocks. No one is allowed to cross from the Left Bank to Mariupol’s center.
“So, now my department has no one but me—just 12 patients and I. Of course, I decide immediately to stay there overnight,” Hanych says. “Starting on Feb. 25, I stayed at the hospital at all times. I can’t tell people, ‘We are closing the place down, so go away wherever you can.’ And, of course, fighting is intensifying in our part of the city, and Russian tanks are all around.”
Electricity gets turned off on Feb. 26, silencing the sirens, making it impossible to use the hospital’s cooking stoves, charge telephones, and get computer and television reception. Telephone calls stop. Newscasts stop. Is Ilona safe? Is his mother? His friends?
For a few days, Hanych makes trips to his apartment. There, he boils water on his gas stove, pours it into thermoses—he has two—and carries the hot water back to the hospital. Gas is turned off a day or so later.
The highrise building Hanych lives in is literally facing the emerging front line. Seeing bombardment intensify, he starts to worry that a shell or a bomb would hit his eighth-floor apartment.
Cautiously, he takes a walk home, to say goodbye to the place and to retrieve his three most prized possessions: his vintage Czechoslovakian-made, semi-acoustic, orange-colored Jolana guitar, a speaker, and a laptop computer.
Hanych’s 1960s Czechoslovakian-made semi-acoustic guitar, now hidden inside a gantry of the Cobalt-60F machine.
—
Food is plentiful during the first days of the war. After electricity goes out, the nurses who live nearby bring over the contents of their freezers—meats mostly.
“The mentality of our people during the post-Soviet period, for whatever reason, requires filling freezers with large amounts or food and storing it for undetermined periods of time,” Hanych says. “Presumably, it has something to do with food shortages that occurred in the 1990s. The roots could run deeper, too, to Holodomor, the man-made famine of the 1930s. Or perhaps it’s genetic,” Hanych hypothesizes.
“Whatever it is, it’s a common practice among our people, which is to say it’s considered normal. To make sure that all this meat wouldn’t spoil after electricity went out, the nurses brought it to us.”
Hanych and his patients adapt to making fires outdoors and cooking soups and stews. He uses the bonfire to boil snow, too.
“We became a cohesive team, all of us,” Hanych says. “That is to say, our women patients peeled the potatoes and chopped them. The men made the bonfire. We had a clear distribution of duties. It wasn’t regimented, of course. It was entirely voluntar.”
—
“Did this situation feel reminiscent of an absurdist dystopia, perhaps a play by, say, Sartre?” I ask roughly two hours into our conversation. Redundantly, I clarify: Thirteen people—twelve cancer patients and their doctor—trapped in Mariupol, boiling soup on bonfires as the world explodes.
Hanych lets out a laugh.
“Yes, when you and I began this conversation, I had a fleeting thought that after all this is over, it would be interesting to write a book about what happened, about the patients, the many details of what happened.”
On the first evening after Hanych is reunited with his guitar, at dinner, he hooks the speaker to the hospital’s generator and starts to play.
He plays something happy, staying away from his own songs, which are dark, in Russian, and not the kind of stuff you play to cancer patients whose treatment is interrupted by war.
The patients are enjoying the music.
“One of the patients, an old man with colon cancer, came up to me and said, ‘You know, doctor, I enjoyed this so much that my tumor has dissolved,’” Hanych says.
—
Soon after Hanych and the patients settle in the department, one of the nurses determines that it’s safer to stay at the hospital than at her apartment.
She moves in.
Her family, which moves to the department as well, includes her octogenarian mother, a retired nurse who spent her entire life working at the hospital. Hanych knew both women for much of his life.
While this family lives at the hospital, the front lines shift from their apartment building and toward the center of the city. After a while, it starts to look like it’s safer for the nurse and her family to move back home.
Since the elderly woman has difficulty walking, her daughter asks to borrow the department’s wheelchair, which Hanych bought in late 2021, after the wheels of the department’s old, Soviet-era contraption refused to turn.
This wheelchair was borrowed by a former nurse and used in an impromptu burial of a passerby killed in the street in Mariupol.
The family promises to return the wheelchair and leaves.
Four or five hours go by, and finally the old woman’s grandson shows up. He is visibly shaken, and the chair is covered in blood and bits of flesh.
“I concluded that something had happened to the old woman,” Hanych says. “I liked her a lot. She spent her entire life working at our hospital. She worked with my mother, and she was still there when I came to work at the hospital. I thought something had happened to her, but it turned out that she got to the apartment without mishap.
“After they got her to the apartment,her grandson turned around to take the wheelchair back to the hospital. Along the way, he saw a young man get blown to bits in an explosion. Maybe it was a landmine, maybe something else.
“The young man’s mother literally saw her son blown apart. She asked for help with gathering up the pieces of her son’s body, loading them in the wheelchair, taking it all to the courtyard of an ordinary residential building for burial.”
∑
Sometime before the war, Hanych and a friend, a surgeon, got into an argument about how Mariupol residents would behave if a war were to break out.
“I said that social contract in the city would dissolve within two weeks. Social contract governs relationships between people, everything we are used to,” Hanych says. “I was mistaken. Social contract vanished within five days.
“Soon after the war began, I noted that the number of stores that stood in ruins greatly exceeded the number of residential buildings reduced to rubble. This was, of course, in the beginning, before the near-complete destruction of the city.
“I was unable to comprehend that my fellow Mariupol citizens would engage in marauding. I could, perhaps, understand why someone might break into a food store. You must eat; that’s complicated. But what about items that cannot help you in the least?
“I saw a group of young men carry an enormous plasma television. I have no idea where they had stolen it, but they were carrying it. In the middle of a street, the screen cracks, so they set it down right there and kept walking as though nothing had happened.
“I saw someone who had broken into a perfume store carry perfume in two big bags. You might think, here we are, in the middle of a war, why do you need such an amount of perfume?
“With my own eyes, I saw a man break into a furniture store and attempt to carry out a cabinet with a sink. This was just one man, alone, and the cabinet was big and heavy. He had busted out the storefront window, and he was trying to move that cabinet out. It was a remarkably difficult spectacle to observe.
“I saw a video recently. It was shot in Mariupol. It shows one of these marauders break into a sporting goods store and grab a soccer ball. Meanwhile, the store owner is screaming at him, with all proper obscenities, something to the effect of ‘Why do you need a soccer ball now? Are you an idiot?’”
—
The patients and their doctor spend the first few nights in hospital beds. Then Hanych realizes that it would make more sense to use infusion chairs instead.
“They are less comfortable, but more convenient. You can move them around easily,” he says. “If there is bombing on the side of the kitchen, you roll them to the opposite side.
“Bombing occurs chaotically. If you hear a plane, you can’t predict where the bombing would occur,” Hanych says. “Aviation is a scary thing. I think even people with significant military experience would agree.”
When the war began, Hanych believed that the Russians would refrain from bombing the hospital complex, which is so prominently located in the center of the city. That illusion was shattered around March 1, when a missile took out a transformer station that was contiguous to the Radiation Therapy Department, literally next to Hanych and his patients.
The Russians showed no hesitation to fire at a hospital, and, day by day, it would get worse. “I am just amazed by what happened to these people, what made this kind of conduct possible,” Hanych says.
The explosion that takes out the transformer blows out the windows and damages a wall. Fortunately, the medical oncology clinic was undergoing renovation, and building supplies, including sheets of plywood, plastic, and bags of plaster and cement, are left piled up inside the building.
Hanych and his patients cover up the holes, but it becomes obvious that the hospital complex isn’t as safe a place as he initially believed. “If they drop one bomb, you know they will drop another,” Hanych says. “When you realize that, all your illusions vanish.”
As the front moves closer, Hanych offers to arrange to transport his patients to a safer place.
Meanwhile, in early March, the main cancer hospital on campus is transformed into a wartime hospital. Three surgeons who used to treat cancer now move to the hospital to take care of the wounded.
“Believe me, these are people far more heroic than I am,” Hanych says. “There were some soldiers getting treated, but there were also children, women, grandmothers. The idea that a civilian is hurt by a bomb is absolutely the most difficult concept to comprehend.”
At the hospital, Hanych asks members of the military to help evacuate his patients. Indeed, a much larger evacuation is in the works. Other civilians, including patients and families of employees, are taking shelter in the cellars beneath the hospital.
As buses pull up to pick up his patients, Hanych asks the soldiers where the patients would be taken, forgetting that soldiers receive special training not to answer questions that begin with the word “where.”
—
Hanych returns to the now vacant Radiation Therapy Department.
Hanych’s patients didn’t leave on an empty stomach. The bonfire outside the Radiation Therapy Department building still smolders from preparation of that morning’s meal.
His obligation to the patents has been fulfilled, and now there is some puttering to be done.
It’s March 9, early afternoon.
The patients have been gone for a bit more than two hours. Hanych starts to pick up the firewood. It can rain here in March, or it can snow. It’s best to keep your firewood covered—or indoors. Hanych’s right hand is on the door handle, his left holds up a modest-sized armful of firewood.
When you hear an airplane, you look up. Luckily, most of them will fly by, toward someone else, possibly. This one is up high, above the clouds. There is nothing to react to, no reason to worry, unless the sound of the airplane engines morphs into a hiss, mechanical yet snake-like.
Just like the sound Hanych now begins to hear. If you’ve heard the sound a missile makes, you’ll recognize it. You know also that the louder it gets, the greater the likelihood that it’s coming for you.
He opens the door.
What do you do? Drop to the ground, run outside, run toward the safest place in the building—the vault? He breaks into a sprint toward the vault, seeing impact as it occurs, in real time, the roof giving way, windows buckling, cardboard ceiling tiles aloft in mad hurricane formations. As he runs, he knows that a rocket has hit, hit hard, someplace close, on the opposite side of the wall, this wall.
I wasn’t thinking about leaving at first, but shooting intensified day by day, mortars whistled every minute. You pray that they fly by, but then you realize that if they fly by you, they may hit someone else. Then Russian tanks started to appear.
Andrii Hanych
But there is something else, another sound, impact of a different sort, much deeper, a sound that screams catastrophe. It comes from the outside, also nearby. By now, Hanych has heard many a rocket, but this, whatever it is, is of another order of magnitude. He hasn’t heard anything like it in the past, even here, even in Mariupol, even in the midst of this madness.
Hanych has reached the steel door of the vault. He will close it now, he will spend the rest of the day and the night here. It’s possible that he has suffered a concussion, but how bad? That will become evident tomorrow.
What was it, that hellish other blast? He will go out, he will investigate—tomorrow, if there is such a thing as tomorrow.
The morning of March 10 does arrive. Venturing out, not quite 50 meters away, in the courtyard, Hanych sees a crater 5 meters deep. The windows on much of the hospital campus are blown out by the blast.
The same Russian plane that released a missile into the Department of Radiation Therapy had dropped a bomb that landed in close proximity of Maternity Hospital No. 3, separated from Hanych’s department only by a flimsy fence. This bombing produced one of the war’s most horrific scenes.
—
Hanych sorts through his obligations. Should he stay? Sometimes believes he has to. There is radioactive material at the department, enough of it for someone—separatists or the FSB—to fashion a dirty bomb, explode it, and blame Ukrainians. He wants to find Ilona, his mother, his friends. Is any one of the people dear to him left alive? There is no way to know.
Meanwhile, the front moves closer.
“I wasn’t thinking about leaving at first, but shooting intensified day by day, mortars whistled every minute. You pray that they fly by, but then you realize that if they fly by you, they may hit someone else. Then Russian tanks started to appear,” Hanych says.
One Russian tank roars through the streets all night, shooting wildly at no discernible targets.
“I have no idea what they could have been shooting at,” Hanych says.
Bravado of the early days of the invasion seems absurd now: “After I actually saw Russian tanks and watched them shoot, I had the urge to ask the people who gave us cheerful instructions on making Molotov cocktails, pointing out the part of the tank to aim at, to give us a demonstration of how it’s done in the real world.”
Much later, Hanych would learn that Ilona was evacuated into Russia, then made her way to Germany, where she now lives. His mother, too, took the same evacuation route and is also in Germany.
—
The front line continues to shift toward the hospital.
One day, the head nurse at his department knocks on the door. As bad as this is, her apartment is in a more dangerous spot. Her family moves in as well.
During the ensuing week, Hanych spends more time in the vault. The night of March 15 seems particularly ominous, yet he still resists the idea of leaving.
Just in case, Hanych hides the semi-acoustic Jolana and the speaker inside the gantry of the Cobalt-60F machine. He may leave at some point. He may return at some later point. He loves that orange guitar.
In the morning of March 16, Hanych’s friend Valerii shows up, saying something like, “Dude, let’s go—it’s time.”
“He was, of course, absolutely right, but I resisted, saying, ‘I can’t, I won’t,’ until the head nurse, who was staying at the department, told me to get out. She stayed behind,” Hanych said.
Hanych reaches out to one of the cancer surgeons—Eduard. The surgeon agrees that it’s time to go, but he needs to get his wife—Oksana—and his son—Stanislav, a young oncologist at the dispensary.
Valerii, too, needs to get his girlfriend—Tatiana.
The six agree to meet at the Radiation Therapy Department within an hour. There is no easy way out of the city. They will walk west, beneath the limestone cliffs of the Azov Sea until they reach the Ukrainian-held zone.
Twenty kilometers would be a good first-day goal, they decide, but they get as far as the colonnade of the Mariupol Chamber Philharmonic, about 500 meters from the hospital, when they encounter a barrage of mortar fire.
The philharmonic has a bomb shelter. They duck in.
Mortar fire subsides 15 minutes later. As they resume the journey, about 20 meters out, they hear more mortar fire. A shell explodes nearby. It’s so close that Valerii pushes Tatiana to the ground and covers her with his body. A one-centimeter fragment lodges in his calf.
They return to the philharmonic’s shelter and bandage the wound. There is no sign of fracture or arterial damage. He is able to put weight on the wounded right leg, he says. For the time being, the fragment will have to stay where it is.
Luckily, with injuries of this sort, pain takes a day to set in. By then, they will be out of the city, God willing.
—
“Before you get to the sea and take the trail that leads west, you must pass through a hefty part of Mariupol. Seeing flames rise above multistory buildings, seeing entire street blocks in ruins, causes unspeakable pain,” Hanych says.
“As you turn around and look, you see the city, in its entirety, in the distance. We turn around, we look. It’s a terrifying sight. We see smoke rise. Black smoke coming from many, many places. This is something I cannot put into words.”
In 1997, Hanych wrote a poem and set it to music:
В этом городе
В этом городе славном,
Горящем огнями,
Я хожу по проспектам
И смеюсь, день за днями.
В этом городе, странном,
И в день и в ночи,
Я умру, слава Богу….
Лечи – не лечи….
В этом городе страшном,
С дождями и венами наперевес
Я хотел прыгнуть к солнцу.
Но дальше чем крыша, я не долез.
В этом городе славном,
С широкими дорогами,
С высокими домами.
Мне тебя не сыскать…
До свидания….
In this city
In this city of splendor,
Where streets drown in lights,
I traverse the wide boulevards
And cannot help but laugh.
In this city of strangeness,
In daylight or at night.
Death will find me, God willing…
You can treat me—or not.
In this city of horrors
That exposes its veins,
I tried reaching the cosmos,
But couldn’t get past the roof.
In this city of splendor,
Where buildings reach high,
Where roads are straight…
You will no longer be found…
Goodbye.
Mariupol, its wharfs, its steelworks is now behind Hanych and his comrades as they trudge westward beneath the limestone cliffs of Azov Sea.
“A certain euphoria set in. It’s a very interesting feeling. Because suddenly, finally, you hear shots, you hear explosions, but they are coming from elsewhere. It’s not happening next to you,” Hanych says. “This feeling, it comes from realization that a new life is beginning. You don’t know what kind of new life it will be, but some new life, probably, beginning. None of us know where we are going. None of us know what’s going on in Ukraine. Has Kyiv fallen?
“Nothing is known. Absolutely nothing, just an indescribable euphoria, an apocalyptic euphoria.
“Do you know the painting, ‘Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)’? Salvador Dali, if I am not mistaken? It’s not the painting itself that matters, but the title, a premonition of the unknown.
“We are unable to begin to fathom what lies ahead.”
As Andrii, Valerii, Tatiana, Eduard, Oksana, and Stanislav stride along the deserted beach, a Russian plane is transporting ordnance that will be dropped on the Donetsk Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol.
As many as 600 people, children among them, will die in that rubble, and another item will be added to the list of Russia’s crimes against humanity.
