Survivors of the siege of Mariupol recall the bombing of its most populated civilian shelter.

For 62 years, the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater was among the most spacious and sturdiest structures in Mariupol. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and laid siege to Mariupol, the building became an enduring emblem of the city’s resistance.

Actors and artists swiftly converted the Drama Theater into a shelter for civilians. Images of the shelter slipped the Russian choke hold to appear on the world’s screens—intact and unbowed amid the rubble, like a temple time-transported from some more ancient siege, the faces of those within drained but resolute.

Then, on March 16, a Russian air strike left a blast radius where the theater had been. The world viewed the satellite imagery with horror, almost in real time. The theater’s deliberate destruction was among the first, and may yet prove the single worst, acts of mass civilian killing in Russia’s war on Ukraine.

What remains of Mariupol today is still occupied by Russia, or is simply Russian, depending whom you ask. The ruins of the theater have long since been carted away. No forensic investigation was ever undertaken at the site, unless it was undertaken by Russians, which is unlikely. Maybe one day the archives of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin will be opened as those of the czars and the Soviets were, and we will learn more about what happened that day at the theater. But for Ukrainians, the message was clear.

“That day, we realized the Russians had come to kill us” is how one theater survivor put it to me. “They didn’t come to fight with Ukrainian soldiers. They just wanted to kill us.”

In the months and years after the bombing, I tracked down every survivor I could, traveling across Ukraine and the rest of Europe to hear the stories. Their stories amount to the fullest accounting we will ever get of one of this war’s defining atrocities.

olena matiushyn, a physician, moved into the theater on March 5 with her daughter, Olha. They had been sheltering with Olena’s mother since the siege began, but her apartment building had taken a direct shell hit that shattered its windows. Olena and Olha covered the holes with blankets, to little avail: The temperatures were frigid, they had no power or gas, and they’d already run through their drinking water and food. Olena knew if they stayed any longer they would be killed.

Olena’s mother refused to abandon her home. She reminded Olena and Olha that she’d been expelled from Mariupol once before, as a girl by the Germans. She would not be prey to the vagaries of history again: The Russians could bomb Mariupol to the ground if they liked, but if they wanted this apartment, they would have to drag her corpse from it.

Olena’s husband, Ihor, came to get his wife and daughter. He was a playwright on the board of the theater, so he was able to secure his family two offices on the second floor, off of the staff lounge, where 10 families were now bunked. At the beginning of the siege, Ihor became a volunteer policeman, tasked with keeping order in a city that was becoming more lawless by the day. The scene of chaos that greeted his family at the theater worried him.

The day of this move, at 9 a.m. a temporary cease-fire was to go into effect in Mariupol, as was a humanitarian corridor along the Zaporizhzhia highway, by which civilians could evacuate the city. The theater had been designated as a pickup location. A crowd began forming in front of it shortly after dawn. By noon, people numbered in the hundreds.

Cars filled the parking area and the surrounding streets, and more arrived all the time. But the promised convoy of buses never came. In fact, neither a single bus nor any authority figure was there to explain what was happening. The temperature was close to freezing. Faces and fingers went numb. Ill children sniffled and wailed. Olena viewed them with worry; as a doctor, she could tell that many urgently needed medical attention. As the hours passed and still no buses arrived, people got frantic. The sun would set soon and the curfew would take effect. Where were they supposed to go then? Why weren’t they being told anything?

Rumor took wing. Probably no evacuation had even been arranged, someone hazarded—the government just wanted to make them feel good. Maybe Kyiv had made the announcement because it wanted to pretend to the world that it had the ability to negotiate with the Kremlin, which would never agree to a cease-fire. Or maybe Putin had agreed but now was sabotaging it.

At dusk, one of Ihor’s fellow police officers pulled onto the square in a cruiser. He got out and announced that there would be no evacuation that day. The crowd converged on him, demanding answers. He had none to give. “Come back tomorrow,” he told them.

The de facto leaders of the theater shelter, a lighting designer named Evgenia and her husband, Serhii, an actor, had watched all day as the crowd grew larger and more restless. They’d kept the doors locked, opening them only for the refugees who were already staying there, and for the elderly and children. Now the police officers asked Evgenia and Serhii to open the theater so that people could at least come in and warm up before heading back to their home, if they still had a home, or more likely to their basement.

Before Evgenia and Serhii had time to consider this, a barrage of rockets sailed in. An air-raid siren sounded. The crowd rushed past Evgenia and Serhii, who stood there like two pier pilings in a hurricane. The siren quieted, and after a while, some of the thwarted evacuees did leave the theater. Many others stayed overnight, believing—or at any rate, hoping—that buses would come the next day.

What the police did not say—possibly because they didn’t know, but perhaps because they didn’t want to deprive people of hope—was that there never would be an evacuation. On February 24, the first day of the war, city officials had begun assembling city buses at a depot near the intersection of Bakhchyvandzhy and Hromovoi Streets, about three kilometers southwest of the theater. For days, buses were being driven there and parked. About 100 were eventually gathered, and a group of volunteer police was recruited to drive them to Zaporizhzhia. With the vehicles and fuel stores on hand, an estimated 11,000 people could have been whisked out of Mariupol with each trip.

But on March 4, hours before the evacuation was announced, the Russians started shelling the depot. They shelled it again and again, every day for a week. They did not stop until Bakhchyvandzhy and Hromovoi Streets were impassable, and every bus was either obliterated or damaged. The refugees didn’t learn this at the time. Years later, many still didn’t know.

when olena entered the theater that day, her physician instincts activated. She heard hacking coughs, labored breathing, and the sobbing and vomiting of malnourished and dehydrated children. Many people had a fever. Fecal matter was spreading from the backed-up toilets. Olena worried that there might be an outbreak of dysentery. She was surprised to learn that no one had yet died.

She took Evgenia aside. “If we don’t do something right now,” Olena told her, “this theater will become a graveyard.”

Most of Mariupol’s 19 hospitals were still open, but the doctors in them were overwhelmed with trauma victims from the siege.