I am not a crier. Not very brave, either, but if something jars my brain and provokes extreme sympathy with suffering or loss, the tears will come. I wept, watching videos on the battle for Mariupol which happened early in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, preserved on cell phone by a member of the foreign press corps.
Ukrainian fighters shout at refugees to take cover from constant missile fire; smuggled-out film shows long, muddy trenches where all ages and sizes of Ukrainian citizens lie in grotesque death, waiting to be buried in temporary graves. They will not get up again. Some….that is, many……corpses are unrecognizable except by clothing as relatives creep about the blasted city searching for their kin.
There is a constant barrage of bombing overhead as one of the too-few medical doctors leads a group downstairs to the hospital basement. He carefully unwraps covering on a very small baby, dead. A little lump of clay going back into earth. Other bodies are there, being loaded onto stretchers and driven to a cemetery where more trenches await. A toddler child arrives in the OR as the press group climbs stairs to listen for more incoming blasts. The little one is injured too severely to sustain life as his tiny, gallant heart still beats, then stops. His mother cradles him in her lap as his father kneels, bending over to bless the body of his small son. They resemble a Holy Family tableau, welcoming baby Jesus………but the parents are mourning their only child’s death. Nearby, in a bombed-out maternity hospital, women cry out in labor as new babies are born into this world of seemingly endless war and destruction.
One young mother is badly wounded by shrapnel with sharp metal edges, which shortly ends both her life and the life of her unborn infant. She is carried by stretcher to a safer place, bleeding profusely as she begs to die, knowing her wound, and her almost-born child’s wounds, are mortal. There is no blanket to cover them; kind hands try to save them and rescue others, dashing across hard, broken ground as snipers take aim and fire.
Though the victims and graves are holy, this suffering is obscene. Rescue attempts continue. It is cold in Mariupol this day; hot fires explode in apartment houses collapsing into rubble, and miraculously some occupants survive – for how long? This wrenching, riveting video was filmed over 24 hours as the city falls and thousands try to escape.
Guiding ambulances and press recording battle heroism with cell phones, Ukrainian soldiers repeatedly race across metal-strewn open ground, risking death from Russian snipers hidden high in the city’s tall buildings. Public parks become killing fields during lulls in battle ; boys are shot playing soccer.
Do the Russians see the small bodies and know they are murdering children for target practice? If they have children of their own, does this make them pause? No. They fear their own commanders more than the judgment of God.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
