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21st April 2022
10:45am BST
"Mama didn't deserve such a death," she said.
"There was no water, no electricity, no heat - and it was unbearably cold. There was nothing we could do for her. We were living like animals."
Leaving the shelter was dangerous, with two snipers guarding near the closest water sources, so the two could not leave to get water for days."Every time a bomb fell, the entire building shook," Larissa continued.
"My mother kept saying she didn’t remember anything like this during the Great Patriotic War [World War II]."
More than 80 years ago, Vanda was also forced to hide in a basement during Mariupol's Nazi occupation. She was born in 1930 and was 10 years old when Nazi occupiers arrived in the city and rounded up its Jewish population in October 1941. Thousands of people, including Vanda's mother, were executed in a mass grave.The young girl managed to escape by hiding in the basement while her mother was taken. She survived the rest of Mariupol's Nazi occupation by spending two years in a hospital, which her father - who was not Jewish - had managed to get her checked in to.
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