20 Days in Mariupol: Inside the city's last hospital as Russian soldiers closed in
Words by Sophia Ankel, ITV News
It is a heartbreaking scene: Doctors are frantically working over the limp body of a four-year-old girl lying on a metal trolley in one of Mariupol's last-remaining hospitals.
The girl - her body pale and lifeless - was in her home when it was struck by a missile in the first week of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Despite the medical teams' best efforts to save her, four-year-old Yevanhelina died.
Ukrainian A&E nurse Olena Olkhovska is filmed as she cries over her body.
The tragic scene is featured in the eyewitness documentary 20 Days in Mariupol filmed by Associated Press journalist Mtsyslav Chernov during the siege of the Ukrainian city by the Russian army.
Alongside a BAFTA and Pulitzer Prize, Chernov also won in the Best Documentary category at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
In his acceptance speech, Chernov told a star-studded crowd in Los Angeles: “I am honoured but I will probably be the first director on this stage to say that I wish I had never made this film."
For Olena, the movie is an important reminder to the world of a war that is very much still ongoing - and a time in her life that is now forever etched in memory.
Speaking to ITV News exclusively from her new home in the eastern city of Dnipro, Olena says the death of the four-year-old girl was a "turning point" for the team of doctors Mariupol Regional Hospital.
They were used to treating adult patients in emergency situations - but children with shrapnel wounds and missing limps was new territory for them.
"There were no emotions, everyone was working...and doing their job. Emotions came later when we were unable to resuscitate the child. " she said.
"Here was a child who had been killed in broad daylight."
But despite the increasingly tense atmosphere as Russian troops surrounded the city, Olena kept working.
On March 3 - as more bombs rained down on the city and also her home - Olena brought her husband, daughter, and two young grandchildren, to live in the hospital.
Her grandchildren, aged 18 months and three years old, slept on the hospital floor in a small storage room.
Meanwhile, hospital patients and Olena herself slept in the corridors to stay away from windows in case they exploded.
"There was no water, no electricity, no communication. We were like in a trance," she said, adding that they only charged their phones to use their flashlights during operations.
One day, the team raided a nearby pharmacy to stock up on equipment. When it snowed, they collected snow into containers and melted it so they "could at least wash our hands" before medical procedures.
Olena said she constantly thought about evacuating her family but that they "didn't have the opportunity" to.
Meanwhile, the journalists with them kept filming and feeding footage back to the outside world. Families of doctors in the hospital later told Olena how relieved they were to see them all alive.
On March 12, the Russians encircled the hospital. Ten of them came in with machine guns looking for Ukrainian soldiers.
"We continued to work as we have before," Olena said. Most of her colleagues evacuated but her and one other doctor decided to stay behind. From the end of March to the end of April, Olena and her colleague continued to work, and were only sometimes bothered by Russian soldiers.
But after her daughter managed to get hold of a SIM card - and they were able to call for help - the family were taken out of the city on a evacuation bus.
Twenty-five tense Russian checkpoints later, they were out. Her only thought - "I want to wish that other people never experience something like this."
The Oscar win is a first for Ukrainian cinema, and for a film that documented the horrors of the war at its peak. It has reminded viewers of the catastrophic scenes civilians were faced with.
Olena said: "This documentary is a must-see so that people don't experience what we experienced there. It is incomprehensible. It is impossible to understand how this could happen in the 21st century."
Today, she lives in rented accommodation in Dnipro - and is still working in a hospital.
Most of her colleagues have also continued working, but in Kyiv, in a newly opened medical clinic named after Mariupol - in memory of their city, which is still under Russian occupation. Every time an air raid siren sounds, her mind brings her back to March 2022.
She has no intention of returning, saying: "Maybe in my heart I want to return, but in my mind I don't. Because it is a dead city. So many people died there that its probably impossible to count."
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