Escape to Austria: Imprisoned in Mariupol: “We didn’t know if Mom and Dad were still alive”
A picture of peace and a tale of war: her granddaughter Lisa lumbers through the living room in Klosterneuburg and beams at the visitors, while Viktoria Rubanova tells how she ran for her life from the Russian bombs in Mariupol. “Mom was nearby fetching water when the Russians bombed the theater. She is immediately called in a house and hid there in the basement. For three hours. My father thought she had died,” her daughter Julia translates. It is not yet clear how many people died in the air raid on March 16.
Mariupol, the proud, now destroyed port city, is located in Donetsk Oblast, which Russia has now illegally annexed. It was and is Viktoria Rubanova’s hometown. From the beginning of the war on February 25th until the end of April, the music teacher and her husband Sergej were imprisoned there before they managed to escape to Austria. “We didn’t know for weeks whether mom and dad were still alive,” says Alisa Rubanova (33), Lisa’s little mother.
“No water, no electricity, no heating, bombs are flying”
Viktoria Rubanova sits upright at the living room table, hands in her lap, and talks calmly about this time of despair. She sometimes smiles at the worst descriptions. She knows well how distant and strange reports of weapons, ruins and starvation seem to die on this high day in Klosterneuburg. “Every time Mom heard the sound of sirens and bombs, she wondered if they’d ever be able to hug us again,” Julia translated. The family’s apartment, which has now been bombed, is on the fifth floor of a building in the center of Mariupol.
There, Viktoria and Sergei fought for survival day after day: “No water, no electricity, no heating, bombs were flying,” Viktoria Rubanova recalled. They had to look for wood to keep the fire burning in the apartment, over which they cooked and which kept them warm. They fetched water from the nearby fire brigade. “It was good that my father always hoarded so much food. They could eat once a day,” says Julia. Sergej Rubanov is the main absentee at the living room table in Klosterneuburg. But more on that later.
Julia and Alisa Rubanova soon lost contact with their parents. “In the first week of the war, Mariupol was still within reach. But mom and dad had Corona, they were feeling very bad, they couldn’t travel. Then the contact broke off,” says Julia. The 37-year-old violinist and her husband Mikheil Menabde, a conductor from Georgia, have been living in Klosterneuburg with their son Niko for a long time. In the first week of the war, Alisa and her daughter Lisa fled to them from Kyiv.
“Lisa spent her first birthday in a bomb cellar. Then it was a long and nerve-wracking drive to the border. I heard bombs exploding not far from the Autobahn,” recalled Alisa, who, like her sister, works as a violinist. She finally made it to the Polish-Ukrainian border with her husband Artem and their daughter. There she took the Grazer Jörg Zwicker, a fellow musician, in his car to Austria. Artem had to stay behind at the border. In the meantime he has been able to emigrate as a member of the Kiev Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra has received a residency in Germany.
“They searched and looted the whole house”
In Klosterneuburg, the daughters’ worries were primarily for their parents: “We tried to reach friends and acquaintances in Mariupol, combed the Internet for information.” But hardly anything was found.
During these weeks, the situation in Mariupol came to a head. The house where the Rubanovs lived was hit by a bomb. The couple takes shelter in the bathroom. When they ventured out again, there was shrapnel in the door and part of a rocket in the piano.
When the Russian soldiers finally came, they all drove them out of their apartments, Viktoria Rubanova said: “They searched and looted the whole house.” She found a British flag with the lettering of the man on one man Regiment Azov, she says. “The soldiers took him to a room, his screams could be heard all over the house, after that nobody saw the man.” The soldiers told everyone that everything now looks like Mariupol: “‘Ukraine doesn’t exist more, you now belong to Russia,’ they said. The bad thing was that you didn’t know if that was true. You have not received any other information.”
But the long road to freedom was soon to begin for the Rubanovs: in mid-April, Viktoria Rubanova approached a stranger who lived in a neighboring house. He had one of the few cell phones that could be used to reach the outside world. After a month and a half, the daughters heard their mother’s voice again: “We were all so happy.” The sisters did everything they could to get their parents to come to Austria. Through the Internet, they suddenly found a brave driver who ventured into Mariupol. He brought the couple out of town. At the end of May, the Rubanovs were finally able to embrace each other again in Vienna.
Her father returns to Ukraine
But in the meantime the family has been torn apart again: Sergei Rubanov returned to Ukraine two weeks ago. “He said he wanted to save the apartment and not let the Russians take what he had built,” says Julia, shaking her head. At the moment her father is with friends in Kyiv, coming to Mariupol is difficult and too dangerous. The Rubanovs received scant reports from acquaintances in the city: In some apartments there is running water again, but no heating, some shops have opened, but there is little to buy, groceries are very expensive, only vodka is cheap.
Will Mariupol ever be free again, will she ever return to her hometown? “Yes,” says Viktoria Rubanova out loud in German. It sounds less like hope than certainty.