After two months, Tetjana Trocak felt the sun on her skin and saw the sky.
She spent the previous period in the bunker of the Azovstal steel plant with several hundred other civilians who were trapped there.
One group of 100 evacuees from the steel plant managed to reach the city of Zaporozhye, which is controlled by Ukrainian forces. Tetjana was among them, with her dog Daisy. She looked around in wonder.
"To get away and be under a calm, blue sky. Look how bright and sunny it is. I think we're all going to get sunburned because we weren't getting vitamin D," she said after spending her first night outside the bunker.
"But I am very worried about the civilians and the wounded soldiers who are left there".
Of the 56 people who were in the bunker with her in total, Tejtana says she knows that only 14 of them have managed to evacuate so far.
The city authorities of Mariupol say that around 200 civilians are still in Azovstal bunkers, including 30 children.
What was life like in Azovstal?
Tetjana Trocak worked at a local power plant. She said that her family decided to take shelter in Azovstal because a shell fell near their house, blew their door open and the whole house shook.
They collected a few personal belongings, bedding and moved to the underground bunker of Azovstal. They shared food and water with other families, and slept on improvised beds made of boards. However, everything went downhill very quickly because the underground bunkers are cold and damp.
In March, the fighting and explosions seemed to be coming closer and closer to the steel plant, and a group of civilians began to lose hope that they would soon return home.
"When the heavy shelling started and it hit near our shelter, we were shaking while sitting on the beds," Tetjana said and recalled how everyone in a panic looked for some kind of light source in the bunkers because there was no electricity.
Tetjana, while talking about how her family survived in the bunker, was calm. However, she began to cry when she told how she asked a Ukrainian soldier to kill her old dog Jerry, who was blind and could not survive in the bunker.
The soldier took the dog somewhere and came back in tears, said Tetjana.
The radio was their only connection to the world and in April they heard talk of helping the captured civilians in Mariupol.
"And that gave us some strength, we felt that we would be out soon and everything would be over," said Trocak.
But when the day came for evacuation, there was no room for everyone. Tetjana Trocak's family managed to pass in the first wave because her mother has asthma.
"It was very embarrassing for us to go among the first".
A group of civilians were making their way through the ruins of the steel mill, accompanied by Ukrainian soldiers. There was so much shooting that the walk to the bus took two and a half hours instead of 15 minutes.
"Passing by the steel plant, we saw that everything was in flames and black smoke. God forbid they throw grenades at the bunkers where the civilians are," said Trocak.
Tetjana and her family are now staying in a hotel that has been converted to accommodate evacuees. However, they do not want to be there for long and are taking up space for those who will evacuate from Mariupol and reach Zaporozhye.
"It's quiet here, thank God no explosions are heard. And I hope we never hear those sounds again, maybe just fireworks or thunder," says Trocak.
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