They Just Wanted to Kill Us’: a Harrowing Account From Ukraine
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In "The Theater," the journalist James Verini recounts the bombing of a performing arts space turned refugee shelter in the middle of war-torn Mariupol.
Caroline Alexander is the author, most recently, of “Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World.” Her translation of the “Odyssey” will be published next year.
May 18, 2026
Updated 2:41 p.m. ET
In the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 24, 2022, Russian forces laid siege to Mariupol — “the city of Mary” — an important port on the southeastern coast of Ukraine. Russian artillery began pounding its eastern outskirts, while Russian bombers targeted power plants and railways. Within two weeks the city’s inhabitants had lost electricity, water and fuel, and Mariupol was transformed from what one resident described as a “blooming” city into a place of infinite menace whose people scrabbled for survival.
On the day of the invasion, the City Council disseminated a bulletin with a list of emergency shelters. Conspicuous among these was the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater, a beloved neo-Classical structure that was the hub of the city’s social life.
The spacious building’s brief role as a sanctuary for Mariupol residents fleeing shattered homes, and its subsequent destruction by a Russian bomber, are the subject of the journalist James Verini’s immersive account in “The Theater.” On assignment for The New York Times Magazine in the early days of the invasion, Verini was in Zaporizhzhia, northwest of Mariupol, when he first met survivors of the theater attack in hospitals across the city.
For him, as for many in Ukraine, the bombardment of a civilian structure — the word “CHILDREN” had been written in Russian in huge letters on the ground outside — was a landmark event in the war, evidence, as one survivor put it, that “the Russians had come to kill us. They didn’t come to fight with Ukrainian soldiers. They just wanted to kill us.”
Before the attack, over 1,000 refugees were drawn to the theater, which became a ramshackle village. Every usable feature was repurposed for some aspect of survival, from plush seats removed to serve as beds to stage props fashioned into toys for children. Out of the random assortment of people there emerged a core of stalwarts who improvised the essential elements of a functioning community from the debris.
The shelter’s only doctor, Olena Matiushyn, managed the makeshift infirmary. Igor Navka hauled buckets of water from an underground cistern, Verini writes, “from daybreak until dusk.” His wife, Nadia Navka, a metalworks technician, labored tirelessly in the “scullery” to eke out communal meals. And a team of scavengers known as The Searchers scoured the dangerous city for anything left by looters.
This panorama of fearful, resilient life is superbly conjured by Verini from interviews with the refugees. Directed by his instinct for the telling word, it is at once spare and precisely detailed. Readers should not be put off by the publisher’s subtitle, “Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War,” which is misguided on many levels; among other things, the war is ongoing.
The tenuous society that had been cobbled together with so much ingenuity and effort was shattered on March 16, 2022, when a Russian bomber dropped the equivalent of 1,200 kilograms of TNT on the theater. The evocation of this devastating event through the memories of different refugees is among the most haunting passages in the book. There was “a thunderstorm of building material,” one survivor recalls of the moment that brought the theater’s 1,500-pound chandelier crashing down. The number of fatalities is still unknown, with plausible estimates ranging from 50 to 200.
Two years after the destruction of the theater, Verini met with survivors, now scattered across Europe. One woman tells the story of her mother witnessing the 1941 arrival in Mariupol of a Nazi motorcycle corps, a scene embedded in her mother’s memory from early childhood. One wonders what memories of this invasion will persist.
THE THEATER: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War | By James Verini |Simon & Schuster | 194 pp. | $28
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