'I was praying we would die quickly', Mariupol survivor says
When Lia and Alex woke up in Mariupol to the loud booms of explosions and shrieks of car alarms on 24 February, the young Ukrainian couple did not expect they would soon have to bury their loved ones in their own garden and fend off cold and starvation as Russian troops pounded the southern port city into dust.
Yet, they managed to survive and leave a city that now lies in ruins, narrowly escaping death in Russian bombardments, and avoiding being captured by Moscow's soldiers as they hunted for any Mariupol defenders.
The pair are now sitting at the newly-formed Lemkin Centre for Investigating Russian War Crimes' office in Berlin, telling their story in vivid detail as part of a programme collecting witness testimonies about war crimes to help tribunals, journalists, and future historians build a case against those responsible.
The Lemkin Centre's fieldworkers have been visiting shelters across Poland and in Berlin, interviewing survivors and recording exactly what happened to them.
They're passing out forms and inviting eyewitnesses to recount their traumas -- the kind of gruelling and emotionally-challenging work in documenting war crimes that often goes unnoticed.
The centre, founded by Poland's Pilecki Institute in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and named after the Polish lawyer who coined the term genocide, has so far gathered researchers specialising in totalitarian crimes and experts in international humanitarian law of armed conflicts.
It also relies on a network of Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking volunteers, who, after going through training by the centre's experts, have made it their mission to listen to and record anyone willing to talk about what they witnessed and endured over the past months.
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