Katarina stepped off the bus into the sun with everything she now owns stuffed in a small backpack. Her two children, aged six and 11, rubbed their eyes. They are exhausted.

For two months they’ve lived in a bunker under the Azovstal steel plant as Russian bombs pounded the site and their city of Mariupol.

“How we were living – to be honest it was horrible,” she says. “From the morning and during the night we were bombarded. Artillery, rockets, air strikes.”

“Our children couldn’t sleep. They were crying. They were scared. And us as well. There were several times when we were losing hope that we would ever get out.”

They lived in the dark on rations handed to them by a group of Ukrainian fighters using the steel plant to make a last stand as most Mariupol was reduced to smouldering ruins.

At the weekend the family got their first glimpse of daylight in more than 60 days. A complex rescue effort managed to free about 100 people from the site including Inna Babush who was sheltering with her 17-year-old daughter.

“We lived in hope that every day would be the last day in this hell,” she says. “That we would go home to a peaceful Mariupol, but now it is non-existent.”