Behrudin Delic, a Bosnian who lived in Ukraine since 1991, was forced to come back to his home country after he witnessed the war first-hand from his home in Mariupol.

“Dear God, when that hit. The entire apartment goes dark. I thought it caught fire,” Delic said.

However, it was not their building that was hit but the one across from it. The shell destroyed five floors of the building, he said.

“All the dust flew in, all our windows were smashed,” Delic remembered.

Behrudin and his wife and daughter spent the next 38 days in the basement, sleeping on chairs, with barely enough resources to survive.

“And then I found a net, a construction net, arranged the chairs and put the net on top, broke down the closet door, laid it down, my wife went and brought a quilt and a sheet. But it made no difference, it was too hard,” he said.

“My bones still hurt today,” Delic added.

Throughout this time, Delic’s family members in the Bosnian city of Zenica had no idea whether he is even alive. His brother, Sabahudin, tried to contact him daily.

“When they would show photos of corpses, I would look to see if I would recognise his hair, his eyes,” Sabahudin said.

“I thought they were all killed,” he added.

Behrudin said that the family would occasionally have opportunities to leave the basement, but sacrificed their lives every time they would do so. They would find ways to get water and cooked outdoors.

The city became unrecognisable, he said, explaining that all that was left was rubble and dead bodies.

“That city is 100 percent finished and there was no life there,” he said.

Behrudin said that Russian soldiers helped his family and took them to a bus station. They were taken to Russia. There, Bahrudin contacted the BiH Embassy in Moscow. He wanted to be transported to Sarajevo with his daughter, but the institutions did not help.

Finally, his niece in BiH sent the tickets by mail.

The family lost everything in Mariupol. Behrudin only had a few things with him when he arrived in Zenica.

Behrudin’s daughter meanwhile went to Germany where she plans to find work as a medical professional.

His wife remained in Russia.