Usmanova, 37, spoke Sunday after being evacuated from the factory, an extensive complex set up by Joseph Stalin and designed with an underground network of warehouses and tunnels to withstand the attack. “I was afraid the shelter would not stand it – I was terrified,” Usmanova said, describing the time when the shelter was underground. “When the shelter started to shake, I was hysterical, my husband can guarantee it. “I was so worried that the shelter would recede.” He remembered the lack of oxygen in the shelters and the fear that had taken over the lives of the people hunting down there. “We have not seen the sun for so long,” he said, speaking in the village of Bezimen in an area of ​​Donetsk controlled by Russian-backed separatists, about 30 kilometers east of Mariupol. Natalia Usmanova with other evacuees near a temporary shelter in the village of Bezimenne in Donetsk. Photo: Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters Usmanova was among dozens of civilians evacuated from the factory in Mariupol, a southern port city that has been besieged by Russian forces for weeks and left in a state of disarray. She said she joked with her husband on the bus ride, in an escort agreed by the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross, that they should no longer go to the toilet with a torch. “You can not imagine what we went through – the terror,” Usmanova said. “I lived there, I worked there all my life, but what we saw there was just awful.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said about 100 civilians, mostly women and children, were expected to arrive in the factory-controlled Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday. “For the first time in all the days of the war, this vital (humanitarian) corridor has started to work,” he told the Telegram. He said he hoped the evacuations would continue on Monday. People who have left the Russian-occupied territories in the past have described their vehicles as being shot at, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of bombing evacuation routes agreed upon by both sides. Up to 100,000 people may still be in the besieged Mariupol, including up to 1,000 civilians who were chased by about 2,000 Ukrainian fighters under the Soviet-era steel plant – the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians. Mariupol was a key target for Vladimir Putin because of its strategic location near the Crimean peninsula, which Russia occupied from Ukraine in 2014. Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report