More than 100 civilians - including elderly women and mothers with children have been evacuated from a bombed out steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine. This, after experiencing weeks of terror with bombardment and depravation. 

"Save Garrison Mariupol, provide us the procedure of extraction. Today it is not 1940, it is 2022. People here will simply die, injured will die," said Serhiy Volynskyy, Ukrainian army officer, on April 27th in a release on Facebook.

That was an appeal last week, an effort to get the civilians out of the Mariupol steel plant. The appeal and others like it must have been heard. This video shows the weekend evacuation overseen by the United Nations and the Red Cross during a brief cease-fire around the steelworks; about 1,000 civilians were believed to be in the plant, along with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian defenders. Russia has demanded that the fighters surrender; they have refused.

For weeks, stories of those being holed up inside the plant were made public. There was even this video released last month from Ukraine's National Guard, which is also holed up in the plant. The group said it showed women and children sheltering underground.

"Take us from here, we want to see peaceful skies. We want to breathe in fresh air. You have simply no idea what it means for us to simply eat, drink some sweetened tea. For us it is already happiness," an unnamed Mariupol resident said in the video.

The White House  did not reveal much about what it knew or knows about the civilians released.

“Of course, it’s positive that 100 civilians were able to depart. There’s clearly more work that needs to be done. We continue to call for it, to press for it. But beyond that, I don’t have any behind the scenes details to outline for you," Jen Psaki, White House spokesperson announced.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his gratitude with this Twitter statement, “We’ll meet them (the evacuees) in Zaporizhzhia. Grateful to our team! Now they, together with #UN, are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant.”

Some question has been raised about where the civilians will end up and when. At least some of the civilians were apparently taken to a village controlled by Russia-backed separatists. The Russian military said that some chose to stay in separatist areas, while dozens left for Ukrainian-held territory.