Photographer Opens Up After Capturing Wrenching Viral Photo of Fleeing Family Killed in Ukraine

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario says her threat level was only at a "six out of 10" earlier this month when, on assignment for The New York Times, she and some colleagues ventured to a crossing in Irpin, Ukraine, where they were reporting on residents attempting to flee the Russian invasion.

"I went to that bridge thinking I was just going to cover the civilian exodus," Addario tells PEOPLE in a recent video interview from Ukraine.

What she ended up photographing that day instead spread from the pages of the Times across the world: the lifeless bodies of a mother and her two kids, killed in an apparent Russian mortar attack while trying to get to safety.

Addario — who was at the Irpin bridge along with a translator, a security guard and another Times journalist — tells PEOPLE how the situation "got extremely dangerous within minutes" of their arrival.

After a mortar round landed within, she estimates, 200-300 meters of her group, they hid within a cement alcove near the road as the attacks "kept coming closer, with every round toward the evacuation route."

From there, Addario would pop her head out to take photos and assess the situation, she recalls. "Every time we heard the whistle of the mortar, we would kind of dive into it," she says.

The next whistle was the loudest yet, followed by a flash and a cloud of dust.

Feeling the spray of gravel on her neck, Addario says, she turned to a colleague to determine whether she had been hit: "I didn't know if it was shrapnel, so I asked, 'Am I bleeding?' "

She says that once they determined they were okay, the group ran across the street, where they were met with the horror of what had just happened: the bodies of four people in the street — beside the luggage they presumably packed for their escape.

"I registered that it was a family, because I saw the body of a child and I looked at his little shoes, and the puffy coat," Addario says. "And their suitcases were lying next to them. It felt almost more disgusting because they were clearly just fleeing and were just innocent victims."

Almost "instinctively," she says, she took a few frames of the scene before the group ran from the area, diving for cover twice more as mortar rounds continued to rain down.

"I thought, Even if we don't use it, this is a war crime. I watched a civilian die. I have to take these photos," she says.

Though Addario wasn't sure if it would end up being published, her photograph of the family killed at the attack near the bridge in Irpin — 43-year-old Tatiana Perebeinis, and kids Mykyta, 18, 9-year-old Alisa, plus a volunteer who was helping them to safety — did feature prominently in both the digital and print editions of the Times.

The photo also spread quickly on social media as a symbol of the war's toll.

Addario has been covering such conflicts for more than 20 years and admits that taking photos — all while "navigating the body's natural survival instincts and human emotion" — isn't always easy. She remembers the first time she was in an ambush, while on assignment with a group of marines in Iraq in 2004.

"I was so scared that I didn't even take any photographs for the first 20 minutes of that ambush," she says. "Over time, I've earned how to manage my fear and put it in a place while I focus on work. I'm not fearless at all, and in these situations I'm very scared. It's a matter of: What do I do with that and how do I put it in a place where I can keep working?"

A big part of her job, Addario explains, is compartmentalizing.

"The best journalistic work I can do is, without letting myself get too emotional, that I do when I get home [is] I sort of process what I've seen," she says.

She continues: "For me, it's always a struggle between being a human being and a mother and a daughter and a sister, and being a journalist that has to document these things. Particularly when I've watched them unfold."

"It's one thing to arrive at a scene and to not know what happened and see a family dead," she says. "It's another thing to witness it and be in that attack and feel very strongly that this was intentional."

After Addario's photo of the family in Irpin went viral, Serhiy Perebyinis saw it and realized his family had been killed.

In an interview with the Times, Serhiy — who had been in eastern Ukraine tending to his sick mom during the attack — subsequently said, "I recognized the luggage and that is how I knew."

In response to the philosophical questions the publication of the photo may have raised, Serhiy said he was in favor of it being made public: "The whole world should know what is happening here."

In the days after the attack, Addario says, she met both with Serhiy and his children's godmother for tearful conversations in which she expressed her condolences and explained her approach to recording what happened.

"For me personally, as a photographer, I had to say, 'I'm so sorry I'm the one who took that photograph and I hope you understand why,' " she says. "There was no question from [them] — it had to be documented."

While speaking to PEOPLE, Addario echoed the importance of illustrating the civilian cost of war, even when that illustration is wrenching.

"War is always horrible," she says. "Every war is horrific. It's not like one is worse than the other. I've been covering war for 20 years. And it's always tragic and it's always heartbreaking and it's always civilians who pay the highest price."

Still, Addario does wrestle with the questions that come with photographing death and destruction. "These images will live in perpetuity," she says. "That image will be there for the rest of his [Serhiy's] life in his head. And I can never take that back. But it also is being mentioned at the United Nations. And it is a documentation of what is happening in this war."

Addario remains in Ukraine. As she finished her call with PEOPLE, air raid sirens began to wail around her.

The Russian attack on Ukraine is an evolving story, with information changing quickly. Follow PEOPLE's complete coverage of the war here, including stories from citizens on the ground and ways to help.