In Memory
Beslan, a small town in North Ossetia, became known as Russia's 9-11 after a group of armed terrorists, demanding an end to the Second Chechen War, took more than 1,100 people, including some 777 children, hostage on September 1, 2004, at School Number One.
On September 1, 2004, I urged my nervous children, seven-year old twins and a nine-year-old, into school. We had just arrived in Moscow and it was a magnificent, summer day, nothing to suggest autumn except for the Russian children walking purposefully to school. The girls wore their hair in traditional pigtails with puffy white bows and white socks with lace trim. Both boys and girls carried glorious bouquets of flowers for their teachers.
We didn't have any flowers with us that day. As newspaper journalists, my husband and I were lucky enough to begin a new adventure in one of the most epic countries in the world, Russia. Compared to other European cities this could be a steep learning curve, I thought that morning, as I returned to our Soviet-style apartment across from the Hotel Ukraine. I dumped my bag, sat at the computer and turned on the TV: there was some kind of school crisis going on — mothers with small headscarves were crying outside a schoolyard, men ran around haphazardly - I could feel the fear. There were clearly children taken as hostages.
Where were they? What was Beslan? I knew something of the hardscrabble life and conflicts in the Caucuses, but North Ossetia was new to me. Soon the children in the gymnasium rigged with explosives, sweltering in the heat and stung by urine, was the only world that mattered.
It will be five years ago next week since School No. 1 in Beslan was stormed by terrorists and one thousand students, parents and teachers were taken hostage. All of Russia, and much of the world, stopped, horrified, holding vigil for the next two and a half days. It would all end badly, the attempt to rescue the hostages chaotic and botched. By September 4, 331 people were dead, almost 200 of them children. Hundreds more were seriously injured.
On the first day, strangers cried together. After a few hours I returned to the school and watched the building for three hours until my children walked safely out of the gates and I held them tightly as my husband packed for Beslan. I bonded with my host country in some primitive way, and quickly. We all sensed it was not going to end well.
My husband had covered many conflicts, but he returned from Beslan a little bit different. So did our Russian colleagues. Walking through a makeshift morgue of children does not leave you, mothers wailing near and far.
When the siege ended in such catastrophe, the world wept with Russia. Beslan became known as “Russia’s 9/11.” Many prayed for those who died, more prayed for those who climbed out of windows, with singed skin and broken hearts, to a much more complicated and tragic life. I put the television in the closet and looked at my own children in wonder. I walked into my sons’ bedroom and tried to talk about Beslan, but found myself mostly mute.
As shards of the story hit my children’s school, I tried to frame the narrative in some way: “Many of the children got out. Their families are getting help. This absolutely should not, I pray, happen to you….”
Every single living person in the city of Moscow was clinically depressed in the fall of 2004. Anxiety was diffuse, but typical aggressions of every day living were absent. For a short time, the Bentleys stopped at the crosswalks and young teens walked the pensioners across the street. There was a strange and quiet empathy in the air.
I recall a crisp, cold New Year’s Eve, 2005: the sadness had lifted in Russia, as quickly and collectively as a crowd taking off their coats. Yet this was eerily quick. I lived in Russia for the next three anniversaries of Beslan. Of course time naturally moves away from grief. But my Russian and expat friends agreed — there was no sense to be made and a heavy effort to this forgetting.
The Beslan children who were seven and nine then are now teenagers like my own children. At this age, they would be full of adolescent turbulence even without their personal histories. When it comes to Beslan, my sense is that Russia — aside from the few activists who will not forget - wants to keep the awful pain away. I understand moving away from the pain. But it makes me wonder about the survivors. The pain is inside them. They have nowhere to go.
Nora FitzGerald, an editor and writer, lived in Moscow from 2004 to 2008.
