Svetlana is a smile frozen in a photograph, drawings fixed to the wall, a dress hanging in a wardrobe, a stuffed animal perched on a shelf. “Every morning I pray for her, my daughter. Every day I talk to her. At first, there was anger, despair. Only this pain remains deep inside me. We have to survive.”confides Marina Pak, 59, on the eve of the memorial ceremonies in Beslan, this small town in North Ossetia, in the Russian Caucasus, traumatized by the hostage-taking at her school between 1is and September 3, 2004. Among the 334 civilian deaths, 186 were children, including Svetlana, his only daughter, aged 13. Twenty years later, the worst carnage to occur during a hostage-taking in Russia continues to haunt people’s minds.
It was the start of the school year. A professional appointment had prevented Marina Pak from attending. Since then, regrets have been eating away at her. But, dynamic and determined, this single mother clings to life. She first got married, to a father who had lost his wife and child in the tragedy. Then, alone again, she adopted German, a little one orphan became a big teenager.
“I worry about him all the time. Svetlana, I know she’s safe in heaven. God takes care of her. I’m just waiting for the day when, up there, I’ll find her again.”Marina breathes, in the solitude and silence of the kitchen of her house in Beslan. She divides her time between hosting in a monastery in the surrounding mountains and maintaining the cemetery in Beslan. “I would like these places to always be full of flowers and colors”Marina murmurs again, met at the end of August on a hot afternoon plunged into the same heatwave that had suffocated the children deprived of water by the terrorists during the three days of detention.
“We must know the truth”
Twenty years later, the combative mothers of Beslan remain all the more alone and lost in their pain because they doubt they will ever know the truth about the hostage-taking. About thirty Chechen men and women, hooded and belted with explosives, held 1,300 children and adults. After killing about twenty adults, they gathered the hostages in the gymnasium, mined the other buildings and threatened to blow up the school. Without water, the children were reduced to drinking their own urine. On the third day, at 1 p.m., an explosion that has not yet been explained caused panic and, in the midst of the flames, an armed intervention. The children found themselves in the crossfire of the hostage-takers and the assault by the Russian security forces.
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