Svetlana is a smile frozen in a photograph, drawings stuck on the wall, a dress hanging in a closet, a stuffed animal hanging on a shelf. “Every morning I pray for her, my daughter. Every day I talk to him. At first there was anger, despair. Only this pain remains deep inside me. We must survive.”Marina Pak, 59, confesses on the eve of the commemorative ceremonies in Beslan, this small town in North Ossetia, in the Russian Caucasus, traumatized by the taking of hostages in her school between 1Ahem and on September 3, 2004. Among the 334 civilian deaths, 186 children were among the victims, including Svetlana, their only daughter aged 13. Twenty years later, the worst massacre that occurred during the hostage-taking in Russia continues to haunt people’s minds.
It was back to school. A professional meeting had prevented Marina Pak from attending. Since then, regrets have been consuming her. But, dynamic and determined, this single mother clings to life. She first married a father who had lost his wife and child in the tragedy. Then, alone again, she adopted German. a bit orphan Become a great teenager.
“I worry about him all the time. Svetlana, I know she is safe in heaven. God is watching over her. I am just waiting for the day when I will meet her again up there.”whispers Marina, in the solitude and silence of her kitchen in her home in Beslan. She divides her time between hosting 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, found at the end of August on a hot afternoon immersed in the same heat wave that had suffocated the children deprived of water by the terrorists during the three days of their detention.
“We must know the truth”
Twenty years on, the militant mothers of Beslan remain even more alone and lost in their grief, doubting that they will ever know the truth about the hostage-taking. Around thirty Chechen men and women, hooded and wearing explosive belts, held 1,300 children and adults hostage. After killing around twenty adults, they herded the hostages into the gymnasium, mined the other buildings and threatened to blow up the school. Without water, the children were forced to drink their own urine. On the third day, at 1 p.m., an explosion that has yet to be resolved sparked panic and, amid the flames, an armed intervention. The children found themselves caught in the crossfire between the kidnappers and the attack by Russian security forces.
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