IN SCHOOL’S RUINS, A TOWN CONFRONTS THE UNTHINKABLE
By C. J. CHIVERS

September 5, 2004 (BBC) - Shafts of light passed through bullet holes in the pupils' desks, which were stacked together at windows, makeshift barricades against attack. Ghastly sights waited behind them, but almost no one could stay away.

Middle School No. 1 was opened Sunday to the people of Beslan, who found themselves drawn toward it by an almost gravitational pull.

After the authorities and the Russian Army slipped away in the darkness on Saturday night, the school had stood looming and empty, a large and foreboding shell in which hundreds of hostages had died. As word spread that its security cordon had vanished, it seemed as if the entire population of the town appeared to wander its corridors.

The Russian authorities announced Sunday that the death count from the hostage siege had reached 338, and many of the wounded remained in critical condition. They also noted that the minister of the interior of North Ossetia, the republic where Beslan is, had submitted a letter of resignation, but that it had been refused.
Such news held little attention. The people of Beslan were drawn irresistibly forward, into the hellish place, to see for themselves. For this small and impoverished republic, Middle School No. 1 was ground zero.
Its sights were unsparingly grim. The explosions of the two bombs in the midst of the children, and the final battle that had rolled through the hallways and classroom on Friday afternoon, had left trails of destruction and carnage, which combined to form a gruesome display.

The roof of the gymnasium was gone, and the wooden floor of the basketball court was covered with its wreckage: a thick coat of black ash. Women's and children's shoes were in places still arranged in lines along the floor.
The bathroom, to one side, showed where the wounded had staggered, leaving bloody handprints on tiles.
Even the architecture itself suggested that some of the smallest children had met horrible ends. There was only one door in the gymnasium leading outside. After the first bomb detonated, many students had survived by pulling themselves out eight large windows whose glass had been blown away - a providential effect that offered lanes of escape.

The windows were high, at chest level for an adult, beyond the reach of the very young. People stood in the roofless room on Sunday, beside growing stacks of flowers, with eyes red and raw. Inside the schoolhouse, with its cracked water pipes and crumbling ceilings, ferocity's marks appeared at most every turn. Uncountable thousands of bullet holes and shrapnel-marks scarred the walls. Blood-soaked bandages littered the floor.

The flesh and hair and bits of bone of suicide bombers were splattered along the ceilings and walls of a classroom on the first floor. The remains of another suicide bomber coated the corridor near the cafeteria. Many townspeople picked their way through the stinking mess with their shirts pulled over their noses.
Incongruity was the norm. New badminton rackets were bundled together among the dust and debris, as were an assortment of brightly colored jump ropes.

In the second-story assembly hall, in a corner of the building where the militants had held out almost into Friday night, the floor was ruined by seven shrapnel-pocked craters that marked the explosions of grenades, presumably thrown into the hall as Russian soldiers cleared the last pockets of resistance, room by room.

On the auditorium's stage, a large cut-out display read "Happy Holiday."

On the wall of a classroom opposite a suicide bomber's grisly remains, there were signs for arithmetic class.

"4+2 = 6," read one. "6-2 = 4."

A strip of the bomber's scalp was curled on a nearby desk.

In one hallway, a man stopped and scraped his shoe along a broken board. He had stepped in something sticky by the door. "Brains," he said.

No matter how repugnant a place Middle School No. 1 had become, the people could not turn away. They wandered by the hundreds, leading each other from place to place.

Some sifted through the rubble and pulled out hints of the terrorists' preparations: abandoned gas masks, compasses, bags of dried soups and first aid gear. They clustered over two large holes where someone had pulled up the library's wooden floor, spaces in which the authorities said they believed that ammunition and equipment had been cached in advance of the attack.

Residents also spoke of the roles that had been forced upon them, survivors and rescuers walking among the widowers and parents who had lost daughters and sons.

One boy, Murat Kulayev, 13, had used a teapot to douse the last fire, the smoldering and charred floor of a classroom at the end of the corridor on the second floor. He had been one of the fortunate few to escape the terrorists' initial attack.

He retraced his route, narrating. As the masked men herded the student body and staff through a door, he said, leading them toward their eventual confinement on the basketball court, he and a friend spotted a chance for escape.

Passing by a stairway just inside the entrance, they broke left and bounded upstairs, chased by two men with beards that hung beneath their masks.

Lithe and young, the youths outdistanced their pursuers, who were laden with ammunition and with rifles slung across their backs. The chase passed madly down the empty hallway, with each glimpse back by the boys providing the sight of two terrorists not far behind.

At last Murat and his friend reached the school's opposite side, where they broke a window on the stairwell, climbed outside and reached the ground by swiftly shinnying down a pipe. "Then we ran away," he said.

By that time, their classmates were being massed in the gym, where many would die. At least 191 people are still missing from among them, according to a list the families compiled, and their absence drove people here to hysteria.

One woman in a blue-print dress and head scarf wandered the first-floor hallways, wailing, screaming, searching the place on her own. The townspeople who watched her pass, weeping as well, said she was looking for a son who had not come home.

She entered the nearly empty cafeteria and passed through it, and proceeded even to the kitchen and pantries, to the last unlit and darkened corner, screaming and sobbing, pulling herself up over the rubble to look for him behind a refrigerator that had been knocked on its side. She found nothing, and wandered out, filling the room with piercing, incomprehensible cries.

Upstairs, Oleg Kasumov picked through the ruins of a second-floor classroom. He lifted a drying bouquet of red roses, brought for the first day of school, and tossed them aside. "They never were used as they were intended," he said.

Mr. Kasumov was gathering books scattered along the floor and stacking them onto a stretcher to carry them away. It was the office of his sister, Yelena Ganiyeva, the school's chief of staff.
His sister had survived, but was hospitalized. He said she was a book collector and would want her collection back. The task seemed to sustain Mr. Kasumov, who worked steadily at stacking the books neatly, distracting him from the fact that his daughter, Inna, had not yet been found.

Down the hall, Teimuraz Kanukov stood in a foul-smelling classroom with his three teenage daughters and two younger sons. A windowsill was streaked by large dried pools of blood, the platform from which residents said the terrorists had shoved out dead hostages.

The window overlooked a lawn. Mr. Kanukov had rushed the wounded and dead from the school's grounds during the battle, risking his life along the edges of the lawn to carry them to waiting cars. He pointed out the wall outside where he had taken cover, just under the school's windows, and described a scene of human nature turned upside down: a woman shooting a man who was trying to save his children.

"So many bullets were flying that you could not even put your nose past here," he said, but one father could not control himself and ran across the grass to try to reach the school. He made it about 100 feet, was struck and fell down.

Then, as they watched him writhing and exposed, one of the women among the terrorists appeared above him.
"She was shooting from the window, finishing him," Mr. Kanukov said. "We saw how the bullets hit his body."
On a table down the hallway the twisted fins of a rocket-propelled grenade stood on a table beside a stack of books.

On top was one of the novels by Nikolai Gogol, from the 19th century, Russia's golden age of prose. The title, facing upward, was "Dead Souls."

Source: NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/international/europe/06russia.html?pagewanted=print&position=)