The voices of innocence lost

IN the middle of “Children of Beslan,” an emotionally powerful HBO documentary about the 2004 terrorist attack on a Russian school, one of the young hostages tells of her fantasy during the 57-hour ordeal.

“I was hoping that Harry Potter would come,” she says. “I was thinking he had a cloak that made him invisible, and he would come and wrap me in it, and we’d be invisible and we’d escape.”

Russian soldiers did come, but in the battle with Chechen extremists holding more than 1,100 children and adults in the gymnasium of Middle School No. 1, some 200 adults and 171 children died. Many were burned to death and others were caught in the crossfire.

Los Angeles Times reporter Kim Murphy pointed out last week that agonizing questions about the soldiers’ heavy-handed tactics remain unanswered, with evidence suggesting that the death toll was the result of a horrendously botched assault by the soldiers, and their use of flamethrowers.

The parents of Beslan, a community 1,000 miles from Moscow, are so angry at their government, and an apparent official coverup, that they asked President Vladimir V. Putin not to attend a ceremony this week on the first anniversary of the attack.

“Children of Beslan,” made by BBC documentarians Ewa Ewart and Leslie Woodhead, is not concerned with assessing blame or exploring the political repercussions of what is Russia’s worst act of terrorism. Instead, “Children” presents the ordeal through interviews with some of the children who were hostages. There is no narrator and no adults are heard.

The interviews with the children are doubly heart-rending because the children speak in clear, precise, almost matter-of-fact tones about the horror they experienced: blood on the gym floor, body parts, bodies burning, chaos and fear.

A boy walks through the rubble-strewn school building and, like a tour guide pointing out an historic spot, shows where the terrorists shot his father. Almost casually he points to the window where they tossed out his father’s lifeless body.

A girl tells of hostages drinking urine to survive and getting into fights over sharing the urine. A female terrorist got into an argument with a male terrorist and the latter flipped a switch and the bombs attached to the woman’s body exploded, a boy says.

On day three, as the soldiers attempted a rescue, the bombs that the terrorists had strung through the school began exploding. “He blew up and his brains hit me in the face,” a boy says of one of the terrorists.

As any journalist can tell you, stories built around interviews with children can become cloying and precious. But “Children” is too good for that, and adroit editing splices the children’s interviews with news footage of the takeover and rescue, snippets of the video taken by the terrorists, and home videos taken by parents before the terrorists rushed the school and turned the annual Day of Knowledge into tragedy.

“It was all horrible, like the end of the world,” says one girl.

As Murphy reported, the parents of Beslan want answers. “Children” suggests many of the young survivors want to forget. “Everyone’s afraid now,” says one girl.

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‘Children of Beslan’

Where: HBO

When: 8 to 9 tonight

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

Directors/producers: Ewa Ewart and Leslie Woodhead. Executive producers, BBC: Alan Hayling and Fiona Stourton. Executive producer, HBO: Sheila Nevins.