Finding Solidarity in Sadness

Paul Quinn-Judge, TIME'S Moscow bureau chief, has been covering the tragedies and atrocities of the Caucasus since 1996 — immersing himself in the relentless pain of the place but never letting it cloud his vision. He has been to Chechnya and its neighboring republics nine times. He was in Grozny in 2000 just after the Russian army flattened it; he's been to the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, a onetime haven for Chechen separatists and al-Qaeda operatives; and back in Moscow, he was at the Dubrovka Theater in October of 2002, where 170 people died after Chechen terrorists seized the building and took 800 hostages. So when he rushed to Beslan in North Ossetia last week — catching a flight and driving through the night to cover the school siege — he knew what to expect. "When you're faced with a tragedy of this magnitude, the feeling is devastation," Paul says. "Watching stretcher upon stretcher of kids coming out, dirty, half-naked, sometimes probably dead. It leaves you with a sense of deep emptiness."

Paul's report on the tragedy is vivid, poignant and shocking. His interview with Elena Kasumova, a teacher at Beslan's School No. 1 who survived the siege, is especially compelling. "Talking to someone who has gone through the most hellish experience, and can calmly, lucidly, dispassionately describe what happened is humbling," he says. "She saw the guerrillas do horrible things, yet remembers that one was a pleasant, nice-looking guy."

Most of all, Paul says, it's the heroism of ordinary people — especially the civilians who rushed to save children as the bullets flew — that sticks in the mind. "There's this fantastic solidarity that comes up in a community that has suffered such a crisis," he says. "I stayed with a family that had two children in the school. They didn't want to talk about it. They were worried, but stoic. Yet they spent their time worrying if I was getting enough to eat." Both children were wounded, but unlike so many others in Beslan last week, they survived.