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Emergencies Ministry employee tells his story
Written by Михаил Поляков   
Вторник, 29 Октябрь 2002
In the newspaper ‘Trud’
 
Rescue Service member Alyosha: WE HAD TO TEAR PEOPLE FROM THEIR SEATS
 
Immediately after the terrorists were eliminated, rescuers from the Emergency Situations Ministry entered the theatrical center in order to evacuate the hostages. Here is the testimony of one of them, Alyosha.
 
I was struck by the abundance of blood in the premises. Here and there lay the bodies of militants. The auditorium where the hostages were located reeked: the bandits had made the people use the orchestra pit as a toilet, and the stench was coming from there. There was silence — other than the voices of the commandos there was not a sound. The hostages were in some kind of a strange daze, apparently under the influence of the gas. They just were sitting in their seats with their arms around each other.
 
Not everyone lost consciousness, however. Some people, though awake, were clearly behaving erratically. A woman took out some papers, tore them up and threw the pieces overhead, and then burst into tears. One child suddenly woke up and began shouting: “To ‘Nord-Ost’ to live, I won’t go to ‘Chicago’.” He repeated this phrase several times and then lost consciousness again.
 
We moved around the auditorium with extreme caution. Everything was booby-trapped, so we had to check our movements literally millimeter by millimeter. Before you could take someone out of the hall, you had to survey the space around him to see that he was not mined or there were any explosives near him. If a person did not respond either to voice or a check of his reflexes, that meant he was either dead or in very serious condition. The hardest thing was with people whom the gas caused to have muscle contractions — they were the hardest to evacuate. They clung tenaciously to the seat handles, and we had to literally tear them out of their seats The anabolics we commonly use in such cases had no effect on them.
 
In general, I would divide the people inside the building into three groups. Some, mostly the men, came to on their own soon after they were carried outside into the fresh air. Some even got out on their own after they were injected. The second group was the women and weaker men. They came to only after additional drugs were used, and not right away. The largest mortality rate was among the weakest groups — the children and people with a weak mentality, on whom stress had the strongest influence. These either died in the hall under the influence of the gas, or did not survive the trip to the hospital.
I cannot speak for my bosses — evaluating the operation is none of my business. I can only answer for my comrades and myself: we did what we could and it is not our fault that we could not save everyone. I do not know how it went with the destruction of the bandits, but the release of the hostages was very consistent. Everyone helped us take people out of the building, including the commandos who by that time were basically done with their work.
 
 
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