For children in packed gym, 3 days of terror -- then war

BESLAN, Russia -- When ''the storm" finally arrived as the adults feared it would, the bullets started flying, the bombs were exploding, and most of the children were unsure what to do.

Hundreds of hostages -- hot, hungry, and scared -- had been packed into the school gymnasium for three days. They had been told they would die if soldiers tried to rescue them. And suddenly a full-scale war erupted around them -- the soldiers were coming.

Sosik Parastayev, who had just begun the fourth grade, noticed a man in uniform at the gym window, beckoning him to jump out. Sosik and his brother Atik, a year younger, scampered to the window along with their mother, Alyona Kokoyeva, who was with the boys throughout the three-day siege of School No. 1. But as she tried to clear the broken glass from the window so the boys could leap out, Sosik said, a bullet sliced through the air and ripped into her body.

''I was nearly shot," too, Sosik said. ''I jumped out the window. . . . Some soldiers grabbed me as soon as I jumped out."

His mother survived, but he lost contact with his younger brother.

The army commando attack on the captured school in this town in southern Russia dragged on for hours after the assault. But for the vast majority of the children held prisoner by suspected Chechen guerrillas, ''the storm," as the survivors described the military onslaught, lasted just a few chaotic and decisive minutes.

Those who got out of the gym right away were survivors. Most of the rest are dead.

Explosives which the guerrillas had wired around the gym blew up in a devastating cascade shortly after the first shots were fired, bringing the ceiling down from two floors above on top of hundreds of schoolchildren who never had a chance.

Hours later, the demolished gym smoldered, its shattered frame blackened and crumbled. By nightfall, most of the crushed bodies of students remained pinned under the rubble, while soldiers searched for lingering guerrillas and detonated the remaining of the booby-trap bombs.

For those who survived, there was charred skin, mangled flesh, broken bones, and memories that don't fade away fast for young children. The words they spoke in the hours afterward seemed disconnected from their innocent faces, as they summoned forth images of chaos.

''When they were storming, there was a lot of shooting," said Aslan Isayev, dirty and scratched and seemingly hardened to the violence although he is 9. ''Our soldiers came in and killed at least one of them, and maybe more," he said, referring to the guerrillas.

''I saw the bullets flying right at us from the second floor and the first floor," said Arkady Zangiyev, also 9. ''I fell on the ground. They were shooting. Then I started running. One guy from our class had a problem with his foot, and I helped him run. I managed to run to the back exit and there was one of our policemen there. He grabbed a wounded boy and carried him. They were shooting a lot, but I ran very fast."

Conditions in the gym had been grim. On the first day, the children were allowed to drink tap water, some were given chocolate candy bars from the school supply. But the guerrillas refused government offers to bring in food, and the candy was gone by the second day and on the third day, water was also running short.

Most children had stripped off as much clothing as they could, often down to underwear for the boys, as they tried to survive the stultifying heat. Arkady was so drained by the heat that he was falling asleep yesterday afternoon.

''Then all of a sudden, the big bomb blew up," he said, and the commando raid began.