Viktoria Ktsoyeva holds the photo of her hand with a cross at a Moscow hospital on Thursday. Photo: AP Posted on 09/19/2004 10:01:00 AM PDT by Destro
Girl clutching cross in photo tells about talisman
September 17, 2004 - 5:33PM
Viktoria Ktsoyeva holds the photo of her hand with a cross at a Moscow hospital on Thursday. Photo: AP
It was an iconic image of hope amid the death and chaos that ended the three-day Beslan school siege - a girl's bloodied hand clutching a golden cross.
The girl pictured in The Associated Press photo that ran on newspaper front pages around the world is now recovering in a Moscow hospital, a piece of shrapnel still embedded in the centre of her brain.
Viktoria Ktsoyeva, 14, says she prayed every day while gripping the cross during the hostage-taking ordeal, not letting go even as she plunged into unconsciousness after being injured in the violent climax.
"I prayed that I would stay alive and that everything would be good again," she said in her room at Children's City Clinical Hospital No 9, sitting on her bed, barrettes holding back her long, black hair.
When the masked gunmen arrived September 1 at her school, Viktoria said she couldn't believe what she was seeing. "I never thought in my life I could be caught up in a terrorist attack."
After they were herded inside with the other more than 1,200 hostages, she and her nine-year-old brother, Artur, found each other.
He had been in the bathroom outside the school and probably could have run away when the siege started, but Viktoria's mother, Tatyana, said he decided to stay with his sister.
Fearing the chain holding the cross around her neck might break, Viktoria took it off and wrapped it around her left hand when the siege started.
A gift from her Orthodox parents too long ago to remember, replacing an earlier cross from her baptism that was somehow lost, Viktoria said she wasn't very religious. But nevertheless she always wore the cross - even when she was asleep.
During the siege, the tiny cross became her talisman of hope. "All three days I held it in my hand and prayed," Viktoria said.
Tatyana was praying too, keeping vigil with other parents near the school. Other relatives went to church services daily and lighted votive candles.
"Every day we had hope that our children would come home," Tatyana said. "We knew if it went on longer, we'd only be able to carry our dead children out of there."
Viktoria and her brother were first inside the main gym that was packed with explosives, and she said she was certain she would die if they went off.
But they later moved to an adjacent room, and when she heard the first explosion September 3 when the standoff spiralled to its violent end, the bomb planted near her didn't go off.
She said the school's physical education teacher quickly disconnected the wires to the device and threw it out the window.
As gunfire erupted, adults in the room told everyone to scream "Don't shoot!" to the forces outside. "Maybe they didn't understand or didn't know who was shooting, but they still all were firing - both our (troops) and also the terrorists," Viktoria said.
Viktoria ran. She remembers the horror of escaping through the gym again, where bodies littered the floor - some without arms or legs - faces of friends, parents and teachers she once knew.
At one point, Viktoria was hit in the head without realising what happened. As she lay injured, Artur was there pleading with her: "Don't die. Don't die. Open your eyes. Don't die," even holding his sister's eyes open with his hands.
Soldiers later passed her out a window to safety, the cross steady in her hand. Her picture was taken soon after at a nearby triage tent, a bandage around her head and her blouse stained with blood.
Viktoria said she was fading in and out of consciousness. She clung to hope, and to her cross.
"I felt that if I had that cross in my hand and if it was still there, then everything would be fine," she said.
The only sign of her injury are three small stitches on the right side of her forehead. But X-rays show a centimetre-sized piece of shrapnel that travelled into her skull and stopped practically in the center of her brain.
Dr Maxim Vladimirov, her neurosurgeon, said the shrapnel could have hit a major artery or affected Viktoria's ability to control her movement if it had gone just 1 millimetre further in any direction. "She's very lucky," Vladimirov said.
For now, doctors are planning to leave the shrapnel inside her skull and will only operate if any future complications develop.
After days of being confined to bed on doctor's orders, Victoria took her first cautious steps again on Wednesday. She's expected to be hospitalised for about a month, and then to travel with her family to a sanatorium for further recuperation.
The cross is now back in her family's apartment in Beslan, still stained with blood.
She didn't have time to remember it when she was taken September 5 to Moscow for treatment, but her father, Sergei, and brother will bring it when they arrive later. She now wears a brown cross given her by a priest who visited the hospital. A couple small icons rest on her windowsill in front of a small menagerie of stuffed animals.
Viktoria said she once wanted to be an economist when she grew up, but after surviving the siege, she's decided she wants to become a paediatrician.
And there's another change she's also making for the future: Viktoria plans to be in church every Sunday, her cross back over her heart where it belongs.
AP
I cried! This is so sad. God bless her and watch over her. Lord Have Mercy!
ping to 33.
The evil one is very active currently. God Bless you!!
Ping..........
BTTT
Well said!
I was hoping it was the translation thing.
> They mocked God, now they are reaping from the seeds which they sowed.
These kids and their families mocked God? Hmm.
Also this one.
ping
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