One year on, the school building remains shattered, but the people of Beslan are putting their lives back together, they tell Chris Stephen.
Oxana Archegova is dreading next Wednesday, the day when children across Russia start their first day of school. For the rest of the country, this is a day of celebration, a chance for parents to wave their children off. But Oxana is from Beslan, and for her this day will bring back grim memories.
After enduring a three-day siege, explosives rigged by terrorists inside the school gym exploded, and in the resulting inferno 330 died, including 186 children. Now the thought of a new school year fills her with terror.
"Everybody is scared about the first day at school," she tells me. "I don't want my daughter to go there for the first month." For her son Alibik, then 11, his first day at his Beslan High School last year was cause for celebration. So the whole family went along to celebrate - Oxana, who was five months pregnant, husband Aslan (37), and their seven-year-old daughter Linda.
The terrorists struck as the children were lining up to go inside the school.
This year, a huge police and army deployment has begun in Beslan and across its province of North Ossetia to try and reassure parents.
The school remains a ruin, its smashed, burned-out rooms now worn down by wind and rain, and two new high schools have been built nearby. With lavish gifts from Russia and the outside world, these schools come with adventure playgrounds and brightly painted walls, but the sadness remains.
"In Ossetia, the first day at school is a big party. But now for all life the first day at school will be mourning," Oxana says.
When terrorists took control of the school, Oxana and her family were herded into the school gym. Her husband was forced to help move a metal box into the hall. To Oxana's horror, she saw terrorists use it to clamber up to the baseball hoops to place wires on which were hung mines. "Our men were so strong, so fast, but they had no guns," she said.
Her husband was taken away with the rest of the men, and for three days Oxana and her children endured fierce heat and no food or water. Some children passed out. Others drank their own urine.
On the third day, the terrorists allowed the smallest of the children to use the adjoining toilet. Oxana was with her daughter in the queue when, without warning, a huge explosion tore through the hall.
"A terrorist was standing on this box, which was made so that if he moved his foot it would explode." The blast, quickly followed by a second, threw her down and when she recovered consciousness, seconds later, she saw her skin was burning. "I looked at my hands and they were on fire. I thought I would die." Oxana quickly rolled over and put the flames out.
Panic reigned in the gym, which echoed to machine-gun fire. People were rushing over each other to get out through broken windows, the roof was ablaze and the gym was filling with smoke.
She looked up and saw that the gym's door, which had been bolted, was now blown open. It was lying on top of children's desks that had been piled by the entrance. She picked her daughter up and scrambled over the entrance, shouting for her son to grab her skirt and follow.
"As he tried to follow me, a terrorist shouted for him to lie down. So he stayed inside the gym." Outside was pandemonium, as special forces soldiers rushed into the flames to pull children out and fight gun battles with the terrorists.
A day later she was in hospital, being treated for her burns, when her son was brought to see her, having escaped unharmed. And there was more good news. They told her that her husband had also survived and was being treated elsewhere.
Oxana remained in hospital, with doctors anxious about the health of her unborn child. A few days later, as she was ready to leave, they came to see her again. There had been a mistake, they explained. They were very sorry, but they had to tell her that in fact her husband was among the dead.
Last January Oxana gave birth to Alic, a healthy cheerful baby boy. Now seven months old he sits happily on his mother's lap in their apartment a stone's throw from the school. The months after his birth were a surprise for her. Instead of finding Alic an extra burden, he has proved a lifesaver.
"He keeps me going, he gives me the thing to live for," she tells me. But life has not been easy. Beslan is a poor town and she is surrounded by grieving families.
The government has organised compensation, but getting their hands on it has meant Beslan's mothers fighting through miles of red tape. Oxana tells me that she has had to make regular visits to the regional capital, Vladikavkaz, to cope with a blizzard of bureaucracy.
She is a proud woman, but the money is much needed. "I am so ashamed, I have to struggle for this money," she says.
GOOD NEWS IS in short supply in Beslan, but it can still be found. Because for once, the outside world has followed through on promises to provide help.
Cities and towns across Europe have given free holidays for groups of the town's children. And, more importantly, money has been spent on creating the world's most ambitious psychological rehabilitation centre.
The UN's educational arm, Unesco, has built the complex, and brought psychologists from across Russia to staff it. Their job is phenomenal: to cure an entire town of its trauma. The help is needed not just by the 700 children who survived the massacre, but by their families, and the families of those mourning the dead.
The process demands diplomacy, with doctors having to remind Beslan's close-knit families that sometimes their instinct to smother and protect can do more harm than good.
"Often the family does not know how to deal with it," says Dr Igor Dobriakov, a post-trauma specialist from St Petersburg. "The families want to feel sorry and show pity and that does not work. You need to create a situation of normality." Another problem is that most doctors are more used to dealing with adults, who can talk through their feelings, rather than very young children who keep their experiences bottled up.
Dr Dobriakov's solution is to use play to get the children to open up. He told me about one girl, aged nine, who was held hostage in the school for three days with her six-year-old sister. When the gym exploded, she found an open window, threw her sister out and jumped out after her.
Her quick thinking saved their lives, but left her in emotional turmoil. "The children go inside themselves." he says.
His solution was to start telling her a story about a big black bird which picked up a little boy and flew away with him. Then he asked her to go on with the story. In minutes she had transposed herself into the role of the bird, and the boy into the role of her sister, talking through her experience.
"I said, suppose a bird came and took the little boy. Where would he take him? She said out of the window, then started to cry. That was a release for her."
Day after day, children and their families are brought to the treatment centre, which is laid out with treatment rooms featuring huge bean bags for relaxing, beach balls and even a fish tank to provide a soothing background.
The doctors are grateful of the help, but are critical of the holidays offered by well-meaning foreigners. "Trips abroad are useful but not in the first period. In that first period, children needed stability," says Dr Dobriakov.
This treatment can't take away the pain, but it can make it bearable. "It's such a small city, and they were burying 100 a day," says Stanislav Tsargarev, head of Beslan's Russian Red Cross treatment centre. "Nobody can teach them how to forget. They need to be taught how to survive."
Some 40 children remain too upset to leave their homes, so the doctors visit them instead. Always, the aim is the same: to bring the bad experiences out into the open rather than leave them to fester in the dark. "Children need stability to get rid of this anxiety," says Dr Dobriakov.
BUT STABILITY IS not something Beslanis likely to taste any time soon. Beslan sits in North Ossetia, an island of calm in a war-torn Caucuses. The war that began in Chechnya in 1999 has now spread to three more provinces and is mixed in with banditry and kidnapping. Jobs are scarce, and few businesses want to invest. The killings at Beslan may have shocked the outside world, but they have not changed the dynamics of the war which this month has ground on into its seventh year.
"The terrorists? They do not exist for me," says siege survivor Alan Aldatov (16), one of a group of children schooled by a professional photographer and given cameras as part of their therapy. Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, is so pleased with the results that the pictures are to become an international touring exhibition. It will feature Aldatov's picture of the ruined gym taken through a jagged hole in the wall.
And this picture is also proof of the power of positive thinking. To me, it is a reminder of the death inside the gym, but Aldatov had a different reason for taking it.
"This hole was made by the special forces," he says. "This hole saved a lot of people."