On 23 October it was nine years to the day of the Dubrovka terrorist attack. To be more exact, on Sunday evening it was nine years ago when the terrorists took more than 900 audience members and actors from Nord-Ost, Russia’s first musical, hostage.

Early in the morning on 26 October 2002 gas was released into the theatre hall and the building was stormed. All 40 militants were killed. Two hostages were killed by the militants, while 128 people died from gas poisoning and not being rendered medical aid.

These are numbers, with each of them representing a person.

What kind of people were they? In order to remember, you need to find out. Now you can: after nine years, the victims’ relatives published a book with something written about every victim.

This book probably could not have appeared earlier, since the Dubrovka terrorist attack has its own peculiarity. The majority of the hostages were audience members, and they were people who had come from all across the country and from abroad: the book covers 36 Russian regions and seven countries.

From Anna Politkovskaya’s article in Novaya Gazeta published on 26 February 2004:

“We won’t die. But please, let there be no more war.” Tatyana Frolova, a Muscovite and the mother of 13-year-old Darya, who died from gas poisoning in the raid, only now, February 2004, read this message her daughter wrote just before she died.

“I had this feeling, I knew that she must have left me something”, Tatyana says resolutely and clearly, because she is a very strong-willed person. Darya wrote these words on her left palm, and the medical expert recorded them during the first posthumous description of the body. His report was put in the criminal case, from where it was made confidential. Tatyana didn’t have the right to know about this; the investigative bodies made the decision for her.”

We Won’t Dieis the name of the book about the victims of the Dubrovka terrorist attack.

Darya Frolova would have turned 21 this year.