By Oleg Kusov

In October 2002, an armed group headed by Movsar Barayev took more than 800 people hostage inside the Dubrovka theater in southeast Moscow. Their demand: an end to the war in Chechnya.

By the time the siege ended, however, all the hostage takers had been shot and killed, and 130 of the hostages were also dead, most from the effects of a incapacitating gas pumped into the theater by special forces.

Tatyana Karpova's 31-year-old son, Aleksandr, died outside the Dubrovka theater after hours of lying unconscious as a result of the gas. Karpova now heads an organization supporting victims of the "Nord-Ost" attack, named after the title of the production at the theater. She says Anna Politkovskaya, who was one of the few people permitted inside the building during the standoff, was responsible for a final act of kindness for many of the hostages.

"She was in the United States, receiving another accolade. And the Chechen terrorists insisted that Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya be brought to act as an intermediary," Karpova says. "She immediately dropped everything. Of course she flew there right away. She convinced the Chechen terrorists to at least let water and juice be brought into the theater. Anna did that. We all say that it's very possible that the last drinks of water and juice that our children who died at 'Nord-Ost,' including my son, ever had, were brought to them by Anna."

Victims still say that they don't know the whole truth about the terrorist attack on Dubrovka. They accuse the government of carelessness in organizing the assault on the building. The Nord-Ost tragedy was covered by thousands of correspondents, but in the weeks and months that followed, most former hostages had no notion where to turn for information about the facts of the case.

'The Biggest Grief In The World'

Irina Fadeyeva lost her 15-year-old son, Yaroslav, during the siege. "We turned to many journalists," she says. "When we were at the 'Nord-Ost' performance, correspondent Sasha Khabarov and his wife were also in the audience. They were there with relatives, friends, and everyone somehow met one another. He said that no journalist will take on this topic. There is only Anna Politkovskaya."

Politkovskaya immediately agreed to meet with Fadeyeva. "Before this, psychologists came to me. I could not look them in the eye. They somehow repeated the same phrase: 'Well, why are you crying, why are you killing yourself? Children die all the time,'" she says. "But Anna looked at me and said: 'Ira, I understand, yours is the biggest grief in the world. There is no bigger grief today. Tell me, what was he like?' She didn't ask me how many terrorists were in the theater. None of those questions about politics."

Politkovskaya wrote a lengthy article about Fadeyeva's son. In the process, Fadeyeva says, Politkovskaya helped her come to terms with her grief and find the strength to continue living.

"I understood that I was going to live, because I had to wait for that article to come out. Before that, I had nothing to hold on to. That became something for me to hold onto. I read the article about Yaroslav and started to wait for her next article. The next one was about 'Nord-Ost,' too," Fadeyeva says.

"I lived from Monday to Thursday [the days Politkovskaya's columns were published]. I found out that Anna published twice a week. And we started to live from buying the newspaper on Monday to Thursday, and from Thursday to the following Monday," she says. "Anna wrote about almost all the children who died there, at 'Nord-Ost.' We all met one another."

'What Will We Let Them Get Away With Tomorrow?'

"You know, this was a person who found her meaning in life in helping others with their grief," says Tatyana Karpova of the Nord-Ost support group. "She visited, I think, if not all, then at least 90 percent of the hostages -- everyone who was there, who survived, who lost someone. She visited everyone. She asked all of them about the problems of their specific family. She did everything possible to somehow ease their suffering. She spoke to hospitals, with orphanages, if one of the orphans needed to be settled there. She communicated with sponsors. She helped us so much, in absolutely everything."

"'Anna Politkovskaya' became not a recommendation, exactly, but a password at any time of day or night," Fadeyeva adds. "We knew that this person was for us a wall, our defense, like an emergency room, like a bandage over a wound."

Members of the Nord-Ost support group made Politkovskaya an honorary member of the group. A phrase from one of her articles became the group's slogan, as Karpova recalls.

"It turned out that when we published our independent investigation of Nord-Ost, we included one of Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya's articles. We got the book literally two or three months before Anna's death," she says. "One of her last phrases was: 'What will we let them get away with tomorrow?' Those are Anna's words. We really understood that we have no right to simply let them do with us what they are doing with us now."