Holocaust survivor’s sacrifice

04/18/07

Posted under Media matters, Religious issues

THE dictionary defines Holocaust as follows:

holocaust |ˈhäləˌkôst; ˈhōlə-| noun 1 destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, esp. caused by fire or nuclear war : a nuclear holocaust | the threat of imminent holocaust. • ( the Holocaust) the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–45. More than 6 million European Jews, as well as members of other persecuted groups, such as gypsies and homosexuals, were murdered at concentration camps such as Auschwitz. 2 historical a Jewish sacrificial offering that is burned completely on an altar. ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French holocauste, via late Latin from Greek holokauston, from holos ‘whole’ + kaustos ‘burned’ (from kaiein ‘burn’ ).

The mass murder of students at Virginia Tech in the USA was subsequently reported by two Filipino students (hat tip to Philippine Politics 04). Filipino-American blogger goodboi points out two eyewitness accounts of what happened at icantread01 and ntcoolfool and that media left comments on their blogs, requesting interviews. Also, another blogger was apparently the victim of a rumor that he was the killer, to the extent that,

apparently to him all the attention was all fun and games until he started getting angry phone calls and e-mails - death threats too. Michelle Malkin and the Drudge Report have written stuff about him.

Read the entries of of the blogger in question for April 16 and 17. You have to wonder then, about the assertion of Buzz Machine, that the whole grisly event may be the harbinger of a “new architecture of news.”

But the most remarkable story -in that it represented an ennobling moment in the midst of all that horror- was the story of a professor. As blogger eyelid pointed out, the day of the VT shootings was Yom Hashoa, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. And on that day, a professor, Liviu Librescu, barred the door to his classroom, instructed his students to open the windows and escape, and continued to bar the door as they escaped -finally being shot to death by the gunman, but by then all his students had escaped. As the comments posted in Librescu’s memory pointed out, he was a survivor of the Holocaust. And so, on Holocaust Memorial Day, a survivor of it gave his life so his students might live.

If you have the chance, here is a book that makes for relevant reading:

“Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps” (Tzvetan Todorov)