I.
When the Holocaust ended, my grandparents emerged from four
years of hiding together in fields and barn houses eating a steady diet of raw
potatoes. My grandmother was already
pregnant with my father, who would be born in the first week of 1946. When they
returned to Bransk, my grandfather’s Polish hometown, they not only returned
with my grandmother’s older sister, Rochel, in tow, but also with my father’s
older sister, Tzipporah. For three years, they’d had to give up Tzipporah to a
convent where she would either be turned in or be raised as a Catholic should
they not return. Is there another Jewish family that made it out of the Holocaust intact?
There were three-thousand Jews in the town before the war,
after the war there were thirty-seven – four of which were of my father’s
family. At Rosh Hashana, my grandfather lead the prayers at the Bransk
synagogue with his daughter sitting at his feet. By Yom Kippur, Tzipporah was
dead from typhus. Not long after Yom Kippur, Rochel was caught in a crossfire
between Polish nationalists and Soviet troops while food shopping, she was shot
in the back and did not even live to see my father born.
Of the thirty-five remaining, the plurality of the Bransker moved to Baltimore - their only
connection to the town being that my grandmother (originally from another town)
had much older sisters living here who emigrated long before the war. The Bransker all started various businesses
together – working in each other’s stores, living in apartments together,
lending each other money when the need came, and generally serving as one
another’s extended family.
Business is a tough field, and depending on the field of
business you choose, it can be a dangerous one. After surviving Hitler and
Stalin, Pilsudski and Lenin, the Holocaust and the Purges, World War I and the
Russian Civil War, the conscriptions of the Czarist Army and the Red Army, my
grandparents lived through it all to taste freedom in the Land of Opportunity,
and it blessed all the Baltimore Bransker
with a prosperity in work and family that was as deserved for what they’d
endured as it was unfair to the dead they left behind. And yet even here in the
Land of Opportunity, two of the original Bransker
were murdered in cold blood a full quarter-century into their American lives. In
both cases, the murderers were probably contracted, and the men who ordered
their deaths were never apprehended. One of them was murdered in front of his own
wife while she was tied up in their home. At the funeral, she threw herself on
his coffin. The other’s body clearly showed signs of severe torture. When he
was found, his body was so severely burned that he could only be identified by
his dental records.
Tragedy begets tragedy. The inquity of the
father is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, and
when misfortunes happen to some people, their newfound vulnerability makes it
more likely, not less, for other misfortune to happen to them.
II.
Newtown, Connecticut is a 90 mile drive from where I went to
boarding school. It was a school for kids who had ‘bad attitudes’ and fucked up
their lives with drugs, or sex, or simply bad grades (take a guess…). It was
April of my first year that Columbine happened. I have very vivid memories of
the trouble a kid I was friendly with got into for saying that while he didn’t
agree with what the Columbine murderers did, he could understand why they did
it. Though I didn’t say it at the time, I absolutely agreed with him.
Perhaps Columbine was the retaliation of two nerds against bullies
who made their life hell, or perhaps Columbine was simply the work of a
sociopath and his naïve accomplice. But either way, there was something about
Columbine that couldn’t help but speak to nerds of my generation. Within the
myopia of high school social life, retaliatory murder is at least a legitimate
fantasy.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold could so easily have been Hyde
students. In a parallel universe, maybe they were my best friends. Perhaps they
were even me. Who knows what any one of us ‘lost souls’ might have become at
our lowest ebbs with easy enough access to guns, and explosive components, and improper
medication, and too much weed and booze and worse drugs, and even to the
experience of an excessively violent video game or movie at the wrong moment?
In the thirteen-and-a-half years since Columbine, there have
now been thirty mass shootings in America that resemble Columbine in outline if
not in particulars. And who knows how many others have been stopped? Columbine
happened on April 20th, 1999 – doubly significant to many possessing
violent ideologies because April 20th is also Hitler’s birthday. Ten
days later, on the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide, schools in Arizona, North
Carolina, Michigan New Jersey, and DC, had to close so they could investigate
potential threats. On May 13th of the same year, four middle school
children forced their principal at gunpoint to call an assembly at which they
planned on mowing down their classmates prior to killing themselves – they were
stopped only because a kid they tried to enlist turned them in before they
could enact the plan. On May 20th, a high school student in Georgia
injured six kids with a gun, he then put the gun in his mouth as though he was
about to shoot himself, but didn’t pull the trigger. On June 14th, a
13-year-old girl in Florida was indicted on a scheme to kill her teachers and
classmates. Three days after Columbine, she showed her friends a map of the
school’s surveillance system, a hitlist of people in the school she’d drawn up,
and a getaway plan.
That was just the first two months after Columbine. On
February 5th, 2001, there were three kids arrested for planning a
high school attack. At their homes were found bomb material and ammunition, an
assault rifle, school floor plans, and White Supremacist drawings. Exactly a
month later, a fifteen year old kid killed two students and injured another
thirteen after telling other students he was going to go on a shooting spree in
retaliation for being bullied. After police officers arrived at his home, they had
to remove seven rifles. In Kansas, there were five kids arrested for plotting a
copycat killing on Columbine’s seventh anniversary. On the tenth anniversary of
Columbine, a copycat killing was barely stopped in England within a few days of
the anniversary. When the police raided the teenagers houses, they found
eighteen months worth of detailed notes on schematics of their school and local
shopping mall, how to build bombs, and how to build the most efficient
firearms. In North Carolina there was a
kid who was described as ‘obsessed with Columbine’ before he killed his father
and fired shots at his school; in Montreal there was a killer of one and
wounder of 20 who liked to play an internet video game called ‘Super Columbine
Massacre’ which simulated the massacre in Littleton.
And we haven’t even gotten to Virginia Tech.
III.
There was one story in Virginia Tech, perhaps the most important
story, which was completely ignored. The reasons for it are not difficult to
understand – few Americans have a personal stake in a story like Liviu Librescu, but
the fact that the massacre can be measured in double digits rather than triple
is almost entirely due to a single old man whom nobody honored highly enough
after the massacre’s occurrence.
When the Holocaust ended, Liviu Librescu was 15. As a Jew he
had lived in the Foscani ghetto and was conscripted to work in a labor camp in
a town called Transnistria. After surviving the Holocaust, Librescu was
repatriated to Communist Romania – a country not only still beset by yet another totalitarian ideology, but historically already one of the most anti-semitic
countries in Europe. Nevertheless, even in this toxic environment Librescu
managed to graduate from the Bucharest Polytechnic University with a degree in
applied mechanics, and eventually earned a Master’s Degree and a PhD. From 1953
to 1975, Librescu was one of the most respected scientific researchers in his
country, but his career was forestalled because he refused to join the
Communist party and was accused of harboring ‘Israeli sympathies.’ When he
requested permission to immigrate in 1976, he was declared person non grata by
the Romanian Academy of Science, fired from all positions and titles, and
unable to find work. All that saved him was an academic paper on material
dynamics that he managed to get smuggled into Holland, which drew such
international attention that the Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, made
a personal call to the Romanian dictator, Nikolai Ceausescu, to request that
Librescu be allowed to emigrate to Israel. He taught for seven years at Tel-Aviv
University and the Technion in Haifa before being offered a sabbatical position
at Virginia Tech, whereupon the esteem proved so mutual that Librescu moved to
Blacksburg, Virginia in 1986 and never left.
Liviu Librescu survived the regimes of Hitler, Stalin,
Georgiu-Dej, and Ceausescu. Those who knew him testified to a limitless intelligence
and an equally limitless modesty. No professor in the history of Virginia Tech ever
published more papers. He was on the editorial board of seven scientific
journals and served as a guest editor for five more. And yet when this unlikely
attack happened in the idyllic surroundings of rural Virginia, it was this
legendary star professor, this Holocaust survivor who probably saw endless
death before and after he was the same age as his students, who blocked the
door with his own body, yelling at his students to hurry out the window of his
classroom. Librescu was shot five times through his classroom door, and by the
time the Virginia Tech gunman got past Librescu, only one student remained. We
don’t know how long Seung-Hui Cho was distracted by Librescu’s act of heroism,
or how many more lives Professor Librescu saved by distracting Seung-Hui Cho
with a nearly futile task for so long. Could the death toll have gone into the
hundreds?
The day on which Columbine happened was April 20th,
Hitler’s Birthday. The day on which Virginia Tech happened was April 16th,
Holocaust Remembrance Day. And yet the victory of this auspicious day belonged
to a Holocaust survivor. It took a
person who’d seen more than his share of death to know what to do in such a
situation and assume an act of undaunted, undersung heroism, that minimized the
casualties that day. Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust, the postwar
reprisals, the crackdowns of two iron-fisted Romanian dictators, and the rockets from the Lebanese Civil War, only to be gunned down in America. And yet it was only his
knowledge of death and tragedy that allowed us to celebrate more life.
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