Never forget. Talk to a Jewish person about the Holocaust and you'll likely hear
those two words. Never forget.

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is an important holiday in
Israel and in the Jewish community. This year Yom Hashoah fell on
April 15. It was observed on Monday, April 16.

That is the day, Seung-Hui Cho killed 33 people at Virginia Tech
University. Engineering professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, died that
day protecting his students from Cho's bullets. I thought about those two events quite a bit.
Then I read an obituary of Professor Librescu in the New York Times where his son Yossi Librescu said, in a telephone interview from
Israel: "He was passionate about life. He had no fear of death."

That inspired me to write a poem about the two of them for a poetry
slam, a competitive poetry event, last week. I have no idea if the words of this poem reflect the emotions of Yossi
Librescu. It's a tribute to him and his father. Librescu is survived by another son, Aryeh, and his wife, Marlena.

A poem for Liviu Librescu, a poem for his son Yossi Librescu

Remember.
I remember
as a child
I worshiped my father.
And now he's dead.
He loved life, was passionate about it.
And he knew death, knew the stench of it.
But never did he fear it.
He knew it too well.
He knew that fear was worse than death.
He never forgot
Ha Shoah.
Gas ovens, firing squads, mass graves.
And it never ends.
What was a 23-year-old punk with a gun to him?
He stood in the door,
he took five shots.
And he told his students to live.
Jump out the windows and live.
He died so they might live.
I thought of him as a Jew.
I thought of him as my father.
And now my mind flashes back
to scenes from the movie Gladiator.
A general who became a slave,
slave who became a gladiator.
We, a people enslaved,
we've become a mighty nation.
And I,
I am the son of a murdered father,
cousin to a murdered nation.
It never ends.
They want us dead again.
Iran, Iraq, the Palestinians.
They want to kill my brothers,
my sisters, my children, my wife.
What did the warrior say?
My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius,
Commander of the Armies of the North, loyal servant to the true
emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife.
And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.
Father to a murdered son. Son to a murdered father.
Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife.
And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.
Except, except I will not.
I will not have my vengeance.
I've had enough death.
I will be vulnerable.
I knew a man once who said,
Death smiles at us all.
All a man can do is smile back.
And so I smile.
I remember everything.
I remember lines
from that movie.
What we do in life,
echoes in eternity.
And so I will do something with my life.
And I will remember.
I will make my father proud.
I will savor every moment.
I am because of him.
I live because of him.
And so do they.
He told his students to live.
Jump out the windows and live.
And I know
they will live and
they will remember.

Contact columnist Brian Lewis at blewis@news-leader.com

(Associated Press photo)