Hanukkah miracle: meeting with an American professor, a native of Odessa - Joseph Virgilis!

Hanukkah miracle: meeting with an American professor, a native of Odessa - Joseph Virgilis!
For many years I have been writing about people who truly know what the Holocaust is. I met a legendary man, Professor Iosif Semenovich Virgilis. This outstanding mathematician taught in American schools and then in two US universities.
 
Meeting people who survived the Holocaust is always important to me. By recording the memories of legendary ghetto and concentration camp prisoners with my daughter, I believe that we are preserving the history of an incredibly talented people.
Joseph, as Professor Virgilis is now known, and his charming wife Jeanne, who has sincerely loved and adored her husband for over 60 years, were genuinely pleased to see me. As it happened, when Hanukkah and Christmas coincided, I came to hear their inspiring story.
Professor Joseph Virgilis, a native of Odessa, the author of three books about the Holocaust, spoke about his difficult childhood, about how his family miraculously survived the war. It was an incredible test that fell to the lot of his family during the occupation by the Romanians, and later by the Germans: his mother, father and three little brothers. He will never forget how all the Jews of Odessa were first told to come to prison, where they died of hunger and cold, and later were in two ghettos, where they were driven on foot in the winter. Later they were sent to a concentration camp, where part of his family died, including his younger brother, whom he loved very much. He wrote three books about this period in the life of Odessans, considering his age - 90 years - I am impressed by the common sense of this intelligent, very extraordinary person, a bright personality, an outstanding mathematician.
Arriving in the US at a mature age, he was invited to lecture at prestigious universities. Now he is 90 years old, but his mind remains clear and his memory is amazingly tenacious. I recorded a video that was published on YouTube Lagunova News. He enthusiastically tells the story of his family: how they survived the war, how they built a new life in the US, where his two daughters became successful doctors.
Now the professor is writing his fourth book - about the pogroms in Ukraine, citing many facts from unique books and the Internet, continuing to preserve the memory of the tragic events of the past. It is worth noting that about 8 years ago I attended a lecture on the pogroms in Ukraine. The lecture was in the Jewish archive, which is located in Manhattan. I was surprised how the photographs and lists of people who were killed by Ukrainian nationalists at the beginning of the last century were preserved. I had no idea that the victims were photographed, I wonder who the Germans learned from to photograph their victims? It is worth noting that I am researching the topic of the Holocaust absolutely as a volunteer. I was in Auschwitz in 2020, and earlier in Western Ukraine, at the opening of a monument that was erected to the courageous woman Lilya Jacob in 2016, in the village of Belky in Transcarpathia (Ukraine). It turns out that when Auschwitz was liberated, she was running and looking for food. So, absolutely by accident, she ran into the room where the photographs were kept. In one of the photographs, she recognized her relatives and neighbors from the village where she lived before the war. These photographs were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. It turns out that Professor Virgilis has a unique book in the original with photographs, which was used as the basis for a lecture in the New York archive about the pogroms in Ukraine. Of course, Professor Virgilis's energy, intellect and optimism are amazing. Such unique people as Joseph Virgilis are the real pride of my people and our immigration. I was lucky not only to meet him, but also to work with him on a book about the terrible events in Ukraine.
I could not even imagine that I would meet such a sensible, wise and inspiring thinker, who wrote his manuscripts 70 years ago, but was able to publish his memoirs only in the USA, including in English, because he worked very hard, living there and living here. This is another miracle of Hanukkah that was given to me on this day.
Marina Lagunova