From: tsirbasc@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Tsirbas Christos)
Subject: A Montrealer's view of the Polytechnique Massacre
Organization: Universite de Montreal
Date: Thu, 8 Dec 1994 17:18:20 GMT

On December 6th 1989, I had taken part of a day off work to prepare for
an exam.  I was at the Samuel Bronfman library of the Universite de Montreal,
which is a short walk down the road from the Ecole Polytechnique.  I left
the library at about 3:00 p.m., and took the tunnel that lead to the Metro.
I got home an hour later and turned on my television set.  I saw pictures of
ambulances and stretchers. The scene looked vaguely familiar.  I had a growing 
feeling of unease.  Finally, the announcer let loose the cannon.... there was
a gunman that had entered the Ecole Polytechnique building and was going about
shooting people.... A feeling of utter horror came over me.  The pictures 
that were flashing on my television screen seemed surreal, but they were
coming from a place that was a short walk from where I had been an hour 
and a half before....  The shooting had started about 15 minutes after
I had left the library.  If I had stayed another half-hour, I would have 
seen the ambulances and police cruisers rushing pastg the library....

The horror and sadness grew as I watched the telecast.  A few weeks earlier
I had come home and turned on my television set to witness people dancing
on the Berlin Wall, that had brought a different kind of tears to my
eyes.

Roughly fifteen minutes after I came home, the telephone rang.  It was the
mother of one of my friends.  She was shaken and in tears.  "Thank
God you answered the phone," she said, "I called a few times to see if you
were safe.  I thought you were probably at the University today and I was
terrified that something might have happened to you."  I explained to
her that the Ecole Polytechnique was a separate building and that it
was not connected to the buildings where I had my classes (The Universite
de Montreal campus is enormous).  She was crying on the phone.  A lot of
Montrealers were crying that day, and the days that followed.

I was shocked.  Mass murder had come to my home town, and not only that
it had come to my campus.  The bus and metro (subway) ride the next mor-
ning was like nothing I have ever experienced.  There was grief in every
face.  There was only one subject of conversation, and tears were being
shed in public.  The train pulled into Universite de Montreal station.
It was the strangest thing.  Every conversation stopped.  Everybody froze
in silence.  IT was unreal.  It was a collective holding of breath,
a moment of undeclared prayer, or silence or reflection that everybody
on that train instinctively succumbed to.  I have never experienced 
anything like this in my life.  Picture it, a packed subway train and
not a sound being made.  There were tears forming on the eyes of 
many people.

On my way back from work, I decided to stop in and see my thesis advisor,
I took the metro with a friend of mine, and we talking about the whole 
thing.  I was doing most of the talking, I was in pain and I was angry.
I was almost shouting.  The woman sitting next to us was almost in tears
from what I was saying.  I was simply another voice expressing the pain
that everybody in the city was feeling, but I was twenty-three and
a Universite de Montreal student, the women who died, were like me,
students who would never get a chance to exercise their chosen proffession.


The talk I had with my advisor was one that I will never forget.  We talked
about the murders being not only a crime against women, but a crime against
humanity.  We were both in pain, we were both angry and scared.  Marc Lepine
chose women engineering students as his target, but given other circumstances,
the target could have been anybody.  I told my advisor how it felt to feel
so unprotected, that a crazed gunman could have decided that he hated
philosophers and walked into my advisors third floor office and shot the
two of us....

Mass murder had come to my town and to my university.... That day I was pain-
fully aware of the fact that, when it comes to violence, the agressor will
use any logic available to justify a crime against a person or group of
persons.  It was a frightening thought.

When the names of the victims were released, I jumped, one of the victims
was Anne-Marie Edwards.  I knew an Anne Edwards, a woman who had transferred
out of the philosophy department into another program.  My heart sank.  Could
this woman be the same Anne Edwards that I had known, with whom I had
shared conversations and coffee?  It was not until the photographs of the
victims were released that I knew that the woman murdered was not the
woman I knew.  It did not lessen the horror I felt, but it brought the point
home that violence does not just happen to strangers.  These women were
somebody's daughters, friends, lovers, wives....  Under different circumstances,
I realized such violence could occur in the lives of people I know and even
in my own life.

Five days later, I was still dealing with it.  I got on the Metro to go
to work, when I ran into my father's Godson (also Chris), we talked about
tragedy.  Then the young man sitting next to us interrupts the conversation.
He couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old.

He begins his conversation with "I was there."

Chris and I were stunned.  He told that he was in an empty classroom with
a female friend when somebody came rushing down the hall shouting that
a gunman was in the building and had entered the classes.  He stuck a desk
against the door and he and his friend hid under a desk, and waited
until somebody came to tell them it was safe.  He  finished his statement
with.

"One of my friends was in the classroom where Lepine was shooting.  Lepine
made everybody lie down on the floor.  My friend was okay.  He got up when
it was over.  The girl lying next to him never did."

There was nothing to say to this young man.  You should have seen the
look of sorrow, terror and horror in his face.  There is no way to describe
the emptiness that I saw in his face, the hollowness in his words.  All
I could think of saying was:  "Have courage."  There was nothing to add.
The kid was shell-shocked.  He had the empty look of a veteran of an
attrocious war.... 


You can make anything you want out of the events of 6 December 1989, but
for me, these events were personal.   I'll never forget how I felt that
day, and I will never be able to wipe from my mind the image of a 
terrified, sorrowful 19-year old who turned to me on a subway train
and said "I was there".

These events are not just another news-story to me.  They are not just
another example of crimes against women.  They are a part of my personal
history, and I will always bear these sad memories with me.....


Chris Tsirbas
aka The Breaker


From: tsirbasc@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Tsirbas Christos)
Subject: Re: A Montrealer's view of the Polytechnique Massacre
Organization: Universite de Montreal
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 15:20:27 GMT

In article <3c7mcv$9u7@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> kittent@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (barbara trumpinski) writes:
>the breaker:
>>On December 6th 1989, I had taken part of a day off work to prepare for
>>an exam.  I was at the Samuel Bronfman library of the Universite de Montreal,
>>which is a short walk down the road from the Ecole Polytechnique.  I left
>>the library at about 3:00 p.m., and took the tunnel that lead to the Metro.
>
>[   ]
>
>"i asked breaker privately, and i will ask publicly, can i share this
>with irene?"  kitten offers chris a hug.
>

Kitten,

You can share this with Irene or anybody else you like via e-mail or
the internet, as long as I am identified as the author.  The only thing
you can't do is publish it to paper without specifically asking my
and receiving my permission....

That goes for the rest of you as well....

Chris Tsirbas
aka The Breaker

Drink entire against the madness of crowds....
				-Ray Bradbury