I can imagine those young students in Blacksburg getting up on Monday morning, probably hitting the snooze button a few times before dragging themselves out of bed, pulling on dirty jeans, squeezing into the closest available shoes, grabbing books, coffee, and maybe a PowerBar, and settling in for an early engineering class. Bleary-eyed from a long-weekend full of problem sets — and maybe even a little fun.

Ugh. Monday morning. How many more classes until the semester is over? I wonder if the professor will let us out early today? I wonder if my boyfriend got my e-mail late last night? I forgot to call Mom yesterday … damnit, it was Sunday, and she hates it when I forget to call. Man, I’d better start taking notes in this class. It’s not hard to imagine it. A regular, ordinary Monday morning. None of the students thought it would be their last. None of them imagined, pulling notebooks out for class, they were about to get caught in the middle of a killing spree. None of them. It’s just not the sort of thing you expect. Death disguised as an ordinary Monday morning in an ordinary classroom on an ordinary American campus. Hell in Blacksburg — hell on earth.

It reminds me of another hell that took Americans by surprise nearly six years ago. Another ordinary morning. Men and women going to work on a sunny, blue-skies morning. Airplanes rendered as giant homicidal missiles. Real people, with families and kids and jobs, jumping from more than a hundred stories because the plunge seemed more tolerable than the hell behind them — a stinking, suffocating blaze of office furniture, human remains, and jet fuel. What sense is there to be made of hell on earth? And why is it always catching us by surprise?

Pope Benedict surprised audiences recently with some short — very short — comments on hell. Just three weeks ago, addressing a small Filipino parish in Rome, Benedict reminded us gently that hell “exists and is eternal.” He said that Christ wants us to go to heaven; but if we choose to shut God out of our lives, hell is a very real possibility. He wanted us to remember that hell after death is a product of human choices and not the evil invention of a sadistic God. The reasoning goes: if God wants us to love Him freely, then he needs to allow for those who do not want to love him. That allowance is hell. He hasn’t conjured up hell as the worst possible punishment for the non-God-choosers. It’s just the nature of the thing. Everything good comes from God and exists through God — ipso facto, being separated from God means being separated from everything good, which is entirely miserable. God lets us choose hell as a compounding of our bad choices made on earth — the same sorts of bad choices that create hell on earth for others.

Four years before 9/11, the summer after my junior year in college, I had my own encounter with hell on earth. I was sitting in the back of an ugly, old tour-bus when the girl I was traveling with, a friend of just two weeks, asked me out of nowhere (it seemed to me), Do you believe that hell exists? I was somewhat annoyed, once the question had registered. We had just visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. The rest of us were sitting quietly, trying to process the scale of the awfulness we had just seen, trying to understand why those people had to suffer the loss of everything — there we were, sitting on a comfortable tour bus on our way to our third comfortable meal of the day right smack in the middle of a very comfortable life. We were squirming. And my friend, annoyingly, wanted to make this personal.

Nazi death camps were about a tragedy, but they were about other people. People who had died a terrible, senseless death. Not about today, about me, about her — not about heaven and hell and eternity. Auschwitz was over — the only decent thing about it, in fact. Her question squeezed my comfortable existence.

We shared the back seat of an old tour bus, our knees shoved up against the seats in front of us. I had been trying to wedge my battered copy of Cancer Ward between my knees to hold the page. My stupid sneakers weren’t as cool as hers. We just had an afternoon visit to the museum of man-at-his-worst. Everyone else was silent. But she had to talk. She had to make that hell-on-earth personal.

When hell comes up and confronts you, when it stabs into your comfortable existence, you don’t forget it. Each little detail — my knees, my book, my sneakers, the feeling of the stale bus — they all stay with me, like scenes from a second-rate movie I might have watched at 2am, drunk on love or cheap liquor. The images of that July afternoon are tattooed on my memory. I was drunk on the pride of life, barely 21 years old. The question pressed me for an answer, and one that would belittle my pride: “Do you believe in hell?”

Of course I believed in hell. Obviously. After visiting Auschwitz, who doesn’t? If hell can be on earth, hell can be in death. And after visiting Auschwitz, hell seemed more of certainty than heaven. Because I was 21 years old and there had to be justice. If there is no hell, then everything is permitted. Then Hitler is the same as you and the same as me, and he is laughing because now he’s only watching the game. There had to be a hell, and my friend had to make it personal.

Finally the word came into my mouth — “Yes.” And my friend said the same — yes, she believed it, too. And then, neither of us looking at the other, she said the following — slowly and deliberately, as if she had been formulating the thought all afternoon: “I also believe that hell exists. But I just realized that I don’t live as if I believed that hell exists. And Auschwitz, that’s just what man can do. But what can God do?”

You can read this — as I did then — as a terribly blunt, unlooked-for reminder that eternal punishment, if it exists, would inevitably be worse than even the worst of man’s inhumanity to man. Life is short, even when it’s a living hell. Eternity is eternal — even when it’s an eternal hell. Those thoughts made me reflect on my comfortable existence and the choices I was making.

But four years later, when a lone airplane buried itself into the earth, and a rural cornfield in Pennsylvania was fertilized with the blood of heroes — a different thought came to my mind. I came to understand hell as a great lesson for the drama of human freedom. Dostoevsky had the right conclusion: everything is permitted — but not because God is dead. Everything is permitted because we are free. We are free to ravage other men, to reap misery and destruction. But we are also free to be heroes, to make choices that correspond to the greatest capacities within us, to give our lives for others, to find meaning even when — precisely when — evil has its moment, to turn tragedy into triumph.

I can also imagine how Professor Liviu Librescu began his day. I doubt he hit the snooze button several times and barely made it to class, unkempt and groggy. He was probably up before dawn and working at his research hours before he had to lecture. He surely did not expect to encounter hell on earth once more, not on an April day at Virginia Tech. Yet when he heard the clang of gun shots, he knew what he was hearing, as he had heard it before — the shots of Nazi executioners when, as a young boy, he survived a concentration camp. Librescu ran to the door, blocked it, and told his students to escape.

While one man, with his freedom, was showing us a picture of hell, another was testifying with that same freedom to freedom’s source and purpose.

– C. R. Hardy is a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University, a consultant for www.familyfacts.org, and the mother of four young children. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, Michael.