During terrible times, it is the better angels among us who emerge to give hope to the afflicted that represent the salvation of humanity. Like those that Yad Vashem recognizes, those non-afflicted who stepped forward selflessly to place themselves in danger for the greater purpose of exercising determination and compassion in the saving of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

On a microscale, it is embodied in the persona of a nine-year-old boy trapped within an avalanche-crushed hotel in a mountainous region of Italy, following an earthquake. Edoardo Di Carlo was trapped, alongside two other children younger than he in the hotel's game room. For two days and nights the children: Edoardo, six-year-old Ludovica Parete and seven-year-old Samuel Di Michelangelo, huddled in a small area, bereft of food or water and the comfort of knowing the whereabouts of their parents.

Ludovica Parete, six, was one of four children who were rescued after being buried by a wall of snow, ice, rock and shattered pine trees. Credit: Claudio Lattanzio/Ansa

The catastrophic building collapse took its toll on at least half of the people who were in the hotel at the time of its avalanche-crushing destruction. When the children were finally brought to safety by their rescuers, it was revealed by the younger two that the nine-year-old Edoardo had taken the initiative to give them what comfort he could. He could and he did.

And that comfort took the form of hugs for emotional warmth and reassurance, and story-telling and singing to give them all the courage to envision and await their rescue. They might only have been in a better emotional position had the three sheepdog puppies that were eventually rescued, huddled within yet another area of the hotel, been enclosed with the children.

Hopes that survivors may still be found in the mangled remains of the resort were boosted on Monday after three sheep dog puppies were rescued from the hotel's boiler room. Credit: Alessandro Di Meo/Ansa

"Where are mum and dad?" the boy asked while being taken to a hospital. Edoardo is now an orphan, his parents did not survive their ordeal. They are among the 18 who did not live to be rescued. Perhaps they died praying that their son would survive. He will now be cared for by his older teen-age brothers and members of his extended family whose mourning will be charged with the future well-being of the surviving member of the afflicted family.

All might have benefited from snuggling together for warmth against the crushing cold and their deprivation of sustenance. That all survived represents a kind of miraculous end-of-story, although the end of the story will be reflected in the manner that all six, the children and the dogs, attain to adulthood with the haunting ghost of their memories.