The 12th Congressional District of California seems to have a preference for representatives who have faced death and lived to tell about it. From 1980 until early this year, the district was represented by Tom Lantos, who survived the Holocaust by escaping from forced-labor camps in Nazi occupied Hungary not once, but twice.

His death in February prompted a special election that briefly attracted an Internet icon but he ended up yielding to Jackie Speier, a former state senator who was endorsed by Mr. Lantos in his final weeks of life.

Now that Ms. Speier has won the seat overwhelmingly, national headlines are focusing on her extraordinary experience in 1978, when she was among those ambushed at an airstrip in Guyana by a cult that became infamous for drinking the Kool-Aid.

A few years ago, The San Francisco Chronicle retold the striking story: