Jerusalem – Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust. He died trying to keep a gunman on a killing spree from shooting his students at Virginia Tech – a heroic feat later recounted in e-mails from students to his wife.
Librescu, 76, an aeronautics engineer and teacher at the school for 20 years, saved several students’ lives by using his body to barricade a classroom door before he was gunned down in Monday’s massacre, which coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
His son, Joe Librescu, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that his mother received e-mails from students shortly after learning of her husband’s death.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv, Israel. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
Librescu told CNN that one e-mail was from the last student in the room. The student said he looked back and saw his teacher struggling to hold the door, and “he was torn between jumping out the window and coming and helping my dad.”
“He chose, and possibly made the right decision, to jump out the window,” the son said.
Cho Seung-Hui, 23, killed 32 people, then himself.
Librescu had known hardship since his childhood in Romania.
When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, he was interned at a labor camp and then deported with his family and thousands of other Jews to a ghetto in Romania, his son said.
According to a report compiled by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were killed by Romania’s Nazi-allied regime during the war.
After the war, Librescu became a successful engineer under the postwar communist government and worked at Romania’s aerospace agency. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, his son said, and he was fired when he requested permission to move to Israel.
After years of government refusal, according to Librescu’s son, Israel’s then-prime minister, Menachem Begin, intervened to get the family an emigration permit. They moved to Israel in 1978.
Librescu left for Virginia in 1985 for a year-long sabbatical but made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu, a Virginia Tech student in 1989-94.
The elder Librescu, who was an engineering and math lecturer at the school, published extensively and received numerous awards for his work.
In Romania, the academic community mourned his death.Professor Nicolae Serban Tomescu of Polytechnic University in Bucharest, where Librescu graduated in 1953, described Librescu as “strong and dignified.”
“He had a huge affection for his students, and he sacrificed his life for them,” Tomescu said.
