Holocaust survivor died saving students
Teacher used his body to block door to class.
JERUSALEM - Liviu Librescu survived the Nazi Holocaust. He died trying to keep a gunman from shooting his students in the killing rampage at Virginia Tech.
Librescu, 76, an aeronautics engineer and teacher at the university for 20 years, saved the lives of several students by using his body to barricade a classroom door before he was gunned down in Monday's massacre, which coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Librescu's students later sent e-mail messages to his wife, Marlena, recounting the last moments of their teacher's life, his son said yesterday.
"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. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."
Librescu had known hardship since his childhood.
When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, he was held at a labor camp in Transnistria, then deported along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a ghetto in the Romanian city of Focsani, his son said.
According to a report compiled by the Romanian government in 2004, from 280,000 to 380,000 Jews were killed by Romania's Nazi-allied regime during the war.
"We were in Romania during the Second World War, and we were Jews there among the Germans, and among the anti-Semitic Romanians," Marlena Librescu told Israeli television yesterday.
After the war, Liviu 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 later requested permission to move to Israel.
After years of government refusal, according to his son, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit. The Librescus moved to Israel in 1978.
Liviu Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a year's sabbatical but eventually made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu, who himself studied at Virginia Tech, from 1989 to 1994. The elder Librescu, an engineering and math lecturer, published extensively and received numerous awards.
"His work was his life, in a sense," his son said.
At the university, where Librescu received an honorary degree in 2000, his picture was placed on a table and a candle was lit. People laid flowers nearby.
Professor Nicolae Serban Tomescu described Librescu as "strong and dignified."
"He had a huge affection for his students," Tomescu said, "and he sacrificed his life for them."