A Holocaust Survivor Is Among Those Killed In Virginia Tech Massacre
In a horrorific event such as the Virginia Tech massacre, you can lay awake at night feeling an overwhelming sense of grief for those who were simply going about their routine daily business when their lives were mercilessly and brutally cut short.
In the case of Virginia Tech, the grief is compounded by the fact that many of the murdered innocents were young people working on fulfilling their potential and just at the time of life when they were blossoming.
But then there’s also another kind of story that can cause enormous grief: a story about someone who has come through monstrous times and was a survivor — only to have his or her life snuffed out by a murderer or murderers. Here’s a story that’ll haunt you:
Liviu Librescu a 75-year-old Israeli professor is one of the people who died in Monday’s Virginia Tech shooting. The professor saved several students before got shot, witnesses said, quoted by DPA news agency.Librescu was teaching his class in Norris Hall when the killer entered the building randomly unloading his gun in class rooms. The Mechanics and Aeronautics professor stayed behind to stop the shooter from opening the door. When the attacker finally got into the classroom, threw himself in front of the gunman, a student told Israel’s Army Radio.
‘He himself was killed but thanks to him his students stayed alive’, the student who survived the massacre said.
The e-mails from grateful students arrived soon after Liviu Librescu was shot to death, telling how the Holocaust survivor barricaded the doorway of his Virginia Tech classroom and saved their lives at the cost of his own.Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who survived the Nazi killings and later escaped from Communist Romania, was one of several foreign victims of Monday’s shootings, which coincided with Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Librescu’s son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
And Reuters offers more details of not just his heroism, but the heroism of others:
Amid the horror at Virginia Tech were tales of heroism during the rampage, including an older professor — himself a Holocaust survivor — who gave his life to protect his students.
Romanian-born Liviu Librescu, an Israeli citizen, moved two decades ago to the United States where he taught in the Engineering Science and Mechanics Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Although he was 76, long past the usual retirement age, he was still teaching at Virginia Tech on Monday when chaos erupted in Norris Hall, the campus building where a gunman identified as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, opened fire, killing 30 people before committing suicide.
Students described how Librescu barricaded the door against Cho so that they could escape by jumping out the classroom’s second-floor window. Some broke legs in the fall, but they survived. Librescu was shot dead during the rampage.
An impromptu shrine to the dead professor was set up on the campus, with flowers and his picture.
“He was an exceptionally tolerant man who mentored scholars from all over our troubled world,” Ishwar Puri, his department head, said in a written statement released to the media.
Students who survived the massacre at Norris Hall spoke of school janitors who, as Cho opened fire upstairs, ran to help others instead of saving themselves.
Unlike in the movies, heroes don’t necessarily survive in life’s final reel.
But they remain heroes, nonetheless….
8 Responses to “A Holocaust Survivor Is Among Those Killed In Virginia Tech Massacre”
[...] Charles Maldonado wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe e-mails from grateful students arrived soon after Liviu Librescu was shot to death, telling how the Holocaust survivor barricaded the doorway of his Virginia Tech classroom and saved their lives at the cost of his own. … [...]
Yes, this man is a true hero. Interesting, though, that none of his students had the same impulse.
DB You are just as callous at the idiots at HumanEvents and NRO. Maybe the chickenhawks would have strangled the killer with their robe strap.
What a wonderful human being! He makes me PROUD to be a teacher. He demonstrated the BEST of humanity.
Rudi,
And you are one who takes a simple statement and attaches the worst motive. I made no indictment, merely an observation based on fact, to which you rise in hollow indignation.
I truly feel for all of the students who went through that hell, and would counsel my own daughter to run away as fast as possible from a gunman. It is not callous to observe that a man who grew up amidst trial and death would be the person to run towards gunfire instead of away from it.
Daniel Berkzik please know this: Professor Librescu will always be remembered in my community. He loved people and he loved teaching. All the media hype to point fingers at the response of the security and police and the school officials play on people’s need to have the assurance and piece of mind that something like this could never happen in their back yard. Likewise, remarks from people pointing out the fraility of humans under intense circumstances is unnecessary and uncaring. If you would have been there, would you have helped him hold the door? You don’t know, do you? I hope you and I never are placed in position to make that decision. We could well discover that we, too, are frail humans.
Terri:
I am certain that the good Professor will be remembered. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some memorial to the man. And I would contribute to such a memorial.
Human frailty: yours, mine, everyone’s is exactly what I was pointing to. I have no idea how I would have reacted. For all I know, I might have run, screaming, for the nearest windows. Or, I might have taken the lessons I have learned form my parents and teachers and looked for another way. For several generations now, we have been told that violence in all its forms is wrong, and, more importantly, that violence done to others is not nearly as bad as violence done to us.
I remember Rick Resorla, and how after the 1993 WTC bombing he trained his people at Morgan Stanley to deal with the prospect of a next attack. In doing so, he saved countless lives, giving his own up in the end. He taught his charges to get out, no matter what the building security said.
Professor Librescu must have possessed a great instinct and a great love of his fellow human beings. This doesn’t diminish those he saved, and I did not mean to disparage them by, as you say, pointing out their frailty. But I wonder and I worry about where our heroes are going to come from in the future.
You’re right. I might discover that I am no Professor Librescu when confronted by a killer. I, too, wish that no one would ever again be faced with such a situation.
There is no judgment in my statement. There are people who run to a disaster and people who run away. We need both kinds of people. You may feel that it is uncaring to make such an observation, and you are welcome to your opinion.
I believe that we will see this sort of thing happen until the time that we realize that those who were murdered, those who were spared, those who gave their lives and he who took those lives are all part of the same big thing.
I take it from your comment that you are part of the VT community. Please accept my condolences. I do not seek to offend.
Daniel,
Well spoken and very thoughtful. Thank you for clarifying your feelings. And thank you for your condolences. So many people are hurting in this area.