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….
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.