Israeli Holocaust survivor threw himself in front of the shooter to save US students!

**lavikor201** · 04-17-2007

As Jews worldwide honored on Monday the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, a 76-year-old survivor sacrificed his life to save his students in Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech College that left 33 dead and over two dozen wounded.

Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter when the man attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, "but all the students lived - because of him," Virginia Tech student Asael Arad - also an Israeli - told Army Radio.

Several of Librescu's other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said Librescu's son, Joe.

Virginia Tech shooting
"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 of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

Librescu was respected in his field, his son said.

"His work was his life in a sense," said Joe. "That was a good place for him to practice his research."

Librescu was sent to a labor camp in Russia as a child and saved by the townspeople. His father was deported by the Nazis.

As a scientist working under Nicolae Ceaucescu's oppressive regime, Librescu was forbidden to have any contact with sources outside Romania. He defied the ban, continuing to publish scientific articles secretly.

His Zionist affinities eventually caused him to be forced out of his job. In 1978, the Librescus emigrated from Romania to Israel, where they raised two sons. In 1986, the family moved to Virginia for Librescu's sabbatical. While they only planned to stay in the United States a year, but have lived there ever since.

Librescu's second son, Arie, told The Jerusalem Post that his father had served as an "ambassador" for Israel in a community with many Muslim residents, but few Israelis.

The Foreign Ministry has taken charge of flying Librescu's body back to Israel. The funeral is expected to take place in Ra'anana on Thursday, although that date has not been confirmed.

Meanwhile, police on Tuesday afternoon identified the gunman as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean citizen who was studying legally in the United States as an English major at Virginia Tech.

Earlier, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said that the gunman in the second of two campus attacks was a student at the university, also defending the school's delay in warning students about what became the deadliest shooting rampage in US history.

While Steger did not explicitly say the student, who he identified as an Asian male, was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter. The gunman struck down two people at a dormitory Monday before killing 30 more people at a campus building and finally killing himself with a shot to his head.

"We do know that he was an Asian male - this is the second incident - an Asian man who was a resident in one of our dormitories," said Steger in an interview with CNN, confirming for the first time that the killer was a student.

Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then the second shooting had begun.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull

**Philosopher** · 04-17-2007

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18153625/

JERUSALEM - 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."

Joe Librescu, who studied at Virginia Tech from 1989 to 1994, said his mother received e-mails from students shortly after learning of her husband's death.

The gunman, identified as Cho Seung-Hui _ a 23-year-old English major and native of South Korea _ killed 32 people, then committed suicide.

Also among the victims was G.V. Loganathan, a 51-year-old engineering professor from India, his brother G.V. Palanivel said from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Peruvian student Daniel Perez Cueva, 21, was also killed while in his French class, said his mother, Betty Cueva.

Loganathan, who was born in the southern Indian city of Chennai, had been a professor at Virginia Tech since 1982.

"For us it was like an electric shock. We've totally collapsed today," his brother said. "Our parents are elderly and have broken down completely."

When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, the young Librescu was interned in a labor camp, and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed by the collaborationist regime during the war.

Librescu, who was 76 when he died, later found work at a government aerospace company. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the Communist regime, his son said, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel.

In 1977, according to his son, Israel's then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit, and they left for Israel in 1978.

Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year, but eventually made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu: "His work was his life in a sense."

The academic community in Romania also was mourning Librescu's death.

"It is a great loss," said Ecaterina Andronescu, rector of the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, where Librescu graduated with a degree in mechanics and aviation construction in 1953. "We have immense consideration for the way he reacted and defended his students with his life."

At the university, people placed flowers on a table holding his picture and a lit candle. "We remember him as a great specialist in aeronautics. He left behind hundreds of prestigious papers," said professor Nicolae Serban Tomescu.

Librescu, who specialized in composite structures and aeroelasticity, published extensively and received numerous awards for his work. He received a doctorate from the Bucharest-based Academy of Sciences in 1969, and an honorary degree from the Bucharest Polytechnic University in 2000.

He also received several NASA grants and taught courses at the University "La Sapienza" in Rome and at the Tel Aviv University in Israel.