Heroism forged in the Holocaust

One can only imagine what went through Prof. Liviu Librescu’s mind as the shots started ringing out next door to his classroom Monday morning. Maybe his thoughts flashed back to his terrible ordeal during World War II. Librescu, you see, was a Holocaust survivor who went on to become a renowned scientist and a senior researcher at Virginia Tech.

But we don’t have to imagine what he did Monday, thanks to the eyewitness accounts of some of the students whose lives he saved – saved by sacrificing his own. Hearing gunshots from the next room that sounded like “an enormous hammer,” student Alec Calhoun recalled, Librescu blocked the door with his body and told his students to flee. As they jumped out the windows of the second-floor classroom, gunman Cho Seung-Hui shot his way into Librescu’s classroom, killing the professor.

Monday, ironically, was the worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Librescu, 76, a Romanian-born aeronautical engineer who came to United States from Israel in 1978, was the most-published faculty member in Virginia Tech history. He will be remembered, too, for his act of incredible heroism.

As we learn more about the 32 lives that were senselessly snuffed out at Virginia Tech, it would be tempting to focus on the bitter irony of Librescu’s story – surviving the Nazi horrors only to meet a violent death in his beloved adopted country where, his son Joe said, he and his wife were happy to live “a simple life … between hills and mountains.” But maybe it would be better to celebrate the example he left of selfless courage – courage forged in that awful cauldron of hate decades ago, courage that steeled Librescu to stand up Monday morning and with his final act proclaim, “Never again.”