The Holocaust survivor who saved a classroom

His expertise was noticed by scientists at Israel's Technion Institute and Israel Aircraft Industries, who pressed then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to appeal to Ceausescu to approve the family's exit, which was ultimately granted in 1978.

In Israel, he joined the faculty of Tel Aviv University, but it was on a sabbatical in Virginia where he and his wife discovered the community where he would thrive academically.

At Virginia Tech, there was plentiful funding from government and companies to pursue his aeroscience research –and he was exposed to students from all over the world who he took under his wing.

Colleagues' shock

When Yaakov Aboudi heard about the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, he immediately thought of his old friend and colleague, Professor Librescu. The men had known each other for more than 25 years, and Mr. Aboudi had once taught, while on sabbatical, in the very same Virginia Tech classroom as his friend.

But he knew what hours Librescu liked to teach class, so he decided he shouldn't worry too much.

"I immediate sent him an e-mail and said, 'I know you usually come in at noon, so I assume everything is okay with you.' "

He never received an answer.

"I know that classroom, and I know he could have jumped from the window to the grass. But I guess it's just an instinct: He decided to protect his students, which is what a professor should do," says Aboudi, an engineering professor.

Doron Shalev remembers him as a dedicated academic who would regularly burn the midnight oil. Dr. Shalev is an Israeli scientist who did his PhD at Virginia Tech under Librescu, and authored several papers with him.

"We used to work until 2 or 3 a.m., and then we would put things aside and talk," says Shalev, who heads an engineering firm in the Tel Aviv area. "He would tell me about how he got through life in Romania and what he had to go through there once he declared to the authorities that he wanted to go to Israel."

While Librescu never talked about his experiences in the Holocaust, Shalev says, he did talk about his life in Romania, surrounded by constant fear and a lack of basic freedoms.

"Living in a communist regime for so long had a great impact on his mentality," Shalev says. "When he wanted to discuss important matters with his wife, he used to go outside the house and have a quiet talk in the garden. Never in the house, because it might be bugged. It's a habit he grew up with and then kept."

Both men loved living in Blacksburg, Shalev recalls. When a tree fell on his house during a hurricane, he joked about how he'd suffered so many difficulties in his younger life only to have a tree collapse on his home.

At the Virginia Tech campus, says aeronautics professor Demetri Telionis, Lebrescu walked at the pace of a much younger man, stood straight, and spoke his mind.

"But he was reasonable and his students loved him very much," says Professor Telionis, who called Lebrescu the department's greatest scholar by virtue of dozens and dozens of articles and books he wrote on topics ranging from aerolastic response to space vehicle control.

The two men – a Greek and Romanian – often talked of their homelands. Lebrescu recounted the dark, oppressed days of "the most miserable years of Communist rule" under the cruel Romanian regime, he says.

If those harrowing life experiences played into Lebrescu's actions Monday morning, Telionis is not sure. But because of Lebrescue's courageous – and fatal – doorway stand against the gunman, the engineering department did not lose a single student.

• Staff Writer Patrick Jonsson contributed to this report from Blacksburg, Va.

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