The Holocaust survivor who saved a classroom

Student witnesses say Prof. Liviu Librescu saved their lives during Cho Seung-Hui's deadly rampage at Virginia Tech.

from the April 20, 2007 edition

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"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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