Liviu Librescu: Holocaust survivor. Hero. Admired lecturer. Great Specialist in Aeronautics. A true loss.
Posted on April 18, 2007 • By Rebecca Markowitz
Category: Miscellaneous, Technology |
There are so many ways to describe Liviu Librescu, the heroic professor at Virginia Tech who barricaded the classroom doorway to save his students’ lives during Monday’s shooting tragedy. Librescu was an Israeli/Romanian engineering and math lecturer who survived the Holocaust and later escaped communist Romania. After finding out more about this man, I started to see his name over and over again, and couldn’t ignore the words jumping out from his name - ‘Libre’ which means ‘free’ in Spanish and French, and ‘Rescu’ short for ‘rescue’. It’s not often that someone’s name describes their life story.
An inspiring man:
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.”
… 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.
Laurie Copans, “Holocaust survivor saved students’ lives” Yahoo News, April 17, 2007
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I do not know if this is true but I heard that he was the only one at the school that day who actively tried to save other people’s lives.
He definitely was a very brave man.