Requiem For a Heavyweight
The aftermath of tragic events always bring stories of harrowing plight and exemplary heroism to the fore. Instinctively, one recoils at pointing up any one single story for the fear of diminishing others--and in the wake of yesterday's horrifying tragedy at Virginia Tech we're sure to hear many stories that will test the limits of what we can bear. But one story that has emerged today has stuck with us, all the same. It has no particular connection to Washington, D.C., but it really deserves to be shared, far and wide.
Liviu Librescu was a professor in VPI's School of Engineering Science and Mechanics, a position he held for two decades. His specialty was aeronautics. He was a specialist in crazy-sounding scientific fields, like the "dynamic instability of elastic and viscoelastic structures" and "aeroelastic optimization." Over the course of a lengthy academic career, he won many honors, sat on many academic boards, and served as an editor to several scientific journals. By any measure, he led an extraordinary and accomplished life.
But one facet of his biography stands out from his life in academia, and places him in a context that anyone can fully understand. The man was a survivor. During World War II, Librescu was interned at a Nazi labor camp, and was later sent, along with many other Romanian Jews to a ghetto in the town of Foscani. Librescu survived that fearful period, only to find himself at the mercy of a Communist regime in Romania, to whom he refused to swear his loyalty, a move that halted his career. He was only able to escape the regime after Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin intervened on his behalf.
It is no mean feat for Librescu to have outlasted those years he spent in fearful, horrific circumstances. Men in his position were isolated, at the mercy of fickle circumstance, with the turn of each day offering no relief from a struggle almost beyond belief. To have come through that period intact must have required well-honed instincts.
It is an extraordinary thing, then, that a man whose life was mainly defined through escape and survival faced the unfolding terror of yesterday's killings in an altogether different way. No one, knowing what he had been through in his life, could have possibly blamed him if, while in the presence of certain danger, he had fallen back on those well-honed insticts again, found a way to escape just one more time, worked to survive one more calamity. No one in their right mind would have begrudged an old man who had fought tooth and nail to have an extraordinary life his chance to preserve that.
Instead, Liviu Librescu, with a gunman approaching his classroom, took up a position at the door and told his students to flee. He stood at his post, and bought his students valuable time to preserve their own lives and their own futures. And, sadly, Mr. Librescu did not survive. His own, extraordinary life ended sometime Monday morning. But, by all available accounts, every single one of his students is alive today because of his efforts.
We will never know precisely what was going through Mr. Librescu's mind as he sacrificed himself for his students. But I like to think that instead of hearing that voice inside, beseeching him to escape, he heard something else instead.
Within hours of yesterday's shootings, it is reported that the inbox of Liviu Librescu's wife began to fill with email, all from thankful students whose lives he saved. In this small way, it can be said that Liviu Librescu has survived even this.