Holocaust survivor dies saving his class

Posted by Rachel on: 04.18.2007 /

LA Times/Washington Post — If you were lucky enough to have a choice, there were only two ways to go on the campus of Virginia Tech on Monday morning: away from danger or toward it. Engineering professor Liviu Librescu chose the second one, saved a classroom full of students and became a hero — at the cost of his life.

As a child, he had survived the Holocaust. As an adult, he had survived persecution for defying Romania’s brutal communist regime during the Cold War. At last, with their children grown, he and his wife, Marlena, seemed to have found a safe haven on a quiet university campus in rural Virginia.

But on Monday, trouble found him once more. With bursts of gunfire rattling through the second floor of Norris Hall, Librescu, 76, closed his classroom door and urged his students to escape out the windows, recalled senior Caroline Merrey of Baltimore, the third student to jump.

As they fled, Librescu held the door shut with his body as the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, tried to force his way in. Moments after the last student leapt to safety, Cho apparently succeeded in forcing the door open and shot Librescu to death.

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