One especially poignant hero was professor Liviu Librescu. He barricaded the door to buy time for his students to escape, then threw himself in front of the gunman when the attacker finally got through. Nearly all of his students survived…

Holocaust survivor saved students’ lives

By LAURIE COPANS, Associated Press Writer

Romanian-born Liviu Librescu, 76, an engineering science and mathematics professor at Virginia Tech, who was killed in the Virginia Tech massacre, is seen in this reproduction of an image taken in Bucharest, Romania, in the year 2000, when he was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa title by the Romanian Polytechnic University, where Librescu graduated in mechanics and aviation construction in 1953. Librescu, was born in the southern Romanian city of Ploiesti, emigrated to Israel in 1978 and later moved to the United States, and received U.S. citizenship.

The e-mails from grateful students arrived soon after Liviu Librescu was shot to death, telling how the Holocaust survivor barricaded the doorway of his Virginia Tech classroom and saved their lives at the cost of his own.

Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who survived the Nazi killings and later escaped from Communist Romania, was one of several foreign victims of Monday’s shootings, which coincided with Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.

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