Holocaust Survivor Killed At Virgina Tech Trying To Save Students Is One Of Many Heroic Stories We Will Hear From This Tragedy

April 18, 2007

Michael Ireland, Chief Correspondent,
ASSIST News Service

An Israeli lecturer who died in the massacre at a U.S. university saved the lives of several students by blocking the doorway of his classroom from the approaching gunman before he was fatally shot, his son said Tuesday.

According to Fox News, students of Liviu Librescu, 76, a holocaust survivor who was an engineering science and mathematics lecturer at Virginia Tech for 20 years, sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said the son, Joe.

"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

Liviu Librescu, was respected in his field, his son said.

"His work was his life in a sense," Joe Librescu said. "That was a good place for him to practice his research."

The couple immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1978 and then moved to Virginia in 1985 for his sabbatical, but had stayed since then, said Joe Librescu, who himself studied at the school from 1989 to 1994.

Meanwhile, in Romania, the academic community also was mourning Librescu's death.

"It is a great loss," said Ecaterina Andronescu, rector of the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, where Librescu graduated in mechanics and aviation construction in 1953. "We have immense consideration for the way he reacted and defended his students with his life."

He also received a Ph.D from the Bucharest-based Academy of Sciences in 1969, and received an honorary degree with the Polytechnic University in 2000.

At the Polytechnic University, his picture was put on a table and a candle was lit, and people lay flowers. "We remember him as a great specialist in aeronautics. He left behind hundreds of prestigious papers," said one of the professors, Nicolae Serban Tomescu.

Librescu, who specialized in composite structures and aeroelasticity, published extensively and received numerous awards for his work. He also received several NASA grants and also taught courses at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome, Italy, and at the Tel Aviv University in Israel.

In Monday's massacre, a gunman killed 32 people at the Virginia university before committing suicide. It was the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

In an e-mail to ANS, Roberta Rogers writes: "My son John asked us to pray for Heidi Miller; her mother Lolly works with him at the Wellness Center in Harrisonburg, VA. Heidi was seriously wounded, was in surgery an hour or so ago in critical condition....just one 'real' name among the carnage at Virginia Tech."

Steve Clemons, who graduated from Virginia Tech, wrote to ANS: "I'm a Va Tech grad and just can't believe what has happened, and only live 40 miles from Blacksburg in Salem Va.  As a Christian I still have trouble understanding how something like this can happen and am deeply grieved for everyone including the shooter. "

He adds: "May God bring His peace to everyone who was involved in this shooting.  They will all be in my prayers for a long time to come.  I just hope we can learn something, anything, from this that will help us prevent this from happening ever again.  I read your emails daily and find them very uplifting.  But this is a time when we must accept God's will even when we don't understand why."

Lisa Goddard, a CNN Radio Correspondent, said she saw three workers from the Salvation Army shopping for breakfast food for displaced students in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

On the Anderson Cooper 360 Blog she writes:"It's 1 a.m. in Blacksburg. The farmland surrounding the school is pitch-black, and dozens of restless people, weary of endless hours of news coverage or hospital vigils are at Wal-Mart.

"I'm here looking for socks, pj's and food (after living off the hard candy provided by Virginia Tech staff at their impromptu press center). But moving around the 24-hour superstore, I see the stories of the day.

"Richard White of the Roanoke office is smiling in his Salvation Army uniform but his eyes are turning red. "

David Kuo, writing on his blog J Walking at www.beliefnet.com/blogs/JWalking/2007/04/tune-out.html,  titles his latest piece on the Virginia Tech shootings "Tune Out."

He writes: "Turn it off today. Turn off CNN and Fox and MSNBC. Don't go surfing for more information. Don't listen to all the people talking. Don't let the media do it for you.

"There is this temptation with our saturated news to immerse yourself in it because immersion feels like action, immersion feels involvement, immersion feels like empathy. Watching sobbing students and parents and doctors somehow makes us feel closer to this tragedy. But there is also an enormous risk to it as well - that it paralyzes us, absorbs all of our time, and prevents us from doing the things that we need to do to help those we can impact - those who are around us."

Kuo says that as a news junkie this is something of a novel concept to him,"But it is one that was encouraged by an email I got from a friend who runs a tutoring program. She wrote,' So many are asking what can we do to stop the continued random acts of violence. There are no easy answers, but I say to all of you..... each time you bring yourself through the doors of Immaculate Conception Church, on a Tuesday night... even after a long and tiring day..... that hour and half you spend with a child or young person, is the best ammunition we have against the enemies continued attempts to rob us of precious lives. Every open book. Every math problem solved. Every paragraph read. Every checker game played... serves to keep our kids safe as we love and nurture them and prayerfully bring them to a place where they will never be the one with a gun in their hands. Instead they will spend their lives being agents of peace.' "

Kuo continues: "Yet we can only do those things if we have time and the emotional and spiritual energy needed to give of ourselves. Surrounding ourselves with the unending symphony of horror around tragedies like this one a few hundred miles from me in Virginia robs us of that energy."

He asks his readers to, "Please hear what I am not saying. I am not saying we should be indifferent. I am not saying we shouldn't feel the horror of it. I am not saying we shouldn't feel everything we are feeling. I am saying that the best way for us to do that is to do it through prayer, do it through loving those around us, do it by living and not by listening. Our compassion is not directly related to our consumption of news about an event. There is stuff that we can do today... let's do it."

In a web search carried out by ANS, this reporter found a posting to the Internet by the Gospelcom Alliance, a network of 300+ Christian ministries working to spread the Gospel online. Each day, the Buzz brings you the best new and classic content from around the Alliance.

Responding to the Virginia Tech tragedy at www.gospelcom.net/buzz/?p=391,  Gospelcom Alliance has posted resources to help shellshocked readers cope with the tragedy.

The Gospelcom site says: "News reports are still filtering in about (today's) school shooting at Virginia Tech. As the details emerge and as Gospelcom Alliance ministries respond to the shootings and the spiritual questions being raised, we'll post them here. Here are some early responses to the Virginia Tech tragedy, as well as related materials posted in response to school shootings in the past."

At the site there is a discussion of the shootings going on at the Youth Ministry Exchange forums (see: http://ymexchange.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=344&Itemid=1).

Youth Specialties has some excellent web resources on youth violence at: www.youthspecialties.com/free/web_violence.php.   

Also on the site are links to some articles by Jim Watkins about dealing with school shootings and coping with death and grief, Peggie Bohanon's devotional responding to the Virginia Tech tragedy, and Bruce Narramore's essay "Why Teenagers Turn to Violence" in response to the Columbine shootings, which is still relevant today.

There are also links to "Violence: Is There a Way Out?" written primarily about Columbine, but which has some excellent insights into the nature of school violence and the steps we can take in response to it.

Columbine Redefined is a short Our Daily Bread devotional that challenges us to think differently about tragedies like Columbine and the Virginia shootings.

Terry Mattingly has a piece he wrote in the aftermath of Columbine, about spiritual questions and dimensions of the violence, and Stuart McAllister has an essay 'The Gravity of Our Disconnection' in response to school violence, which discusses the real reason that terrifying violence like this happens.