By Andrew L. Jaffee

What kind of person stands up to terrorism, especially in an age when many people want to hide under their beds and/or placate the terrorists? During the awful Virginia Tech massacre, one professor sacrificed his life to save his students — a man who had, to put it mildly — real life experience. The Nazis and the communists couldn’t keep Liviu Librescu down, but some pathetic madman snuffed out the good professor’s life:

Liviu Librescu survived the Nazi Holocaust. He died trying to keep a gunman from shooting his students in a killing spree at Virginia Tech — a heroic feat later recounted in e-mails from students to his wife. [Continues below…]

Librescu, an aeronautics engineer and teacher at the school for 20 years, saved the lives of several students by using his body to barricade a classroom door before he was gunned down in Monday’s massacre, which coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day. …

When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, he was first interned at a labor camp in Transnistria and then deported along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a ghetto in the Romanian city of Focsani, his son said. …

After the war, Librescu became a successful engineer under the postwar communist government and worked at Romania’s aerospace agency. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, his son said, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel. …

Full Virginia Tech/Cho Seung-Hui Coverage:

• Thinking too much about Ismail Ax
• Virginia Tech: Mendacity!
• Virginia Tech and Adolescence
• Lessons from Virginia Tech: We Had Better Learn Them
• Ideas for Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui
• When PR supersedes safety
• Hollywood hasn’t raised concerns?

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Related: Society, Virginia Tech Shooting

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