Holocaust survivor was killed saving students

JERUSALEM — 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.

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.

His son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday that his mother received e-mails from students shortly after learning of her husband's death.

"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."

Last student left

Joe Librescu told CNN that one of the e-mails was from the last student left in the room. The student said he looked back and saw his teacher struggling to hold the door, and "he was torn between jumping out the window and coming and helping my dad."

"He chose, and possibly made the right decision, to jump out the window," the son said.

The gunman, identified as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, killed 32 people before committing suicide, officials said, in what was the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

Librescu, 76, had known hardship since his childhood.

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.

After years of government refusal, according to his son, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit. They moved to Israel in 1978.

Sabbatical to Virginia

Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a yearlong sabbatical, but eventually made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu, who himself studied at Virginia Tech from 1989-94. The elder Librescu, who was an engineering and math lecturer at the school, published extensively and received numerous awards for his work.

"His work was his life, in a sense," his son said.

In Romania, the academic community mourned Librescu's death.

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

Professor Nicolae Serban Tomescu described Librescu as "strong and dignified."

"He had a huge affection for his students and he sacrificed his life for them," Tomescu told AP Television News.

Associated Press writer Alexandru Alexe in Bucharest, Romania, contributed to this report.