Victim a Holocaust survivor

2007-04-17 17:50

Jerusalem - An Israeli lecturer killed in the Virginia Tech massacre was a Holocaust survivor who later escaped from Communist Romania.

Relatives said Liviu Librescu - an internationally respected aeronautics engineer and a lecturer at Virginia Tech for 20 years - saved the lives of several students by blocking the gunman before he was gunned down in Monday's shooting.

The shooting coincided with Israel's Holocaust remembrance day.

Librescu's students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, recounting how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said his 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."

Interned in a labour camp

Librescu, 76 at the time of his death, had known tragedy since childhood.

When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, the young Librescu was interned in a labour camp, and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said.

Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed by the collaborationist regime during the war.

Librescu later found work at a government aerospace company.

But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the Communist regime, his son said, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel.

In 1977, according to his son, Israel's then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit, and they left for Israel in 1978.

Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year, but eventually made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu, who himself studied at Virginia Tech from 1989 to 1994.

- AP