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Liviu Librescu

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Romanian-Israeli-American scientist, Holocaust survivor

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Liviu Librescu (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈlivju liˈbresku]; Hebrew: ליביו ליברסקו; August 18, 1930 – April 16, 2007) was a Romanian–Israeli-American scientist and engineer. A prominent academic in addition to being a survivor of the Holocaust, his major research fields were aeroelasticity and aerodynamics.

Librescu is most widely known for his actions during the Virginia Tech shooting, when he held the doors to his lecture hall closed, allowing all but one of his students enough time to escape through the windows.[3] Shot and killed during the attack, Librescu was posthumously awarded the Order of the Star of Romania, the country's highest civilian honor. Coincidentally, Librescu's act of heroism happened on Nisan 27 in the Jewish lunar calendar. That date is Yom HaShoah, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel.

At the time of his death, he was Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Tech.[4]

Life and career<br>[edit]

Liviu Librescu was born in 1930 to a Jewish family in the city of Ploiești, Romania. After Romania allied with Nazi Germany in World War II, his family was deported to a labor camp in Transnistria, and later, along with thousands of other Jews, was deported to a ghetto in the Romanian city of Focșani.[5] His wife, Marlena, who is also a Holocaust survivor, told Israeli Channel 10 TV the day after his death, "We were in Romania during the Second World War, and we were Jews there among the Germans, and among the anti-Semitic Romanians."[5] Dorothea Weisbuch, a cousin of Librescu living in Romania, said in an interview to Romanian newspaper Cotidianul: "He was an extraordinarily gifted person and very altruistic. When he was little, he was very curious and knew everything, so that I thought he would become very conceited, but it did not happen so; he was of a rare modesty."[6]

After surviving the Holocaust, Librescu was repatriated to Communist Romania.[5] He studied aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, graduating in 1952 and continuing with a Master's degree at the same university. He was awarded a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics in 1969 at the Academia de Științe din România.[7] From 1953 to 1975, he worked as a researcher at the Bucharest Institute of Applied Mechanics, and later at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics and the Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Aerospace Constructions of the Academy of Science of Romania.

His career stalled in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to Nicolae Ceaușescu's government.[5] When Librescu requested permission to emigrate to Israel, the Academy of Science of Romania fired him.[5] In 1976, a smuggled research manuscript that he had published in the Netherlands drew him international attention in the growing field of material dynamics.[8]

After months on end government refusal, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem...