Liviu Librescu

As Virginia Tech remmebers that shattering day just one year ago, lets remember one special person. A man who rushed to the danger to save his students.

Tangible also was the tinge of irony; here was a 76-year-old man who overcame incredulous odds-surviving the Holocaust, fleeing a Communist regime intent on keeping its brightest minds, teaching in the land of the free, killed in a bitter incident while protecting others. There is a sense of futility when people who escape some of history’s worst maladies die in car accidents.
But I didn’t get a sense of futility in Ra’anana that day. Headlines quoting Librescu’s son, Joe, ran across the Internet the next day that I think sum up what everyone felt. “My dad died a hero.”