Liviu Librescu (ליביו ליברסקו; August 18, 1930 – April 16, 2007) was a Romanian–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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
After surviving the Holocaust, Librescu was repatriated to Communist Romania.
1952
He studied aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, graduating in 1952 and continuing with a Master's degree at the same university.
1953
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.
1969
He was awarded a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics in 1969 at the Academia de Științe din România.
1970
His career stalled in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to Nicolae Ceaușescu's government.
When Librescu requested permission to emigrate to Israel, the Academy of Science of Romania fired him.
1976
In 1976, a smuggled research manuscript that he had published in the Netherlands drew him international attention in the growing field of material dynamics.
After months on end government refusal, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin intervened to get the Librescu family an emigration permit by directly asking Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu to let them go.
1978
They moved to Israel in 1978.
1979
From 1979 to 1986, Librescu was Professor of Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering at Tel Aviv University and taught at the Technion in Haifa.
1985
In 1985, he left on sabbatical for the United States, where he served as Professor at Virginia Tech in its Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, where he remained until his death.
He served as a member on the editorial board of seven scientific journals and was invited as a guest editor of special issues of five other journals.
2007
Most recently, he was co-chair of the International Organizing Committee of the 7th International Congress on Thermal Stress, Taipei, Taiwan, June 4–7, 2007, for which he had been scheduled to give the keynote lecture.
According to his wife, no Virginia Tech professor has ever published more articles than Librescu.
Librescu's major fields of study included:
At age 76, Librescu was the oldest of the 32 people who were murdered in the Virginia Tech shooting.
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho entered the Norris Hall Engineering Building and opened fire on classrooms.
Librescu, who taught a solid mechanics class in Room 204 in the Norris Hall during April 2007, held the door of his classroom shut while the gunman attempted to enter it and yelled to his students to escape through the windows.
While the shooter tried to nudge open the door, Librescu managed to prevent him from entering until most of his students had escaped through the windows.
After kicking open the window screens, the students successfully escaped.
Some suffered leg injuries while landing on the ground two floors below, others survived after landing on the shrubbery just below the window and then ran either to some ambulances pulling up or to the nearest bus stop.
Librescu was shot four times through the door, including one through his wrist watch.
Of the 23 registered students in his class, Minal Panchal, a grad student from Mumbai, India, was the only student in the room who lost her life, while two others, who were injured while taking cover in a corner, made it out alive.
It was then noted that after the armed aggressor forced his way inside the room, he was enraged after the majority of students escaped.
Before leaving the room, Cho confronted Professor Librescu and student Panchal who were lying on the ground next to the door and fatally shot them in the temple.
A number of Librescu's students have called him a hero because of his actions.
Caroline Merrey, a senior, said she and about 20 other students scrambled through the windows as Librescu shouted for them to hurry.
Merrey said, "I don't think I would be here if it wasn't for [Librescu]."
Librescu's son Joe said he had received e-mails from several students who said he had saved their lives and regarded him as a hero.
