Extraordinary

The details of yesterday’s orgy of violence are still pretty sketchy. I am sure more information will be forthcoming regarding the extraordinary courage and selflessness of Professor Liviu Librescu. This unbelievably brave man sacrificed himself so that his students could escape.

The e-mails from grateful students arrived soon after Liviu Librescu was shot to death, telling how the Holocaust survivor barricaded the doorway of his Virginia Tech classroom and saved their lives at the cost of his own.

Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who survived the Nazi killings and later escaped from Communist Romania, was one of several foreign victims of Monday's shootings, which coincided with Israel's Holocaust Remembrance day.

"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Librescu's son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

My God – what a lion of a man.