A Stain Upon the Silence

There came from Virginia Tech the awful silence that follows; and then it was broken when that wretched child whose tantrum took all those lives got the final word. I had just finished reading his so-called plays and felt pretty lousy for having done so, and I was about to come on here and talk a little about what I'd just read; but then I checked the news pages and saw the video package that got sent to NBC. And I realized that this is all exactly what that petulant monster wants: he wants his image everywhere, he wants to become some sort of iconic figure in the awful tradition of "Charlie" Manson and Jim Jones. To hell with him, I refuse to even name his name. He's no writer, he's no artist, and he sure isn't Jesus redeeming his "children." To Hell with him.

Let's talk about this man instead: Liviu Librescu. He of course was the engineering professor at Virginia Tech who held the door while his students leaped from high windows and escaped; then bullets came through the door and Prof. Librescu died. He lived in Romania under the Nazis, and was ghettoized and/or sent to a labor camp (I've seen it reported both ways); then he lived under the Communists, who tried to marginalize him for his support of Israel by refusing to allow him to publish outside of Romania, but he defied the Ceaucescu regime and published anyway. At last a personal intervention by Menachem Begin in 1978 allowed Prof. Librescu to emigrate to Israel, and then while on sabbatical in the U.S. he decided to stay here. There was no mandatory retirement age for U.S. professors, so he could go on teaching for as long as he liked.

It's clear from the above that he always felt there wasn't enough time. A colleague at Tel Aviv University said "He wanted to write many books and have a lot of students," and his wife claims that Librescu published more papers in his field than any of his contemporaries. So much time was stolen from him in Romania that he must have felt positively impelled to transmit as much as he could to as many people as he could; but he always did so, according to his students, in a gentlemanly fashion, always wearing a suit, always feeling the privilege of his position.

Prof. Librescu was buried today in Israel. There is a lovely Times of London tribute to him here, and a Chabad on Campus family condolence page here.