–Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Chapter 1, first line
TOLSTOY, I suspect, had it wrong. Examples of unhappiness are more like each other than instances of happiness. Mass murderers, for example, tend to be all alike. As David von Drehle pointed out in last week’s Time, these killers are almost always “raging narcissists”–emotionally isolated, envious and resentful. They are at once sick and uninteresting.
Heroes, on the other hand, are each heroic in their own way. Reading through biographies of recipients of decorations for valor in combat recently, I was struck by the quality they all shared–extraordinary courage, demonstrated in remarkable ways. In this, these men are alike. Yet in other ways they are a strikingly diverse group. Some are religious and some secular, some family men and some bon vivants, some self-improvers and some cut-ups. All heroic individuals aren’t alike, even if heroic deeds have a family resemblance.
A healthy society will recognize such deeds. It will remember and honor the doers of those deeds. It will turn its gaze away from the killer at Virginia Tech. A hero of that sad tale, by contrast, received only passing mention in many stories. So let’s take a minute to recall the life and death of Professor Liviu Librescu.
Librescu, 76, was teaching solid mechanics in a classroom on the second floor of Norris Hall when the shooting began down the hall. He grasped what was happening, and implored his students to jump from the classroom’s window as he leaned against the door to slow down the killer. One of Librescu’s students, Alec Calhoun, was the last of the eight or nine students who were able to jump to safety. As he climbed out the window, Calhoun looked back and saw Librescu, mortally wounded. He had stayed behind, at the door, having shielded almost the entire class of students from the murderer.
A remarkable death. After a remarkable life. As a child in Romania during World War II, Librescu had been sent to a labor camp, and then along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani. He survived the destruction of European Jewry, and, decades later, having achieved professional distinction in the field of aeronautical engineering, sought to emigrate to Israel.
He was denied his request, and lost his job as a result of it. Only with the intervention of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin did Librescu escape communism and arrive in Israel in 1978. Librescu taught at universities there and came to the United States in 1984 on a sabbatical, where he stayed and taught for over 20 years at Virginia Tech. Throughout his career, he was a brilliant researcher who published prolifically. Librescu and his wife were very happy in America. “He and my mom led a simple life, at a pastoral place in west Virginia, between hills and mountains, and he loved the school in which he taught,” one of their sons said.
Liviu Librescu died Monday morning, April 16. In Israel, it was Holocaust Remembrance Day. A few hours earlier, seven time zones away, at 10:00 a.m., activity had stopped throughout that land and a two-minute siren had sounded to honor the victims of the Holocaust. Librescu survived that horror, only to die six decades later at the hand of another murderer. He had lived an impressive and inspiring life in the intervening six decades. And though his murder is a terrible thing, he was able to die nobly, performing a deed of remarkable self-sacrifice.
One often wonders: Who and what will really define our times? The Holocaust or the creation of the state of Israel? Hitler or Churchill? Stalin or John Paul II? The Virginia Tech murderer, or Liviu Librescu?
–William Kristol
