Professor Liviu Librescu:
David Bernstein mentioned him below, but I thought this was worth a picture, and a longer excerpt, this one from an AP story:
Relatives said Liviu Librescu, an internationally respected aeronautics engineer and a lecturer at the school for 20 years, saved the lives of several students by barricading his classroom door before he was gunned down in Monday’s massacre ….
Librescu’ students sent e-mails recounting the last moments of their teacher’s life to his wife, Marlena, his son, Joe, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.” …
When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, [Librescu] was first interned in a labor camp in Transnistria and then deported along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. According to a report compiled by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were killed by Romania’s Nazi-allied regime during the war….
As a successful engineer under the postwar Communist government, Librescu found work at Romania’s aerospace agency. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the regime, his son said, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel.
After years of government refusal, according to his son, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit….
In the late 1980s, Librescu moved from Israel to America.