THE CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, APRIL 17, 2007:
THE CONCLUSION OF THE PROGRAM
Esther Karol, Memoralizing Professor Liviu Librescu, Holocaust Survivor who sacrificed his life to save his students during the Virginia Tech Massacre
Liviu Librescu, 76, was gunned down while blocking the doorway into his classroom long enough to allow students to jump from windows during the rampage that claimed 32 lives on April 16, 2007.
Liviu Librescu was born in 1930 to a Jewish family in the city of Ploiesti, Romania. After Romania allied with Nazi Germany in World War II, he was interned in a slave labor camp in Transnistria.
Afterward, he endured communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu's Romania. He studied aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, graduating in 1952 and continuing with a master degree at the same university. He was awarded a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics in 1969 at the Academia de Stiint e din Romānia. 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. In 1972, he received the Traian Vuia Award of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. He refused to swear allegiance to the Communist Party of Romania and was forced to resign from the Academy of Sciences for his sympathies towards Israel. When Librescu requested permission to emigrate to Israel, he was fired from his job. In 1976, a smuggled research manuscript that he had published in the Netherlands drew him international attention in the growing field of material dynamics. The communist regime in Bucharest did not allow him to leave the country, until 1978 when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, pressed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to let him go.
In 1979-1985 he served as Professor of Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering at the Tel Aviv University and taught at the Technion in Haifa. 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 from September 1, 1985 until his death. He was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa of the Politechnical University in Bucharest in 2000
Esther Rebori reading The Third Generation Pladge
We are the next generation, born since the darkness. Through our parent's teachings we are linking ourselves to that annihilated Jewish existence whose echoes permeate our consciousness. We pledge to ensure that our heritage will never be forgotten. We pledge ourselves to continue to remember and pass on all that we have learned to our children and all future generations thereafter. We are your children, we are here!
