The Hero

Further to my thoughts below about the Virginia Tech killings, there is a sad but heroic story from within the massacre to tell. Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who escaped to Israel from Communist Romania, and a world-acclaimed aeronautical engineer, saved the lives of his students, at the cost of his own.

Professor Librescu heard the gunshots and recognized what was going on. He shut the door to his classroom and blocked it with his body, telling his students to get out of the room through a window, which they did. Librescu was shot before he could escape himself.

The measure of such a man must have been truly astonishing. The world is measurably worse off today because we no longer have Professor Librescu among the living.

(Hat tip to Eugene Volokh.)