In movies and books, when someone faces a near-death experience, it changes them for the better. They try harder, they treat people better, they fix aspects of their lives that they had ignored before. Real life doesn’t quite work that neatly, though. We can learn deep truths about ourselves, we can be faced with our own mortality…and we can choose to do nothing.
Our choices, during the huge moments and during the modest ones, speak volumes about who we are. Our awareness determines the power we have over our lives. Our awareness and our decisions make up the stories of our lives.
As one who experienced the Holocaust, Liviu Librescu, Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech, had spent a lifetime learning how to survive. First in the internment camps of World War II and then in Romania living under the particularly harsh Communist regime. But it was in those moments that we learn telling things about Mr. Librescu. Under the Communists in Romania, all he had to do was swear fealty to the regime and he’d be allowed to travel outside of his country, to practice Engineering as he wished and to follow his calling: research and academics. But he stood up against the regime and drew his own line in the sand at the cost of his career for many years until the personal intervention of Israeli Prime Minister Begin allowed him to finally move onward and follow the things he believed in.
So in the 1980s he came to the United States and began to open new doors in the fields of Aerodynamics and Engineering. His focus in composite structures and aeroelasticity — essentially the structures that allow our airplanes to carry more and fly more efficiently.
And, on a Monday morning that transformed into a day of confusion and terror for those students and professors and staff in Norris Hall, I believe that Liviu Librescu made a choice that, understanding the context of his life, really wasn’t much of a choice at all.
He used his body to barricade the door and to take the oncoming bullets so that every single one of his students could escape.
Timshel, indeed.
