For this I was born

Column by Max Friedman

I want to get a little existential on you for a moment, as in the purpose of one’s life. Is your path in life preordained, as in predestination, or is life a random crap-shoot, i.e., you take it as it comes, not being able to control outside factors which interfere with it?

In the 1970s, an Ukrainian dissident whose name may have been Marchenko, or something like that, wrote a small book about his harsh life under Soviet rule and repression in his occupied country. It was entitled For This Was I Born?, a plaintive cry questioning life’s purpose.

He was asking whether he (as a symbol of occupied and ravaged Ukraine) was born to be a slave and suffer all his life. Fortunately for that country, and hopefully for the writer, freedom came in the late 1980s, early ’90s, and the Ukraine regained its freedom from Soviet/Russian tyranny.

When Virginia Tech University student Cho Seung-Hui went beserk on April 16 and killed 32 teachers and students in a fit of as-yet unexplained rage, he not only killed people he knew and many he did not know, but he also killed a symbol of both man’s inhumanity to man, and of man’s courage in the face of evil. That symbol, and person, was Liviu Librescu.

Many articles and tributes have been written about how Librescu, a world-renowed professor of aeronautical engineering, held his classroom door shut, preventing the entry of the wildly firing Cho, thus giving his students enough time to get out the windows and save their lives.

In the process, Librescu was shot through the door, and died.

You can find a lot of good material about this man on the Internet, including a nice background piece at www.bloomberg.com, entitled “Virginia Tech, Inspired by Librescu, Recruits Abroad” (Update 3), May 2, by Luke Timmerman. I’ll let this article be a nice tribute to the man who was Liviu Librescu.

What I want to explore, if only in a brief existential moment, is the question of whether this child survivor of the Holocaust, a survivor of a labor camp and a ghetto, and also a survivor of the weird Communist dictatorship of the Romanian psychopath Nicolae Ceausescu, would have written a book about his life also entitled For This Was I Born?, or would he have, based on his life, written a book entitled For This I Was Born!

If you believe in predestination, then you would probably say that the second title, For This I Was Born! is the correct story of his life, and while I don’t take any strong position in favor of predestination, I won’t, on the theoretical level, dismiss it. However, a person can often make their own destinies and chose their various paths in life, even if others often control their lives, as in the Holocaust/war or in a slave society such as Communism brought to Romania.

Librescu seems to me to have been the type of person who, despite having been put into places and situations no sane person would ever want to be in, also had the strength of mind to decide what he wanted to do in life when the opportunities arose. In some case, he did what my old school’s motto said, Carpe Diem, Seize the Day, and he made the very best of these opportunities for himself, his family, his students and for humanity.

As I see it, here was a man, who as a young boy and teen-ager, saw and survived the worst evil of World War II, the Holocaust against European Jewry. He was also helped by others during that time, and eventually he came face to face with evil, again, and made a choice to stand and fight, to help others in their time of need. Armed only with his courage and his 76-year-old body, Librescu chose to fight evil, to save his students, and to give his life, if necessary, in this endeavor.

History had 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, while Virginia Tech had one Jewish professor and Holocaust survivor at the door, both fighting against overwhelming odds, buying time for others, and then dying in the end.

Romanian professor Nicolae Serban Tomescu, of the Polytechnic University in Romania, said of Librescu, “He had a huge affection for his students, and he sacrificed his life for them.”

A friend and former professor, Yakov Aboudi, (Tel Aviv University), said of Librescu, “Where did he die? Was there a better place for him? It’s where he wanted to be.”

A former mayor of Tel Aviv, Israel, Zeev Bielski, said, “He did not hesitate to use his body to block the door. In that way, he gave life to many.”

Librescu never wanted to be in the Holocaust, nor in the prison state of Romania, but he ended up there, only to later get his freedom to live and teach in Israel, and then for his last 20 years, to live and teach in the U.S., mainly at Virginia Tech.

He was killed on Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, an irony which will never be forgotten, for him to have survived one Holocaust, only to die in a mini-one on the one day of the year devoted to remembering those earlier victims of beserk evil.

Yet, there is a difference this time. Evil won during the Holocaust, even though its perpetrators lost the war. It nearly exterminated a whole people, European Jewry, along with other minorities such as the Roma people (including those we call “Gypsies”), and millions of other Europeans.

However, even though Librescu lost his life this time, he faced and defeated evil by saving his students. He died a hero on his own terms.

Liviu Librescu – a Blessed Memory.