It’s only two weeks now since I met him.

You met him, too, then, under the tragic circumstances. Before it happened, not many had heard of him; afterwards, who hadn’t?

He was a foreigner with a difficult name to pronounce. His calm and quiet belied the discrimination and persecution he had suffered.

Someone who went through his experiences should be bitter and angry. Turbulent emotions should have cascaded through his mind and ignited as he walked the hallways.

Shortly after 9am he was blasted from obscurity to the world’s front pages, placing himself between a gunman and a classroom full of students.

Having endured anti-Semitic Romania, labor camps and Communist oppression, Liviu Librescu had every reason to be angry. As a child, he saw his father torn away by the Nazis, and as an adult, the Communists robbed him of his career. If anyone should feel vengeful, he should have. He chose not to.

Monday was Holocaust Memorial Day, a day that represented every seminal trauma of his life. That day crystallized his response to that horror.

Liviu Librescu chose to respond to life’s circumstances. Like his predecessors who emerged from the ravages of Crusades, Spain’s Auto Da Fé or the Gas Chambers, Librescu knew that a Jew is not shaped by life, but shapes life.

Unlike his killer’s “You made me do this,” Librescu did not surrender to “circumstances.” He chose to rise from the ashes to success and scientific renown. He chose to enhance life, to sacrifice his life to preserve the lives of others.

Librescu and his murderer were separated by four centimeters of door; and by attitudes light-years apart.

I am proud to belong to Liviu Librescu’s people. May his memory be a blessing and inspiration to us all.

(rabbishishler.blogspot.com, Inspired by Rabbi Eitan Ash of Chabad House, Savoy)