From Deseret News archives:
Prayers, memorials
Students mourn as they honor their lost schoolmates
"God is here. He loves this campus. He loves these students," the Rev. Franklin Graham told a multitude in orange and maroon that gathered on the grassy drill field at Virginia Tech. "We saw evil here. But look at the good you see today on this campus."
Not far away, Chase Appich comforted a sobbing Jessica Hawkins. They had paraded and played in the Marching Virginians band with Ryan Clark, a senior from Martinez, Ga., who was among the 32 students slain here on Monday.
With classes canceled for the remainder of the week, the pathways were sparsely traveled through the flagstone buildings at this picturesque college nestled in the New River Valley. On a warm spring afternoon, many of the students who remained on campus congregated on the 36-acre drill field to mourn and pray and remember their lost schoolmates. Hundreds signed big white signboards that had been set up to memorialize the 32 fallen Hokies
On the drill field, Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, visited a semi-circle of 32 "Hokie stones" laid out in memory of the fallen students. Each had a flower and Virginia Tech pennant.
Asked about the victims' parents, Graham lowered his head in sadness.
"I cannot imagine the hurt that they are going through," he said. "I pray for them."
In New York, a Holocaust survivor, Liviu Librescu, who escaped the Nazi killings to become a world-class scientist, was remembered Wednesday as a hero for saving his Virginia Tech students from a rampaging Cho Seung-Hui.
A Brooklyn funeral home and its Jewish community volunteered to hold a funeral before Librescu's remains were flown to Israel for burial.
The professor's wife, Marlena Librescu, arrived with Israeli consular officials. She was greeted with bear hugs from strangers who praised her husband's bravery.
Although she was initially composed, she broke down as someone handed her her husband's golden wedding band — 42 years after their marriage.
"He saved them. He saved them," she said quietly of her husband's students as she slipped the band on her finger, next to her own.
During World War II, Librescu was imprisoned in a Romanian labor camp and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a ghetto in the city of Focsani. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed during the war.
