11 February 2008
United States Mourns California Congressman Tom Lantos
Human rights champion and Holocaust survivor loses battles with cancer
Washington -- Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and one of the United States’ leading champions of human rights, died February 11 in Bethesda, Maryland. Lantos, who announced in January he would not seek re-election, was 80 years old.
The California congressman’s commitment to human rights was forged when, as a young man in Hungary, he lost nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. He is the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, to which he was elected in 1980.
An American by choice, Lantos was born in Budapest, Hungary, on February 1, 1928. He was 16 years old when Nazi Germany occupied his native country. As a teenager, he was a member of the anti-Nazi underground and later of the anti-Communist student movement. Following the war, Lantos was awarded a scholarship to study in the United States, and, beginning in 1947, he studied economics, ultimately earning a doctorate from the University of California - Berkeley.
"It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country," he said January 2 during his announcement that he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would not seek re-election. Lantos was serving his 14th term in Congress.
In August 2003, Hungary’s prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, presented Lantos with the Middle Cross with the Star of the Order of the Republic of Hungary, the highest honor the Hungarian government can bestow.
Throughout his adult life, Lantos sought to be a voice for human rights and civil liberties. He was the founding co-chairman of the 24-year-old Congressional Human Rights Caucus and continued to co-chair that caucus until his death. He also served on the U.S. delegation to the Preparatory World Conference Against Racism in 2001.
Lantos’ lifelong commitment to human rights began in Hungary and was inspired in large part by Raoul Wallenberg.
CONGRESSMAN’S LIFE A LEGACY OF RAOUL WALLENBERG
In a first-person account written for Steven Spielberg’s The Last Days, Lantos recalls:
“When Hitler occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, I was sixteen years old. I joined the Hungarian Underground. It was basically a number of not very well organized groups, small clusters of individuals. A handful of these people were engaged in military activities. But increasingly these people organized under Raoul Wallenberg's leadership, to provide food, medical supplies and a feeling of being a protected community which hopefully would survive the war under Swedish, Swiss, Spanish or Vatican protection. As 1944 wore on, I really didn't think I had much of a chance of surviving the Second World War. … It was Raoul Wallenberg who interposed his frail body between the Nazi war machine and thousands and thousands of Jewish men, women and children. Had it not been for him, neither I nor the other tens of thousands of others would have survived to January 1945.”
Raoul Wallenberg, posted to the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, is credited with saving thousands of lives during World War II by issuing so-called Swedish protected passports, pieces of paper with an embassy seal that declared that the bearer planned to go to Sweden as an immigrant and was under the protection of the Swedish government. The papers were legal fiction, but Wallenberg managed to convince the Nazis to honor them. His work inspired other governments, including those of Portugal and Spain, to take similar actions.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Wallenberg was the ultimate humanitarian hero of the Second World War,” Lantos recounts. “Here was a man who did not share with us his nationality, his language or his religion -- he was a Lutheran. What we shared was our common humanity.”
Lantos received word of his U.S. scholarship in 1947, and left Budapest on August 8 on a train bound for Paris to board a converted troop ship for a voyage to what would prove to be his new homeland.
The California congressman never lost his sense of amazement at the course of a life that had once seemed so fragile, so tenuous:
“My life today, given my background, is something I cannot believe possible. I am privileged to serve the Congress of the United States. I think back to my life fifty years ago, when I was a hunted animal in the jungle, and how I am dealing with issues of state of a country I love so deeply. It all seems like a dream and it all places an incredible sense of responsibility on me. I didn't achieve this because of what I am, it happened because of what this country is.”
