California’s Rep. Tom Lantos was Holocaust survivor
Published 11:13 pm Monday, February 11, 2008
WASHINGTON — Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, died Monday of complications from cancer of the esophagus at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland, his staff said. He was 80.
A champion of civil liberties, Lantos founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and supported human-rights struggles against both right-wing and left-wing regimes in China, Russia, Burma, Sudan’s Darfur region and anywhere else where official pressure could, as he put it, “prevent another Holocaust.” He was also passionate about animal rights.
He used his post as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to highlight human-rights violators. He argued that nations with bad records had no place on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, that Beijing should not be awarded the 2008 Olympics because of its human-rights record and that corporations had an obligation to protect individuals and media freedoms.
When Yahoo executives appeared before the committee last year to defend their role in the jailing of a journalist by Chinese officials, Lantos said, “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are Pygmies.”
The congressman, a staunch supporter of Israel, led a U.S. walkout of a United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 over its anti-Semitic language. But he was also an advocate of talking to renegade regimes. He was among the first members of Congress to visit Libya in 2004, lauding Moammar Gadhafi’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. And when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., met with Syrian President Bashar Assad last year, Lantos was at her side. “Dialogue,” he said, “is not appeasement.”
Born Feb. 1, 1928, to a middle-class family in Budapest, Hungary, Lantos was 16 when Nazis occupied the city in 1944. Sent to a labor camp in a nearby village, he escaped, was recaptured and beaten. After he escaped a second time, he took refuge with his aunt in one of the safe houses maintained by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.
With his blue eyes and blond hair, Lantos often served as a courier, delivering food to Jews in hiding, and working for the underground fighting the Nazi regime.
After the war, he located his childhood sweetheart, Annette Tilleman, a cousin of the glamorous Gabor sisters. He came to the United States in 1947, earning a degree in economics from the University of Washington and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Tilleman arrived in 1948, and they were married in 1950.
His first major bill in Congress was to give honorary American citizenship to Wallenberg whom Lantos called “the central figure in my life.”
Lantos, an avid swimmer who never smoked, announced last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer and would retire at the end of the year. “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,” he said. “I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”
He is survived by his wife, Annette, and daughters Katrina Lantos Swett of New Hampshire and Annette Lantos Dick of Colorado, 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
