TOM LANTOS: 1928-2008
Stockton Record
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Feb 13 2008
CA
Tom Lantos, the conscience of Congress, can only echo now.
But what noble reverberations.
The only Holocaust survivor to become a member of the House of
Representatives, the San Mateo Democrat died of cancer at 80 on Monday.
His life was a monument to courage, righteous indignation and defending
the oppressed. His three-decade political career reached its apex
in January 2007, when Lantos became chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee.
The 14-term congressman was a determined protector of human rights
with unwavering principles.
He was a staunch defender of Israel, a vocal critic of totalitarian
regimes, a supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and founder in 1983
of the bipartisan Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1928, Lantos was 16 when the Nazis
occupied his country and sent him to a labor camp. Twice he escaped,
the second time reaching the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the
Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in World War II.
After the war, most of his family killed at Auschwitz, Lantos
reunited with childhood friend Annette Tilleman, who had escaped to
Switzerland. They married and moved to the United States, where Lantos
earned a doctorate in economics from the University of California,
Berkeley. He taught for 30 years at San Francisco State University.
Lantos, first elected to the House in 1980, made the most of his one
year as House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman.
Members of the committee demanded Japanese officials apologize
for wartime sex slavery by their military. In a principled but
controversial move, committee members declared Turkey’s mass killing
of Armenians during World War I an act of genocide.
No government was too powerful and no issue too delicate for Lantos,
who frequently criticized Chinese leaders for human rights abuses. He
was arrested in 2006 outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington,
D.C., protesting the mass killings in Darfur.
Lantos’ legacy emboldens us never to ignore suffering, always to speak
up for the nameless and oppressed and to consistently confront evil
and tyranny.