Tom Lantos, a tall, dignified politician with a pronounced Hungarian accent, was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, and he became the powerful chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He was born of Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, joined the underground resistance after the Nazi occupation and at 16 was sent to a forced labour camp.
He survived after escaping twice from the camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his status to save the lives of thousands of Hungarians. The first important Bill that Lantos passed after entering Congress was to give honorary American citizenship to Wallenberg whom he called “the central figure of my life” (Wallenberg disappeared in January 1945 while in Soviet military hands outside Budapest and was never seen again).
Lantos credited his survival to Wallenberg’s protection, his own Aryan appearance — blond hair, blue eyes — and a good measure of luck.
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“The bloodbath, the cruelty, the death that I saw so many times around me during those few months between March of 1944 and January of 1945 made me a very old young man,” he later declared.
After the war Lantos learnt that his parents and most of his relatives had died in the Holocaust. His background gave him a moral authority unique in Congress and he used it to speak out on foreign affairs as a fervent human rights campaigner. Last year, as one of the most senior figures on Capitol Hill, he was among five members of Congress arrested while protesting outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington over the genocide in Darfur.
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In 1947 he was awarded a scholarship to study in the United States. On the converted troop ship that took him to New York he saw wicker baskets filled with oranges and bananas and asked if he could have a piece of fruit. A seaman replied: “Man, you can eat all the damn bananas and all the damn oranges you want.”
“It was then,” said Lantos, “I knew I was in heaven.”
Announcing his retirement from Congress last month, after being given a diagnosis of cancer, Lantos said: “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.”
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Lantos was born in Budapest in 1928. After coming to America he attended the University of Washington where he graduated with a master’s degree. He then spent 30 years teaching economics at San Francisco University until 1980, when he entered Congress to which he was elected 14 successive times. His retirement on medical grounds was a particular blow. Lantos had assumed chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee only a year earlier, when the Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense his whole life had been preparation for the job.
The Northern California district which Lantos represented included the southwest portion of San Francisco, known for its liberal views which, to an extent, Lantos shared. He founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983 and championed those causes worldwide. Last year he defied Administration opposition by supporting a measure recognising the First World War killings of Armenians in Turkey. The Bill, which was not passed, would have done disastrous damage to US-Turkish relations.
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In 2004 he led the first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting Colonel Gaddafi and urging the Bush Administration to show “good faith” in the Libyan leader’s pledge to abandon nuclear weapons. That year America lifted sanctions against Libya and entered into a new relationship.
At the same time Lantos was a passionate supporter of Israel and tried unsuccessfully to block US aid to Egypt and Lebanon. He denounced Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in financing international terrorism.
Out of step with some of his fellow Democrats, he was a leading advocate of the 2002 congressional resolution authorising the Iraq invasion and played a decisive role in gaining his party’s support for the measure. However, he became critical about the direction of the war, called repeatedly for large withdrawals of American troops and opposed last year’s decision to send in a new “surge” of US combat forces to reverse the deteriorating security situation. “Our efforts in Iraq are a mess,” he said “and throwing in more troops will not improve it. The Administration’s myopic policies in Iraq have created a fiasco.”
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For years Lantos sided with Repubican neoconservatives, who believe the United States should assert democracy abroad and use the military to intervene when a moral cause or national interest is at stake.
The political scientist Bruce Cain of the University of California said that Lantos’s long alliance with Repubicans on the Iraq war made him politcally vulnerable at home. He said Lantos was able to have a hawkish postion on foreign policy only because in every other dimension he agreed with his San Francisco constituents.
In 1950 Lantos was married to his boyhood Hungarian girlfriend, Annette, and they had two daughters. “Because my wife and I were survivors of the Holocaust; because our own families were killed, the gift to us was to give us as many grandchildren as possible to keep alive the names of those who were lost,” Lantos said. One daughter has ten children and the second has seven. He is survived by his wife and daughters.
Tom Lantos, politician, was born on February 1, 1928. He died on February 11, 2008, aged 80