Holocaust Survivor Rep. Tom Lantos Dies

California Democrat Was Only Holocaust Survivor To Serve In Congress

(AP)  Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80.

Spokeswoman Lynne Weil said Lantos, a Californian, died early Monday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Maryland. He was surrounded by his wife, Annette, two daughters, and many of his 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Annette Lantos said in a statement that her husband's life was "defined by courage, optimism, and unwavering dedication to his principles and to his family."

Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south including Lantos' home of San Mateo.

President Bush praised Lantos in a statement as "a man of character and a champion of human rights."

"After immigrating to America more than six decades ago, he worked to help oppressed people around the world have the opportunity to live in freedom," Bush said. "As the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, Tom was a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men."

Flags were lowered to half-staff at the White House and U.S. Capitol.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Tom Lantos was a true American hero. He was the embodiment of what it meant to have one's freedom denied and then to find it and to insist that America stand for spreading freedom and prosperity to others."

Speaking to reporters at the State Department, she said, "He was also a dear, dear friend and I am personally quite devastated by his loss."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Lantos "used his chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee to empower the powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world."

The timing of Lantos' diagnosis was a particular blow because he had assumed his committee chairmanship just a year earlier, when Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense his whole life had been a preparation for the job - and it was.

Lantos, who referred to himself as "an American by choice," was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.

That background gave Lantos a moral authority unique in Congress and he used it repeatedly to speak out on foreign policy issues, sometimes courting controversy. Lantos was outspoken on human rights in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere, and in 2006 was one of five members of Congress arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy over what the Bush administration describes as genocide in Darfur.

He joined the Bush administration in strong support of Israel and was a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion, though he would become a strong critic of President Bush's handling of the war.

Lantos was a frequent visitor to Hungary, meeting with political leaders and holding recurrent news conferences which were widely covered in the Hungarian press. He was widely recognized there for his calls for the respect of the human rights of the millions of ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries, especially Romania and Slovakia, whose cultural identity was a common target of those countries' communist regimes.

"Tom Lantos deserves that the millions of people in Central-Eastern Europe think about him for a moment and guard his memory," Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said in parliament.

Lantos, who was elected to the House in 1980, founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. In early 2004 he led the first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting personally with Moammar Gadhafi and urging the Bush administration to show "good faith" to the North African leader in his pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons programs. Later that year, President Bush lifted sanctions against Libya.

In October 2007, as Foreign Affairs chairman, Lantos defied administration opposition by moving through his committee a measure that would have recognized the World War I-era killings of Armenians as a genocide, something strongly opposed by Turkey. The bill has not passed the House.

Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary, but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he would make in committee if the testimony he heard was not to his liking.

"Morally, you are pygmies," he berated top executives of Yahoo Inc. at a hearing he called in November 2007 as they defended their company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.

"This is about as believable as Elvis being seen in a Kmart," was his retort to a witness testifying before a subcommittee he headed in 1989 that led a congressional investigation of Reagan-era scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Lantos was elected to Congress after spending three decades teaching economics at San Francisco State University, working as a business consultant and serving as a foreign policy commentator on television. He challenged GOP incumbent Rep. Bill Royer in 1980 and won narrowly, subsequently winning re-election by comfortable margins.

"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," Lantos said upon announcing his retirement last month. "I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."

Lantos came to the United States in 1947 after being awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1950 he married Annette, his childhood sweetheart, with whom he'd managed to reunite after the war. The couple moved to the San Francisco Bay area so Lantos could pursue a doctorate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

The first major bill Lantos passed in Congress was to give honorary American citizenship to Wallenberg, whom he called "the central figure in my life." But Lantos sometimes shied away from talking about his experiences in the war. When he joined a lawsuit in 1984 to seek Wallenberg's release from the Soviet Union - Wallenberg was captured and imprisoned by Soviet troops after World War II - Lantos told The Associated Press that he "didn't want to dwell on the details" of the dangers he faced from the Nazis.

Lantos joined the Hungarian Underground after the Nazi occupation but was captured and sent to a forced labor camp 40 miles north of Budapest, according to the biography on his congressional Web site. He was beaten severely when he tried to escape, but feeling he had nothing to lose he made another attempt. This time he made it back to Budapest and to one of the safehouses that Wallenberg had established.

Lantos credited Wallenberg's protection, his own Aryan appearance - blond hair, blue eyes - and a good measure of luck with helping him survive the war. But he said that at the time he didn't think he had much of a chance of staying alive.

"I was sixteen, but I was very old," he said in an interview for "The Last Days," the 1999 book accompanying the Steven Spielberg documentary of the same name that focused on the experience of Hungarian-American survivors.

"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."

Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette and Katrina, who between them produced 18 grandchildren, one of whom died young. According to Lantos, his daughters were following through on a promise to produce a very large family because his and his wife's families had perished in the Holocaust.

[gunnerv1]

If you ask the Jews, Jesus was just another common ordnary Joe Shmoo Ralph Mouth, I am an Agnostic Jew! I like Israel, I''ve even been there, the place is pretty good. Of course, what can be all that bad for a country thats only sixty years old.

[prinzowhales]

Singinrick, bearer of false witness, you answer nothing. You imagine that you can serve the rabbins and their Golum-State, their occult works like the Zohar and their Bablyonian Talmud--which they place above Holy Torah--and clearly, from your quotes of the Old Testament, you prefer scripture that was written and juggled for political purposes and not the ''Good News'' of Jeshua, who said in Matthew 16:6 "...Take heed and beware the leven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." He told us in Matthew 23 not to allow ourselves to be called "Rabbi" and in verse 15, He said "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, you make him two-fold more the child of ''ell than yourselves."

Fancy that! Yeshua is telling us that those who follow Judaism are ''two-fold more the children of ''ell than the Pharisees themselves!'' Does this sound like Yeshua is committed to the protection of the false Israel of the rabbins?

But you have set yourself against Jeshua''s judgement of the rabbins and their works...the "commandments of men". Your denials are hollow and you are alone because the Holy Spirit does not oppose Jeshua''s judgment. "Woe unto you!"

[ekucrew]

Palestine and work for peace like RAchel Corey and you will be run over repeatedly by an IDF bulldozer.


----------------------------------
----------------------------------------
------

Posted by Prinzowhales


She should have moved out of the way.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by poopusbuttus at 10:32 AM : Feb 12, 2008
+ report abuse


How does Rachel Corey figure into a story of Lantos and his grit? Oh well....

Corey''s parents tried to sue CAT, who made the dozer, go figure....not the operator of the dozer. Wonder if they ever collected any $$ ??

[poopusbuttus]

Palestine and work for peace like RAchel Corey and you will be run over repeatedly by an IDF bulldozer.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by Prinzowhales


She should have moved out of the way.

[prinzowhales]

singinrick--Show me one instance of a Palestinian child blowing himself up.

And, again, from Matthew, this time 5:20, "For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven."

You subscribe to the doctrines of the Pharisees, backing the claims of the atheistic Zionist racist ideology and the heirs of the Pharisees, the rabbins, to the land of Palestine. These fathers of the false-Israel do not even acknowledge the Book from which you quote as the highest authority in their religion of Judaism--instead, as you well know, it is the Babylonian Talmud--the commandments of men--that they hold most esteemed and holy....the works of men! And, YOU!, through your support for the unholy creation of the rabbins, partake in their denial and cursing of Jeshua. You are no better than they! Go to the Zionist State and try to preach and you will be spat upon by Jews as are the Christian priests in Jerusalem. Go to Palestine and work for peace like RAchel Corey and you will be run over repeatedly by an IDF bulldozer.

[prinzowhales]

If, as you claim, all of the children of Palestine are taught to be suicide bombers...why aren''t they blowing themselves up? Is it the fault of the schools? How many Palestinian children have become martyrs by blowing themselves and others up? Is there even one, O bearer of false witness who will not even call Yeshua by his name?

You are of the Synagogue of Satan and support the work of the Pharisees who Yeshua rebuked. Jeshua''s words in Matthew 15: 7-9 speaks of people like you:

"Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you saying, This people draweth nigh to me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worhip me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men."

You are the servant of the Pharisees...you spread their poison. Even among the Moslems, Jeshua is honoured...Under the Babylonian Talmud, Jeshua, His blessed Mother and his followers are reviled and cursed.

[prinzowhales]

It was Admiral McCain who orchestrated the cover-up of the LBJ-facilitated Israeli attack on the USS LIBERTY. He thwarted the Kidd inquiry in the murder by Israeli forces of 30-plus US sailors in the attack by ordering its completion in less than a week and forbidding this fine naval officer from going to Israel to conduct the investigation, when Kidd said it would take six months to conduct a real inquiry. John McCain-- who is NOT a natural born citizen of the United States--saw his career flourish thanks to his criminal father. This disgusting officer, the son of a disgusting father does not belong in public life in any civilized nation..

[prinzowhales]

singinrick--The Israelis responded to the capture of their soldiers with artillery attacks on Lebanese villages. They placed their artillery in civilian occupied areas and shelled civilian targets. This was witnessed by the UN observers who were under fire and gave their exact coordinates to the IDF--and were immediately brought under more concentrated and accurate fire...the observers were murdered, their post destroyed.

The Israelis still held Lebanese civilians from their previous war of aggression against Lebanon when they oversaw the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian women, children and old men in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982...raping, torturing and killing while the IDF surrounded the camps and fired flares to light the work of their Phalangist allies.
20,000 civilians were murdered in the attacks on Beirut. The Israelis still occupy areas of southern Lebanon. The Lebanese were interested in trading their captives for the Lebanese civilians...the Israelis were interested in destroying the civilian infrastructure of an increasingly prosperous and recovered Lebanon.

[prinzowhales]

singinrick--The only peace the Zio-Nazis who run the Israeli state want is a bigger ''piece'' of Palestine. Even when the suicide bombings stopped, they continued to make air strikes and incursions into the remnants of Palestine murdering civilians and destroying property.

The Palestinians have seen this, the world has seen this, even if you and Church-ite, anti-Christian creatures like you have not. You are of the Synagogue of Satan and support the Pharisees who were condemned by Yeshua and the blood of the murdered children of Palestine and Israel will rage against you on the Day of Judgment.

[brianbwb-2009]

"-I don''''t follow a religion brian" Posted by singinrick

Except for whatever religions advocate the genocide of Muslims.

[ubrew12]

Pssst.... he''s dead.... we can pretend it didn''t happen now....

[jerr11]

Posted by singinrick at 08:42 PM : Feb 11, 2008



singinrick - An Israeli operative.

Mission - Create hatred and fear against Muslims.

Objective - Keep America in Iraq in perpetuity, to fight Israel''s dirty war against its neigbors.

[jerr11]

Posted by singinrick at 09:36 PM : Feb 11, 2008


FEARMONGER, HATEMONGER.

We know your secret agenda.

You want to forment hatred between Christians and Muslims so we''ll keep fighting your dirty wars for you and your country.

And that country ain''t the US of A.

You want the US to be embroiled in a permanent war against Islam so your country can reap the rewards of that conflict.

You''re as Christian as the other hate-monger, Bin Laden.

Be gone, az*zhole.

[fettkonserv]

Tom Lantos was not afraid to tell it like it is.

I didn''t agree with him on many things especially Israel but His passing is truly a loss for the USA.

[rhs648]

HOLD IT! we got way too many people as it is, 300 MILLION v/s 150 million in 1950, we dont need clowns and idiots mass breeding to ''''make up'''' for minor losses, gezus.

Posted by newster1

Sounds like you have a heart of stone.

[prinzowhales]

singinrick--And, to continue from my last post, that is precisely what you and idiots and ignoramuses like ''gkc99'' do not understand! This is part and parcel of the cost of the racialist Zionist agenda... to prevent peace from ever occurring in the Middle East. To keep those outside the empire at odds has been part of imperial strategy since before the days of the Roman Empire...it is a dirty business, turning people against people...it is variously described as ''Realpolitik'' and ''Machiavellian''...it is the game we are playing out to its bloody end in the Middle East where children are taught to hate and fear and hate and fear.

[prinzowhales]

singinrick--I have no intention of refuting it...I am sure that much of it is true...just as I am sure that what the children of Israel are being taught and expressed in their writing on the missiles is true...That is the tragedy! That is why peace is needed...and that is what the intransigence of the Likudnik extremists make impossible by pressing for more and more and more of Palestine. It is like Northern Ireland...and it is destructive...and it can end if only the US and its allies viewed Israel as something more than a stalking horse for their imperial aspirations in the region...If only they would back peace.

[nothappyatall]

ccording to Lantos, his daughters were following through on a promise to produce a very large family because his and his wife''s families had perished in the Holocaust."

HOLD IT! we got way too many people as it is, 300 MILLION v/s 150 million in 1950, we dont need clowns and idiots mass breeding to ''make up'' for minor losses, gezus.

[prinzowhales]

closethippy1,

The so-called "Palestinians" aren''''t under any occupation, and Israeli children are taught peace and tolerance, not hatred and to become suicide bombers.

If you can refute the abundance of evidence I have presented for this subject on here, try it, but if not, your ridiculous assertions that Israel is occupying someone else''''s land will always be, as they have been for the past 60 years, pure and utter sick and deceptive propoganda.
Posted by singinrick at 09:02 PM : Feb 11, 2008
-----------------
Naughty, naughty little ricky...it was just the other day that "j-whitman", if memory serves gave you a link of some of those tolerant little Israeli children writing happy little messages on the missiles being used by the IDF to murder little Lebanese children...and who can forget the ''tolerance'' shown by these little Israeli children as they hit and pulled at the robes of a lone Palestinian woman they had surrounded like a pack of hyenas.

Singinrick...if you are going to lie--and that seems to be your nature...take a lead from your master, George,and make the lie so outrageous that few will believe that you could actually be lying.

[closethippy1]

Here''s a link to an interview of a Holocaust survivor who evidently has a much bigger heart than Tom Lantos ever did:

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/59FEE2A5-1461-4119-B852-1045D235566C.htm