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OBITUARY: HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR LIVED AMERICAN DREAM
By Daniel Dombey
FT
February 12 2008 02:00
Tom Lantos, a Hungarian-born Jew who escaped the Nazis to become a
power broker on Capitol Hill, died on Monday after a career that he
believed would have been impossible anywhere except in the US. He
was 80.
Lantos, who at his death was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, was born into a family of academics in Budapest. At the
age of 10 he was made aware of the tenuous nature of that life when
he bought his first newspaper. It bore the headline "Hitler marches
into Austria".
Jan-02 German troops occupied Hungary in 1944, not long after Lantos
turned 16. While other Jews were taken to Auschwitz, he, as a young,
able-bodied man, was dispatched to a forced labour camp. He made two
escape attempts, the second of them successful.
He found refuge via Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who
sheltered Jews in Budapest and vanished after being arrested by the
Soviets in 1945.
Although Lantos never met Wallenberg, he said the diplomat was the
"central figure in my life". Lantos remembered later: "Had it not
been for him, neither I nor the other tens of thousands of others
would have survived."
The future Congressman left Budapest in 1947 after having obtained
a US scholarship, travelling to New York on the SS Marine Falcon,
a converted troopship.
He studied economics at the University of Washington in Seattle
and went on to earn a doctorate in the subject at the University of
California, Berkeley.
After 30 years as an academic, consultant and television analyst,
in 1981 he became a member of the House of Representatives for the
12th District of California - the only Holocaust survivor to reach
Capitol Hill - and was the founder of the Congressional Human Rights
Caucus two years later.
In 2007, after the Democrats retook Congress, he became chairman of
the House Foreign Affairs Committee and sought to advance his human
rights agenda. Although he backed the 2002 authorisation of military
action in Iraq, he became a critic of the Bush administration's conduct
of the war. He also clashed with the administration's last year by
supporting a House resolution that infuriated Turkey by labelling
the first world war killings of Armenians as genocide. The measure
has still not been backed by the full House.
Last month, after being diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus,
Lantos said he did not plan to run for Congress again. But his illness
denied him the time to serve out his term. He leaves behind him his
wife Annette, whom he met in Budapest before the war, two daughters,
18 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
In 1999, in a contribution to a volume of Holocaust reminiscences,
he wrote: "I think back to my life 50 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." He added. "It all seems like a dream."
By Daniel Dombey
FT
February 12 2008 02:00
Tom Lantos, a Hungarian-born Jew who escaped the Nazis to become a
power broker on Capitol Hill, died on Monday after a career that he
believed would have been impossible anywhere except in the US. He
was 80.
Lantos, who at his death was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, was born into a family of academics in Budapest. At the
age of 10 he was made aware of the tenuous nature of that life when
he bought his first newspaper. It bore the headline "Hitler marches
into Austria".
Jan-02 German troops occupied Hungary in 1944, not long after Lantos
turned 16. While other Jews were taken to Auschwitz, he, as a young,
able-bodied man, was dispatched to a forced labour camp. He made two
escape attempts, the second of them successful.
He found refuge via Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who
sheltered Jews in Budapest and vanished after being arrested by the
Soviets in 1945.
Although Lantos never met Wallenberg, he said the diplomat was the
"central figure in my life". Lantos remembered later: "Had it not
been for him, neither I nor the other tens of thousands of others
would have survived."
The future Congressman left Budapest in 1947 after having obtained
a US scholarship, travelling to New York on the SS Marine Falcon,
a converted troopship.
He studied economics at the University of Washington in Seattle
and went on to earn a doctorate in the subject at the University of
California, Berkeley.
After 30 years as an academic, consultant and television analyst,
in 1981 he became a member of the House of Representatives for the
12th District of California - the only Holocaust survivor to reach
Capitol Hill - and was the founder of the Congressional Human Rights
Caucus two years later.
In 2007, after the Democrats retook Congress, he became chairman of
the House Foreign Affairs Committee and sought to advance his human
rights agenda. Although he backed the 2002 authorisation of military
action in Iraq, he became a critic of the Bush administration's conduct
of the war. He also clashed with the administration's last year by
supporting a House resolution that infuriated Turkey by labelling
the first world war killings of Armenians as genocide. The measure
has still not been backed by the full House.
Last month, after being diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus,
Lantos said he did not plan to run for Congress again. But his illness
denied him the time to serve out his term. He leaves behind him his
wife Annette, whom he met in Budapest before the war, two daughters,
18 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
In 1999, in a contribution to a volume of Holocaust reminiscences,
he wrote: "I think back to my life 50 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." He added. "It all seems like a dream."