In the nearly 60 years Tom Lantos spent in the United States, he never lost his Hungarian accent, his love for animals or his stubborn belief that political leaders have a duty to speak out against tyranny or oppression, wherever it occurs.
JAMIE ROSE / New York Times
Rep. Tom Lantos (in a 2007 photo) became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress.
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Rep. Lantos, the Democratic congressman from San Mateo for 27 years, died Monday morning at Maryland's Bethesda Naval Hospital from cancer of the esophagus. He was 80.
He championed the causes of those who often had no other voice, whether they were in Tibet, Darfur, China or anywhere else in the world. As a teenage boy in Hungary, Rep. Lantos escaped from Nazi labor camps and the genocide of the Holocaust, which took the lives of most of his family. It was a time he never forgot and that shaped the rest of his life.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district split San Francisco's voters with Lantos', said he made it his life's work to shine “a bright light on the dark corners of oppression” and used his position in Congress to “empower the powerless and give a voice to the voiceless throughout the world.”
President Bush, who felt the edge of the congressman's sharp tongue more than once, called Rep. Lantos “a man of character” who was “a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men.”
With his shock of white hair and unmistakable European accent, Rep. Lantos was often described as “courtly” or as “a gentleman of the old school.” But he also was a tough political infighter who didn't much care whom he offended when it came to making his point.
He founded the bipartisan Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983 and acted unabashedly as Congress' conscience when it came to those issues.
His “tireless and passionate work for human rights around the globe is legendary,” said Jackie Speier, a former Democratic state senator whom Rep. Lantos endorsed on Jan. 16 to succeed him in Congress. “No one was more articulate, persuasive or tenacious in fighting for the common people, and no adversary was too large for Tom.”
In 1987, then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping attacked Rep. Lantos by name for “slandering and vilifying China” over complaints about human rights abuses in Tibet.
Two years ago, Rep. Lantos was arrested in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington as he protested the continuing strife in the country's Darfur region.
“If you're looking for a lack of international morality, Darfur encompasses all aspects,” he said.
When tech giant Yahoo was accused of providing the Chinese government with information that enabled them to track down and imprison dissidents who used the service, Rep. Lantos summoned Jerry Yang, the company's founder, and the company's top lawyer to Washington last November and took them to task.
“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” he told them at the end of a three-hour hearing before his House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Rep. Lantos' life was “defined by courage, optimism and unwavering dedication to his principles and to his family,” said Annette, his wife of 57 years. He was surrounded by his wife, two daughters and many of his 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren when he died, a spokeswoman said.
Rep. Lantos was born in Budapest in 1928 and was 16 when the Nazis took over the city in March 1944. Most Jews outside the Hungarian capital were sent to Auschwitz, while young Jewish men from Budapest were taken to forced labor camps.
Rep. Lantos was taken to a camp at Szob, a village about 40 miles from the capital, from which he escaped twice. The second time he made it to a safe house in Budapest.
The house was one of those under the protection of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps. In 1981, Rep. Lantos wrote the bill that made Wallenberg only the second honorary U.S. citizen, after former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The Red Army liberated Budapest in January 1945, and Rep. Lantos began to search for his family. Most had died, but he managed to contact Annette Tillemann, a childhood friend who had escaped to Switzerland with her mother. Like Rep. Lantos, most of her relatives perished in the death camps.
The two were reunited in Hungary later that winter and married in 1950. She was a lifetime partner, volunteering in his office during his years in Congress.
Rep. Lantos began studying at the University of Budapest in 1946 and received a scholarship in 1947 to study in the United States. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the University of Washington and a doctorate from the University of California Berkeley.
Rep. Lantos and his wife settled in San Mateo County in 1950, and he became an economics professor at San Francisco State University, where one student remembered him as one of the few teachers in the 1970s to wear a coat and tie to class every day.
He made his first foray into politics when he won a seat on the Millbrae school board and was a regular foreign policy analyst on public television. In 1978, he moved to Washington as an adviser to Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, who was planning a run for president.
“Tom Lantos was one of my closest friends in life,” Biden said Monday. “His steadfast commitment to human rights and freedom across the world will live long after today.”
Rep. Lantos jumped into the 1980 House race and shocked incumbent Republican Bill Royer despite the Reagan landslide that devastated most Democratic candidates.
Throughout his time in the House, Rep. Lantos, the lone Holocaust survivor in Congress, was a strong supporter of Israel and Jewish issues.
Rep. Lantos “transformed his own painful experience during the Holocaust into a lifelong commitment to preserving the dignity and security of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and to fighting for the human rights of all,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
His final years in office were marked by a running battle with Bay area liberals, including many in his own district. They were angered by his early support for the war in Iraq and his refusal to say that the United States was wrong to overturn Saddam Hussein.
“I abhor war in the way only a survivor and a grandfather . . . can,” Rep. Lantos said in a 2002 Chronicle interview. “But . . . if the costs of war are great, the costs of inaction and appeasement are greater still.”
He left public life with no regrets.
“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust . . . 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.”
