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ML
3021 Posts |
 Posted - 02/11/2008 : 07:41:03 AM
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Representative Tom Lantos Dies at 80
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 twice from a forced 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.
''It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Na-zi 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.''
White House press secretary Dana Perino announced the news of Lantos' death to reporters at a morning briefing and flags were lowered to half-mast 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 Relations Committee to empower the powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world.''
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.
''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.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-Lantos.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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BigFire
2962 Posts |
Posted - 02/11/2008 : 08:08:00 AM
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| he was a good egg, RIP. |
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