Tom Lantos (Feb. 1, 1928-Feb. 11, 2008) was born as Tamás Peter Lantos in Budapest, Hungary, to banker Pal Lantos and his wife Anna, a high school English teacher. After Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, Lantos was sent to a labor comp, but on a second try escaped to a safe house operated by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. With fair hair and blue eyes, he was mistaken by Nazis for an Aryan and thus was able to serve as a courier delivering food and medicine to Jews living in other safe houses.
Following the war, Lantos learned that his mother and other family members had been murdered by the Nazis. He enrolled at the University of Budapest, where his essay on Franklin D. Roosevelt won for him a Hillel Foundation scholarship in the United States. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Washington at Seattle, respectively in 1949 and 1950, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1953.
In July 1950, he married Annette Tillemann, a first cousin of actresses Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor. The couple remained married for 58 years until Lantos’ death in 2008. They had two daughters, Annette Marie and Katrina, and 18 grandchildren.
His political career began in 1980, when as a Democrat he successfully challenged Republican Bill Royer, and went on to be reelected 13 times. His voting record was liberal on health care, conservative on spending, and protectionist on the environment. He was best known for his work on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he advocated for the rights of such minorities as Christians in Saudi Arabia and Sudan and Tibetans in China. He declared Turkey’s mass killings of Armenians during World War I to be genocide, and he demanded that Japan apologize for forcing women in conquered countries into sex slavery.
He opposed military aid to Egypt on the grounds that Egypt was permitting money and weapons to flow to Hamas in Gaza. During the Gulf War in 1991, he was criticized for accepting and then publicizing a false atrocity story that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from their incubators in Kuwait and left them on the ground to die. In 2002, he supported a second war with Iraq believing that dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But by 2006 he was distancing himself from the war.
He died at age 80 of esophageal cancer, drawing such dignitaries to his funeral as then Senator Joe Biden, fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and musician Bono of U2.
Tomorrow, February 2: Jascha Heifetz
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article.