U.S. loses a voice for human rights

It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Congress lost its conscience Monday when Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif. and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, died in Washington from cancer of the esophagus. Lantos, 80, a Hungarian Jew who escaped twice from Nazi concentration camps, was the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress. While he was involved in some controversial – and questionable – dealings over the years, he was that body’s most powerful voice for human rights and civil liberties. With a moral authority born of personal suffering, he kept his colleagues honest on such issues.

He was one of several lawmakers arrested at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington in 2006 during a protest of the Darfur genocide. He spoke out about the mistreatment of religious minorities in various countries, and was particularly focused on preventing a resurgence of antisemitism. He was instrumental in the 2004 deal that led to Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi ending his nation’s nuclear weapons program.

And he wasn’t one to pull his punches. In November, Lantos upbraided Yahoo executives over the online firm’s cooperation with Chinese authorities that led to a journalist’s 10-year jail sentence: “Morally, you are pygmies,” he told them. In June, he called former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder a “political prostitute” for his ties to Russian energy firms, then apologized – to prostitutes.

“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,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. “He was also a dear, dear friend and I am personally quite devastated by his loss.”

Lantos’ life story is an amazing one by any standard. He was a teenager when he and his family were imprisoned by the Nazis. He eventually got away, aided by the legendary Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews. After the war, Lantos reunited with his childhood sweetheart, Annette, who became his wife of 58 years. He won a scholarship to study in America, enrolled in the University of Washington, and went on to get a doctorate in economics at Berkeley. He ran for Congress in 1980, and held his seat ever since then.

“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 last month. “I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”

Lantos was wrong. With his service to America and humanity, he expressed it well indeed.