Cong. Tom Lantos, 80

From today's San Francisco Chronicle obituary of the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee--whose life was saved by Raoul Wallenberg (Lantos worked for Wallenberg), whose mission in turn resulted from Peter Bergson's agitation for the establishment of the War Refugee Board in 1944:

Lantos lost nearly his whole family in the Holocaust. When he was named chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year, he told The Chronicle that "in a sense, my whole life has been a preparation for this job."

Lantos was born in Budapest in 1928 and was 16 when the Nazis took 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.
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, where his aunt had also taken refuge.

The Red Army liberated Budapest in January 1945, and Lantos began to search for his family. Most had died, but he managed to contact Annette Tillemann, a childhood friend who had gone into hiding shortly after the German occupation and escaped to Switzerland with her mother. Like Lantos, most of her relatives perished in the death camps.

The two were reunited in Hungary later that winter and married in 1950.

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.

The Lantoses settled in San Mateo County in 1950, and Tom Lantos became an economics professor at San Francisco State. He made his first foray in to politics when he won a seat on the Millbrae school board, then in 1980 defeated GOP incumbent Rep. Bill Royer to win election to the House. Three years later he founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which his wife has directed since.

Among his accomplishments over nearly three decades in Washington were preserving open space in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and bringing millions of federal dollars to extend BART to San Francisco International Airport.

He was criticized in some quarters, however, for an unwavering support of Israel, and he wasn't afraid to be unpopular on a number of issues. As recently as October, he angered the Bush administration and some colleagues when he moved a bill through his committee that defined the killings of Armenians in Turkey in the early 20th century as genocide.