Monday, February 11, 2008

Tom Lantos 1928-2008

CQ Politics

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos , D-Calif., a leading congressional champion of human rights, died Monday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

Lantos was born in Budapest and was the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress. When he disclosed his illness last month, the California Democrat praised his adopted homeland, saying, “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.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what America is all about.

There is much more in the obit including his escapes from a Nazi labor camp and his work in the underground.

Godspeed, Tom.

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