Tom Lantos

May 8, 1945 was the end of the organized, political oppression, and bloodshed of six

million jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime. Across Europe, around 400,000

people survived the holocaust, but many died later on, due to suicide and the severity of their

injuries given by the Nazi’s. Today, there are around 100,000 holocaust survivors stil alive. Tom

Lantos was one of them, until he passed away on February 11, 2008 as a result of cancer.

Lantos was born in Budapest, Hungary and is the only holocaust survivor to serve in the US

congress. He was one of the few Jewish people who were imprisoned and who escaped and

sought refuge from the Nazi regime.

On March 13 1938 Lantos went in to buy a newspaper from his local store, and the

headline was “Hitler Marches Into Austria”. ​Lantos recalls knowing that this would have a

significant effect on his country, himself and his family. ​Lantos knew this would have an affect

on him and the lives of his fellow hungarian jews because at this time, Hitler had just adopted

the enabling act and he was appointed Chancellor. ​The Nazi Germans forced Lantos and his

family into labour camps when he was sixteen years old. This relates back to ​stage 4

(Dehumanization) and stage 8 (Persecution) ​of the ten stages. Hitler began publicly denying

the Jews their human rights and described them as a disease as soon as he came to Austria.

After this, Hitler began separating Jews from the public and were then segregated into ghettos,

concentration camps and labour camps. ​In 1944 when Lantos was 16, he was sent to a labour

camp forty miles north of Budapest. They were forced to maintain a bridge on the Budapest

Vienna rail line and were given many other labour jobs to help the Nazis capture more jews and

to help Hitler plan his route to take over other villages. This can also be related back to ​stage 7

(Preparation).
 Lantos made two escape attempts in which the first he was caught and badly beaten for,

but the second time he was successful. He sought refuge with his aunt who lived in a safehouse

which was operated by a swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers

to save thousands of hungarian jews. ​Hitler then began dividing the Aryans from the

Non-Aryans; hitler was obsessed with racial purity. ​ This relates to ​stage 2 (Symbolization)

because they distinguished people based on their physical appearance. ​Lantos had Aryan

coloring​ and so, he briskly joined the anti Nazi resistance. His duties comprised of secretly

delivering food and medicine to other jews in other safe houses. He did this wearing a military

cadets uniform. After doing this for a month, the Russians liberated Budapest and Lantos began

looking for his mother and family, but later discovered that they had died. Although,Lantos did

manage to locate one of his childhood friends, ​Annette Tillemann ​who had gone into hiding with

her mother and escaped to Switzerland, and got married to her in June 1950.

He first came to America in 1947 to study on a scholarship. He was first elected to office

in 1980 and went up to becoming a ​Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and

one of the country's leading champions of human rights. This decision to tackle this issue was

due to his first hand experience of being sent to a labour camp as well as the loss of his family

due to the holocaust. In 2007, Lantos was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and announced

his resignation. Following this, he gave a statement 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. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt

gratitude to this great country."

 Works Cited

​Biography. (2019). ​Tom Lantos​. [online] Available at: 

https://www.biography.com/people/tom-lantos-270367​ [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019].

Tom Lantos. (2012, July 24). Retrieved February 17, 2019, from 

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/tom-lantos-2 

Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. (2019, February 06). Retrieved from 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lantos_Human_Rights_Commission