Tom Lantos, the California Congressman and a Holocaust survivor, has passed away at the age of 80. The San Francisco Chronicle has an obituary:
In the nearly 60 years Tom Lantos spent in the United States, he never lost his Hungarian accent, his love for animals or his stubborn belief that political leaders have a duty to speak out against tyranny or oppression, wherever it occurs.
Lantos, the Democratic congressman from San Mateo for 27 years, died Monday morning at Maryland’s Bethesda Naval Hospital from cancer of the esophagus. He was 80. He championed the causes of those who often had no other voice, whether they were in Tibet, Darfur, China or anywhere else in the world.
As a teenage boy in Hungary, Lantos escaped from Nazi labor camps and the genocide of the Holocaust, which took the lives of most of his family. It was a time he never forgot and that shaped the rest of his life.