In his nine terms in the House of Representatives, Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) has effected more legislation than he cares to recall. However, his efforts to honor the memory of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg top his list of accomplishments.
In 1981, Lantos and his wife, Annette, introduced the bill into Congress that made Wallenberg an honorary U.S. citizen. Four years later they led the successful effort to rename Washington, D.C.’s 15th Street S.E. “Raoul Wallenberg Place.”
In 1994 the Lantoses won congressional approval to place a bust of Wallenberg on permanent display in the United States Capitol Building.
Most recently, the Hungarian-born couple added a commemorative U.S. stamp of Wallenberg to their tributes.
“The stamp is really the fourth step. I’d say we’ve been working on it for years,” Lantos said during a recent phone interview.
“The U.S. Postal Service gets 40,000 requests and suggestions for stamps each year. They pick about 28 to 30. Your chances are less than one in a thousand.”
Wallenberg saved more than 70,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II. He issued Swedish passports and false protective passes called Schutzpasses, and established safe houses for Jews.
The U.S. Post Office has produced 96 million Wallenberg stamps, designed by New Yorker magazine artist Burt Silverman.
“We’re obviously delighted,” Lantos said.
During a Yom HaShoah commemoration Sunday at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, the Lantoses, joined by S.F. Postmaster George Kikuchi, presented a wall-sized enlargement of the Wallenberg stamp to the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
Wallenberg Traditional High School in San Francisco received a wall-sized enlargement from the Lantoses and Kikuchi on Monday.
Both Lantoses credit Wallenberg for their survival.
Annette Lantos received a Portuguese passport, arranged by Wallenberg, and spent the war years in Switzerland. At Wallenberg’s prompting, similar protective passports were issued by the Swiss and Spanish governments and the Vatican.
Meanwhile, Tom Lantos joined an underground movement when the Nazis took Hungary. He was captured and thrown into a slave-labor camp.
Lantos escaped and “made my way to Wallenberg.
“He was not an unknown phenomenon. He was the sensation of the Jewish community. He was our only lifeline. And I volunteered to work with him.”
Wallenberg placed Lantos, a blond, blue-eyed boy of 16, at a Swedish protective house on the bank of the Danube.
“I looked very Aryan, so I was of value. I could move around the city with some degree of assurance that I would not be caught and killed,” Lantos said.
Following the war, childhood sweethearts Tom and Annette were reunited in Budapest. Tom immigrated to the United States in 1947. Annette followed later.
Wallenberg, who in 1945 traveled to Soviet headquarters in an attempt to negotiate the transfer of Hungarian Jews from Swedish to Soviet protection, was never seen again as a free man.
Soviet officials said Wallenberg died of a heart attack in the Lubyanka prison in 1947. However, the Soviet government did not return Wallenberg’s passport and daybook to his family until 1989.
Tom Lantos is convinced that Wallenberg lived in the Gulag for decades but has since perished.
“It’s not the first time a person was rewarded with tragedy for his good deeds,” Lantos said.
But Wallenberg’s efforts were not in vain.
Annette Lantos “may have failed to liberate Wallenberg, but she succeeded in making him an international figure,” Tom Lantos said, giving his wife credit for the couple’s efforts.
“Wallenberg is larger than life — with museums, schools, parks, streets and monuments named after him,” he added.
“Wallenberg will again have his story — the historic lesson that the voice of moral authority occasionally prevails — penetrate millions of homes through a postage stamp.”