Congressman Tom Lantos (D), who represented his northern California House District for 14 terms, was the only Holocaust survivor ever to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

A self-proclaimed “American by choice,” Mr. Lantos was born in 1928 in Budapest, Hungary. Joining the Hungarian resistance movement as a teenager following the 1944 Nazi occupation, Lantos escaped twice from forced labor camps before emigrating to the U.S. in 1947.

Mr. Lantos was first elected to Congress in 1980, founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983 and was Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time of his death in 2008.