(27 Apr 2012)
Well, thank you very much, Tina. And thank you for the work that you do and the bureau does and the impact that it continues to make. I’m very pleased to join with all of you today. I want to welcome Ambassador Szapary and Ambassador Simonyi – former Ambassador Simonyi, other distinguished guests, and in particular, just a few of the extended Lantos family members. But I would like the Lantos family members, in particular her – Annette’s daughters, “little” Annette and Katrina, and the other members of the family just to stand so that we can recognize you. (Applause.)
I used to tell Tom and Annette all the time that their beautiful family, which I always received a picture of for the holiday season, was the single-best rebuke to the Holocaust perpetrators, and I used to keep that picture until I got a new one every year. In particular, one where everybody was in white was a very good – a favorite of mine. And I also want to especially recognize Tomicah Tillemann, who is our very able and effective first-ever coordinator of our outreach to civil society around the world. We talk a lot about how we work with governments; we are increasingly trying to find creative ways to work with the private sector and with civil society, and Tomicah’s been at the forefront.
As we gather here today in the well-named Marshall auditorium for George C. Marshall to remember the millions of Holocaust victims and the courage of those who worked to save them, I’m reminded of the words of the great Hungarian novelist, Imre Madach. History, he said, portrays “good and evil in such vast proportion that both appear miraculous.” Well, there were few stories that illustrate that truth more vividly than the lives of Tom and Annette. And we particularly miss Tom today, Annette.
Growing up in Budapest in the 1930s, Annette Tillemann’s parents ran a successful jewelry store, and she was their only adored daughter. Being the mother of an only adored daughter, I understand that. She wasn’t just adored; she was kind of adorable too. In fact, she won Hungary’s national Shirley Temple lookalike contest – (laughter) – when she was a little girl. She had a childhood sweetheart, a very precocious young man named Tom Lantos, whom she met when she was six. Life could not have been sweeter for her and her family. They were secure; they had a loving family; they were surrounded by friends; they were pillars of their community.
But as fascism spread across Europe, Annette’s father was conscripted into a forced labor battalion. New laws limited Jews’ access to many parts of Hungary’s social and economic life. Then, in March 1944, Nazi forces occupied Hungary. In the course of a few months, almost 500,000 of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz or shot by roving bands of fascist thugs. By late 1944, almost every Hungarian Jew outside of Budapest was dead.
Amid this storm of hatred and evil, a young Swede accepted a special mission. Raoul Wallenberg was not a traditional diplomat. He had studied architecture in the United States; he had held a series of jobs in business. There was nothing in his background that would have marked him as one of the great heroes of the 20th century. But when the United States War Refugee Board approached him about traveling to Budapest to try and save the largest remaining concentration of Jews in Europe, Wallenberg answered that call. Amid so many missteps responding to the Holocaust, sending Wallenberg to Hungary was one of the things we got right.
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