[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 34 (Wednesday, March 17, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E401]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR RANDOLPH L. BRAHAM

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, March 17, 2004

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I invite my colleagues to join me in paying 
tribute to a brilliant and remarkable scholar, Professor Randolph L. 
Braham. Dr. Braham is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political 
Science from the City College and the Graduate Center of the City 
University of New York, where he is also Director of the Rosenthal 
Institute for Holocaust Studies. He is a distinguished member of the 
Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. 
Professor Braham is an outstanding scholar and chronicler of the 
Hungarian Holocaust whose sixtieth anniversary we are commemorating 
this week.
  His two-volume work, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in 
Hungary, won the Jewish National Book award in 1981, and earned him 
citations in the New York State Assembly. In 1995, he was awarded the 
Order of Merit Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Republic.
  Born in Romania in 1922, Professor Braham received a traditional 
Jewish upbringing in Dej, a small town in Transylvania. His parents and 
many relatives perished in the Holocaust. He spent 1943-45 in a forced 
labor battalion with the Hungarian and German armies in Ukraine. Later, 
he was captured and incarcerated in the gulag where he experienced the 
horrors of Soviet labor camps.
  After the war, Professor Braham came to the United States on a Hillel 
Fellowship at the Graduate Faculty of the New School University and 
encountered many of the emigre luminaries, including Frieda Wunderlich, 
Arnold Brecht, Erich Hula, and Boris Mirkineguetzevitch.
  Professor Braham has spent over forty years as a professor at the 
City College of New York. He is the author or co-editor of forty-two 
books on the Holocaust in central and eastern Europe including his all 
important documentation The Nazis' Last Victims: The Holocaust in 
Hungary. Professor Braham has made a most significant contribution to 
the scientific historiography of the Holocaust in general and the 
tragedy of Hungarian Jewry in particular.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to pay tribute to Dr. Randolph Braham for his 
remarkable achievements and scholarly contributions in documenting the 
persecution of Jews in Europe, particularly his extensive history of 
the Hungarian Holocaust. The life's work of Dr. Randolph Braham is a 
major contribution to the understanding of the history of the twentieth 
century, and therefore it deserves to be recognized and honored by the 
Congress of the United States.
  As George Santayana reminded us, ``those who cannot remember the past 
are condemned to repeat it.'' Dr. Braham's important legacy should help 
all future generations to learn the dark lessons of the past and thus 
enable them in the future to create societies based on justice and on 
values that will always include respect for the rights of the 
minorities and human rights in general.

                          ____________________