I sit down with Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice and co-chair of the recently concluded International Religious Freedom Summit. We discuss her fight for human rights and religious freedom, including raising awareness about the Chinese regime’s practice of forcibly harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience.
And we discuss the legacy of Swett’s late father, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust, and what inspires her to continue her work.
“My father had escaped from a slave labor camp. He was able to make his way back to Budapest and he found refuge in one of the safe houses that Raoul Wallenberg had set up … One of the things that [Raoul] Wallenberg did was he rented a number of buildings around Budapest, hung the Swedish flag there, basically said these are now part of the Swedish legation, and they are off-limits to the Nazis and to the Hungarian Arrow Cross,” she says. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, started issuing “protective passports” and inspired other members of the diplomatic corps in Hungary to do the same.
“My mother would tell us: we called Wallenberg our Moses from the North, who had come to save us and lead us to the promised land. And so from a young age, both my sister and myself, we knew the stories of danger and of terror, but [also] that someone had come to help.”
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/unspeakable-crime-against-humanity-katrina-lantos-swett-on-chinas-murder-for-organs-industry-and-the-legacy-of-her-father-holocaust-survivor-tom-lantos_5037933.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Katrina Lantos Swett, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Katrina Lantos Swett:
Thank you so much, it’s an honor to be here.
Mr. Jekielek:
We’re here at the tail end of the third International Religious Freedom Summit, or IRF Summit. I’ve heard it described as perhaps the largest gathering of its kind in the world. As one of the co-chairs, why don’t you tell me what was really accomplished here?
Ms. Swett:
For a number of years, many of us who have been active in the international religious freedom space have felt that we needed to somehow bring all the disparate elements of this movement together so that we could find strength in numbers, build momentum, educate, network, and strengthen coalitions. It really was the brainchild of Ambassador Sam Brownback. He served as our Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom, and he organized the first Earth Ministerial, which was a government-driven gathering of ministers.
When his term ended as our earth ambassador, he realized and really caught vision of this idea of creating a civil society-driven event, because so much of the change on the ground, especially around international religious freedom, really does have to come from these disparate communities that need to be brought together, so they can strengthen one another and really build a movement. So, I think we’ve accomplished a lot. And again, Ambassador Brownback’s words birthed the movement and brought it into existence. It’s been a bit of a toddler, but now it’s on its feet and moving forward, and we’re very excited about that.
Mr. Jekielek:
I really want to talk about the realities in China. This is something that you’ve been vocal on for years and, in fact, your father, may he rest in peace, Congressman Tom Lantos, was also incredibly vocal about it. A few things struck me. One, we had Congressman McCaul speaking at the summit and he basically confirmed the reality of this murder-for-organs regime run by the Ch