RAOUL WALLENBERG

RAOUL WALLENBERG 1912 - ????

January 17 1995 marked the 50th anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. He was honored all over the world on this day.

In Sweden the parliament held a special ceremony which was attended by the King and Queen. Anita Björk and Jan Olof Strandberg, both well-known in the Swedish theatre world, read from some letters that Wallenberg wrote from Budapest, among others his last letter to his mother Maj von Dardel.

The day also marked the first time Raoul Wallenberg's writings have ever been published, through the release of a new book, Letters and Dispatches, 1924-1944 (296 pages $24.95). The book brings together all that there is of the written record of Raoul Wallenberg, much of it published for the first time. The collection material creates a dramatic story and offers an intimate look at who Wallenberg really was.

The first sections contain correspondence between the young, fatherless Raoul and his mother and grandparents, in which the character of a citizen of conscience is shaped - in Sweden, in 4 years in the United States, and in travels through South America, Africa and the Middle East. The second part of the book contains the 1944 dispatches from Buda-pest, from the man of action Wallenberg had become, using every aspect of his education, character and heritage to save a people of extinction. The book ends with Wallenberg's final letters to his mother. The letters from the early years are introduced by members of Wallen-berg's immediate family. The dispatches are commented by one of Wallenberg's colleagues from the Budapest days who explains the dramatic events behind them.

Brought together for the first time, these letters and dispatches allow Raoul Wallenberg to tell his own story. They are a testimony to the miracles of which ordinary but uncompromising human decency is capable, to be, as Raoul Wallenberg's grandfather put it "of greater use."

Also in time for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Wallenberg's disappearance, Arcade Publishing is reissuing in paperback Kati Marton's biography of Raoul Wallenberg (Missing Hero, 264 pages $ 11.95 paper) that together with Lars Berg's The Book That Disappeared - What Happened In Budapest gives the best picture of Raoul.

"One morning, a group of these Hungarian Fascists came into the house and said all the able-bodied women must go with them. We knew what this meant. My mother kissed me and I cried and she cried. W e knew we were parting forever...... Then, two or three hours later... my mother returned with the other women...... my mother was there - she was alive and she was hugging and kissing me and she said one word: Wallenberg.....

My mother told me that they were being taken to the river when a car arrived and out stepped Wallenberg and they knew immediately who it was, because there was only one such person in the world. He went up to the Arrow Cross leader and protested that the women were under his protection. They argued with him, but he must have had incredible charisma, some great personal authority, because there was absolutely no thing behind him, nothing to back him up. He stood out there in the street, probably feeling the loneliest man in the world, trying to pretend there was some thing behind them. They could have shot him there and then in the street and nobody would have known about it. Instead, they relented and let the women go. "

This is one story (retold in:John Bierman/Righteous Gentile) among many about an extraordinary man. It has been established that Raoul Wallenberg helped between 20 000 and 25 000 persons survive the war by equipping them with "protective passports" and letting them live in "Swedish houses". His efforts contributed to save another 70 000 lives in Budapest's sealed ghetto - the only substantial Jewish community left in Europe after the war.

THE MAN
Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 5, 1912 into one of Sweden's most prominent banking families, sometimes nicknamed "the Swedish Rockefellers". His father was a naval commander who died before Raoul's birth, so his paternal grandfather, a diplomat, supervised his education. By the age of 20, the young Wallenberg was already proficient in English, French, German and Russian. He took a degree in architecture at the University of Michigan and later worked for several different banks in Palestine and South America.

In 1939 Raoul Wallenberg formed a partnership with a Jewish refugee from Hungary, building a successful importexport business trading in foodstuff. During this time he travelled several times
to Hungary where he became increasingly concerned about the plight of the Hungarian Jewish community.

Wallenberg's business flourished but he himself often found himself bored by the business world. Once after seeing the movie "Pimpernell Smith" with Leslie Howard as a British university professor outwitting the Nazis, he told his sister Nina Lagergren, that that was just the thing he would like to do himself.

It was not too long before he was given a chance to fulfill this dream. He was contacted by Iver Olsen, who represented US President Roosevelt's newly-formed War Refugee Board in Sweden. Raoul Wallenberg was asked to carry out a US-financed rescue mission while posing as a Swedish legation secretary. The US minister to Sweden, Herschel Johnson warned him, however, that if the Germans found his real mission in Budapest he was on his own.

HUNGARY 1944
The Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, only four days after the Hungarians had celebrated their National Day. The German fronts were crumbling and they were scared that Hungary would join forces with the Allies against them. That is exactly what Hungary had planned. During the occupation, the Hungarian "regent" Horthy tried to maintain some independence hoping that it would be the British or the Americans who would liberate his country rather than the dreaded Russians. By July, almost 500 000 Jews had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps by the Nazis, but there were still 200 000 Jews left in Budapest. The world had become aware of the Holocaust and Swedish King Gustav V sent a personal plea to Hungary's President Horthy, which resulted in a temporary stop of the deportations. The Swedish embassy started issuing temporary passports to Jews. Shortly afterwards, however, the Germans supplanted Horthy with local Arrow Cross fascists to rule the country. Together with Adolf Eichmann, they were particularly single-minded in their pursuit of the Jews.

THE MISSION
"Wallenberg arrived at the embassy on July 9, 1944 with a, for a diplomat somewhat unusual packing of two knapsacks, one sleeping bag, a windbreaker and a revolver. But this gear was to come in handy in the months to come. `The revolver is only there to give me courage', Wallenberg said in his typically jovial way. "I hope to never use it"', recalls his colleague Per Anger in his book "With Wallenberg in Budapest".

Soon after his arrival in Budapest, Wallenberg re-designed the "temporary passports" into "protective passports" printed in yellow and blue, complete with the Three Crowns of Sweden. Instead of just issuing them to Jews who could claim a Swedish relative or the 4 500 he was allowed to issue, he distributed the passes wholesale to up to 20 000 people. He worked day and night aided by a staff of 300 Jewish volunteers. He bought several houses that became known as Swedish "safe houses" where he crammed in up to 15 000 Jews away from the Arrow Cross bands.

Giselle and Ferenc Friedman of Hamilton owe their lives to Wallenberg. At 78, Mrs. Friedman's eves still mist over as she remembers those days in Budapest.

It was September, Mrs. Friedman had walked with her 9-month baby and 9year old son to the Swedish embassy in hopes of obtaining a protection passport.

The 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. hour in which Jews were allowed to leave the Eichmann-created ghetto was half over when she arrived at the embassy. The line-up ahead of her was hopelessly long, and despondently, she went around to the back garden, leaned her head on the wooden fence-slats and cried.

Suddenly, Wallenberg emerged from the embassy, pencil and paper in hand. Fifteen minutes later, the precious "Schutz-pass" was in her hands.

Ferenc Friedman, now 81, recalls the day Wallenberg personally pulled him back from certain death. It was November, in the bleak, rainy, period, and the Germans were now frenziedly rounding up Jews from their homes for week-long train rides in cattle cars to extermination at Auschwitz's gas chambers.

Friedman was yanked from the Swedish house in Wallenbergs absence and taken to a brick factory yard, outside Budapest, where 3000 men, women, and children had been herded together to board the trains.

"Two cars suddenly drove up. There was Wallenberg in the first one, with Hungarian officials and German officers in the second car. He jumped out, shout ing that all those with Swedish papers were under his protection. "
Friedman was one of the 150 saved that day. "None of the others ever came back, " he says.

ADOLF EICHMANN
December 1944 marked the blackest period of the war for those Jews in the Hungarian capital who had until now escaped the Nazi deportations. With the city constantly bombarded by the Soviet army, the local Arrow Cross fascists and the Nazi SS tried to annihilate as many Jews as possible before meeting their own fate at the hands of the Russians. In the midst of all this upheaval, five men sat down to a strangely civilized dinner party in the Budapest home of the Swedish diplomat Lars Berg.

"It seemed like an ordinary, pleasant dinner party. We drank brandy. No voices were raised. But we could see the Russian artillery fire from our window.

Then Raoul Wallenberg faced the uniformed Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the Jewish operation, and said: `Look you have to face it. You've lost the war. Why not give up now?' Eichmann argued at first, then said that he would continue to do his work until the end. Finally he threatened Wallenberg with the words: `Don't think you are immune just because you are a diplomat and a neutral."' this according to Lars Berg himself.

A couple of days later Raoul Wallenberg's well-known Volkswagen was rammed by a German truck an demolished. Wallenberg was not in the car at the time. Once again he had miraculously survived certain death.

THE DISAPPEARANCE
Just before the Russians took Budapest, Wallenberg learned that the Germans planned to destroy the Jewish ghetto with its surviving 70 000 Jews. He told the German commander that he would personally see him hanged by the Russians for war crimes if he went ahead with the slaughter. This was to become Wallenberg's last and biggest rescue effort.

Raoul Wallenberg was last seen in Budapest on January 17, 1945, roughly six months after he had first arrived. On this day, having been granted permission to visit Soviet military headquarters in Debrecen, east of Budapest, he left with his driver and three Russian officers. Wallenberg wanted to meet with the Soviet commanders and give them an account of his humanitarian work and his plans for economic relief for the surviving Jews.

"I don't know whether I am in custody or a guest", said Raoul Wallenberg as he said goodbye to his friends.

He thought he would be back in a week but he never returned. A few weeks after his disappearance the Soviet wartime minister in Stockholm Mme Kollontai assured Raoul Wallenberg's mother that he was alive and safe. In May 1945 the Swedish legation in Moscow received the same official assurance: "Mr Wallenberg was found in Budapest and taken under protection of the Russian army."

THE THREAT
Not much happened after this until the Russians claimed that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in the Lubianka prison in Moscow in 1947.

Twice the Soviet Union has threatened to publish proof of what Raoul Wallenberg "was actually doing" in Budapest. It was not going to be pleasant reading. Wallenberg was "a criminal element" well beyond human rights.

The first time the threat was used in 1963, it was to suppress Swedish physician Nanna Swartz from publishing sensational proof that Wallenberg was still alive. The second time was in 1981 when the Soviet submarine U 137 went aground in the Karlskrona archipelago, causing an embarrassment for the Russians and giving the Swedes a good opportunity to get some answers about Wallenberg. At this time there was strong proof that Raoul Wallenberg was in the Vladimir prison.

THE EXPLANATION
We still do not know what, if anything, that is contained in the threat. But we can speculate. The Soviet military tried to accuse Raoul Wallenberg (and another Swedish embassy employee, Lars Berg) of being German spies, in February 1945. From a Communist point of view, Wallenberg was a prime suspect on the merit of his family background. Speculation that Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg had personally tried to arrange a peace treaty between Germany and the Allies put Raoul in an even stranger position. The mere fact that a "capitalist" like him was saving Jews and planned to stay on in Hungary after the war to assist them, was very suspicious.

From a Soviet standpoint however, the most compromising fact must be that Wallenberg's employer was the U.S. War Refugee Board rather than the Swedish Foreign Service -, and that the person who recruited Wallenberg was Iver Olsen. Documents that have recently been revealed show that Olsen worked for OSS, the U.S. intelligence network that later became CIA.
Swedish diplomat Per Anger says that neither he nor Raoul Wallenberg were aware of this. But Wallenberg's special status at the embassy and the vast sums he used for bribes and in acquiring buildings would further add to this suspicion. The fact that Wallenberg had studied at the University of Michigan would in the Russian mind also make him a likely OSS recruit. Add to that the surprisingly halfhearted attempts from Sweden and the U.S. to get Wallenberg extradited and Moscow must have been sure of his guilt as a U.S. spy.

Pavel Sudoplatov, a former Soviet spy and deputy minister of internal affairs under Stalin, claims in his memoirs that Raoul Wallenberg was killed by a poison injection in 1947 when they were unsuccesful in their attempts to recruit him as a spy.

Ex-British spy Greville Wynne told BBC audiences of an incident in Moscow's Lubianka Prison in early 1963. One day when taken in the tiny cage-like lift to the roof for solitary excercise, Wynne heard another cage coming into the next pen. As the gate opened he heard a voice call out
`Taxi'. Given the filthy condition of the lift, this piece of defiant humor was greatly appreciated. Five days later when it happened again Wynne called out `Are you American?' The voice answered `No, I am Swedish'. Nothing further could be learned.

THE RESCUE ATTEMPTS
The Swedish Social Democrats were so scared of the Russians that they hardly dared raise the subject of his release. But even the Swedish monarch Gustav VI Adolf and Dag Hammarskjbld, the Swedish SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations refused to get involved. After the Soviet empire crumbled and since the Gorbachev era there has been active exchange between Russia and Sweden on the Wallenberg affair. The story from the Russian side has not, however, changed significantly and access to documents has not brought much light on the fate of the Swedish hero.

Adolf Eichmann was hunted down and brought to justice in Tel Aviv in 1961. Einstein nominated Raoul Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize - in vain. In Israel, of which he is an honorary citizen, Raoul Wallenberg has been deemed the most outstanding of the "Righteous Gentiles", non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. The United States has made Raoul Wallenberg one of only four honorary citizens. Canada has done the same. There are Wallenberg committees now all around the world, including in Russia. Few people hold up any hope of finding Raoul Wallenberg alive, but everybody feels like the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that Wallenberg must be regarded as alive until the Russians furnish better evidence of his death.

“Saved By Wallenberg”
John Brooks Interview
John Brooks was one of the Hungarian Jews that Raoul Wallenberg saved from deportation to a death camp. Brooks vowed never to forget Wallenberg's kindness and humanitarianism. Since 1944 he has kept a personal archive of books and magazine articles about his hero.

In 1986 when an intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles was dedicated as Raoul Wallenberg Square, John Brooks decided to raise funds to place a memorial at the site. After getting initial go-ahead from the council, Brooks contacted another holocaust survivor, Suzanne Zada, who operates a gallery in LA and represents the Italian artist Franco Assetto. Zada persuaded Assetto to donate his talents to design a statue (on the right) in tribute to Wallenberg.

Thanks to the vision of John Brooks the idea of creating a lasting monument to honour Raoul Wallenberg became a reality.

Swedish Press interviewed John Brooks about how he was saved from sure death in 1944. This is his story:

I never met Raoul Wallenberg but I owe my life to him. In 1944 I was in a labour
camp in Hungary. The camp was quite close to Budapest and I was working in a steel factory packing up all the factory machinery for the Germans because they did not want to leave anything behind when they understood that the Russians were really close to taking over Hungary. My parents had been deported to a labour camp outside Hungary, I did not know where. After the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi party, took power in October 1944 things got really bad.
I had a Zionist background. In my teenage years I had belonged to a Zionist organization and it was very active. It was almost the only organized Jewish resistance and the Zionist youth were helping Wallenberg to produce and spread the Schutz passes - to give them to the right people. They risked their lives many times in doing this job. So I knew about Wallenberg.

In 1944 I was 21 and my wife was 18 and we were newly married. Anyway while I was still in the labour camp, my wife was in Budapest and she went to the Swedish consulate and said to the young lady standing at the door screening people who got in, that she wanted a schutz pass for us. The lady asked for her address and the same night somebody brought the schutz pass to her house. You have to know that there was a curfew at this time and anybody caught out was shot on the spot. So the person who brought the schutz pass to our house was risking her life.
A schutz pass was a letter with the consulate letterhead showing that we were in a collective passport. For a while it was accepted by the Hungarian government. Wallenberg had kind of promised the Hungarian government that his government would acknowledge the schutz passes as a legal entity.

The Hungarians were anxious to get international acknowledgement so they were willing to allow Wallenberg to issue 4 000 schutz passes. He issued many more and he let the Zionists make copies. Wallenberg also got together with the other neutral consulates and embassies like the Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese and convinced them to also issue a certain number of passes.

Then Wallenberg organized these protective houses - so-called international ghetto. He rented big apartment buildings or Jewish owners who had apartment buildings gave them to him and they were all along the Danube River.

Anyway after my wife got the schutz passes she dressed in men's clothes and came out to the labour camp, to the living quarters that were two miles away from the factory. She was waiting at the gate when we returned from the factory in the evening. It was fall and quite dark. She fell in step right behind me and told me not to look back and that she was putting the schutz pass into my pocket. After that she walked back to Budapest. She took a real risk. That night I escaped from the camp.

We stayed in one of the protective houses for a week. Then one day the Arrow Cross came in and just tore up the schutz passes. As it happened I had gone out that morning because we had heard a rumour that it was possible to get a fake gentile pass and we had also heard rumours that schutz passes were being torn up. When I came back I saw the Arrow Cross at the door of the building and my wife from a window upstairs gave me a sign not to come in. So I was outside on the sidewalk with no yellow star, no yellow armband which I was supposed to wear, no identification, only the schutz pass. Without the yellow star you could be shot on the spot. But I was not noticed. Then the whole house was emptied and everybody, about a hundred of them, came down to the street and they were marched to the railway station where a train was waiting. I started following the group. It so happened that the group had to stop at one intersection for traffic lights and right there was an underground public toilet - something like the metro in Paris with steps going down.

Somehow my wife was able to make her way down to the toilet without the guards noticing. After a while I followed her down there. And from there we were able to go to a hiding place that I had managed to find out about a few days earlier. It was an abandoned factory and a gentile man I knew had told me we could hide there.

The rest of the group was of course taken to a camp. My mother-in-law was one of them. My father-in-law had been taken in another group a few days earlier. He never came back but my mother-in-law survived. What the schutz pass had done for us was to allow us some time. This was also true for the international ghetto. The end was so close that it was a matter of holding out. Once the Arrow Cross fell, many gentiles dared to take the risk to help the Jews, many individuals but mostly clergymen and nuns. The monasteries did a lot of good work. The schutz passes gave us time to survive until the gentiles dared to help us. Just two weeks later Budapest was surrounded and the siege of the city started.

Now let me tell you that we had been lucky in so many ways. We were lucky that when our group was taken from the international ghetto, the city had not been completely surrounded and trains could still leave. All those who were left in the international ghetto after the city was surrounded and who could not be taken away on trains were shot on the spot and thrown into the Danube - thousands and thousands.

I was also lucky that I was an able-bodied man and was sent to a work camp. If I had been middle-aged, very young or very old, I would have been deported. And so we who got to work inside the country were lucky. Anyway my wife and I stayed in Hungary until 1956. We did not move right away because my parents came back.