Sixty-six years after his disappearance, Israel has a moral obligation to find out why the Swedish diplomat was detained and what really happened to him.
January 17, 2011 marks 66 years since a historic injustice was done to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a man designated by Israel as a Righteous among the Nations.
The Russian government maintains that Soviet troops, who liberated Hungary from Nazi Germany, detained and then transferred Wallenberg to the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in 1945. The Russians claim further that Wallenberg was executed in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD in Moscow, in 1947. The Kremlin, however, does not offer any proof of this. The account of his execution is based entirely on hearsay. What’s more, several former prisoners in the gulag claimed to have met Wallenberg years after 1947. If alive, Wallenberg would now be 98.
Wallenberg is famous for saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from extermination. He was a diplomat but his methods were the opposite of diplomacy. Inside Nazi-occupied Hungary, Wallenberg ran an enterprise that distributed Swedish schutz-pass – a document that protected its bearers from Nazi detention – and harbored Jews in buildings marked as a Swedish territory.
He accomplished the unimaginable by befriending, bribing and threatening Gestapo and Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi Party) bosses with inevitable prosecution, promising to put a good word for them. “The Wallenberg Effect,” an article in The Journal of Leadership Studies, cites Sandor Ardai, one of Wallenberg’s drivers, who recalled how he intercepted a trainload of Jews about to leave for Auschwitz: “He climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colors. I don’t remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it.”
WHAT WALLENBERG did for the Jewish people went beyond humanitarian, nonviolent resistance. This was an open war on fascism fought from within by him and his team. Then, shortly after the Red Army liberated Budapest, Wallenberg vanished forever.
The world has not forgotten Wallenberg. For decades Swedish governments quizzed the Kremlin about him.
Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi hunter, collected testimonies about him. Prof. Guy von Dardel – Raoul Wallenberg’s brother – searched for him until his final days. The efforts of von Dardel and other researchers are documented on www.raoul-wallenberg.eu. The US and Hungary, having named public spaces in his honor, are not indifferent to the fate of their honorary citizen. -> More