Raoul Wallenberg

  Perhaps no Swede has received as much international acclaim as Raoul Wallenberg.  Only 31years old, he organized and led an effort that rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation and likely death. Leveraging Swedish and U.S. support, he fearlessly and boldly challenged, bribed and tricked the Nazis and Hungarian Arrow Cross fascists over a six month period.

Wallenberg as he is depicted in the advertising for an exhibit about him at the Holocaust Museum in Stockholm. 

   Arriving in Budapest in July 1944, he was armed only with fluency in German and Hungarian.  But with Swedish diplomatic cover he built a network of 300 people to support the work. Wallenberg initiated a series of bold rescue actions, including designing and issuing protective (fake) Swedish passports (Schutzpasses), establishing 31 safe houses under Swedish protection, and directly intervening to save Jews from deportation trains and death marches.

Monument to Wallenberg, in a Gothenburg church square. It is one of many tributes to him throughout Sweden and the world including at the US Capitol.  One person he saved was Tom Lantos, who became a member of the US Congress from 1981-2008.

   In one instance that has been documented 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 colours. 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.”

 But his work also got the attention of the Soviets. During the Siege of Budapest, on January 17, 1945, they arrested and imprisoned him on trumped-up charges of spying. He was sent to a KGB prison in Moscow and never heard from again. There is some evidence that he may have been executed there in 1947, but Russia has never provided any details other than confirming, in 2000, that he was “wrongly arrested.”

   Wallenberg was from a prominent and rich Swedish family, and studied architecture and graduated from the University of Michigan. His affinity for Jews and their plight may have developed in 1935-6 when he was a banker in Haifa (Palestine) and he first came into contact with Jews who had fled Hitler’s Germany. Their stories moved him deeply. He himself had some Jewish ancestry, and sometimes exaggerated this, even telling people he was “half-Jewish.”

Monument in a Stockholm Park and situated on simulated train tracks leading to a Holocaust Monument nearby at the Stockholm Stora Synagogue. The globe contains the line: "The road was straight, when Jews were deported to death.  The road was winding, dangerous and full of obstacles, when Jews were trying to escape from the murderers." This sentence appears first in Swedish, followed by English and then in 22 other languages, beginning with Polish, given that this is the language of the largest group of victims, followed by the other 21 languages of the countries from which the victims originated.