by Alex Kershaw
Wallenberg was left behind bars in Moscow, one of tens of thousands of people seized by the rapacious NKVD and SMERSH in Eastern Europe in 1945. The Soviets undoubtedly knew that the Swedes would not make too much of a fuss about Wallenberg and other citizens apparently lost in the Soviet Union after the war. Rysskrack—fear of Russia—was, according to the Hungarian-born journalist, Kati Marton, “the strongest emotion in postwar Sweden.”17 What mattered most to Swedes like Soderblom, it seemed, was their precious neutrality, from which many in the Swedish establishment, notably the Wallenberg banking dynasty, had profited handsomely.18
Wallenberg’s cousins, Jacob and Marcus, had had a particularly good war thanks to their dealings (which they had tried to conceal) with Nazi corporations.19 In fact, these über-bankers, arguably the most cynical and calculating of all neutral capitalists during World War II, had benefited so much from their Nazi connections that General Lucius Clay, in charge of the American occupied zone in postwar Germany, demanded that the Wallenberg brothers be prosecuted as war criminals.20
In coming years, the brothers would do little to help their cousin, much to Wallenberg’s parents’ dismay.21
LARS BERG STOOD ON THE SHIP’S DECK with other Swedish colleagues from the embassy in Budapest. They looked at the approaching wharf and a small crowd that had assembled to welcome them home. It had been a long and harrowing journey via Moscow from Hungary, where as far as the embittered and disillusioned Berg was concerned, nothing now remained except “ruins and terror.” As the ship, which had brought them across the Baltic from Finland, neared the dockside, Berg could see his relatives waving and cheering, and one family that was “still and silent”—Wallenberg’s mother, Maj, and his stepfather, Frederick von Dardel.
Berg’s mother cried tears of joy when she took him in her arms. Then Berg spotted Wallenberg’s mother close by; she too was crying, not tears of joy but of “deepest sorrow.”22 Her small figure seemed particularly frail and forlorn to Berg that morning of April 18, 1945, as he stepped onto Swedish soil.
Maj had been told that Raoul would not be among those returning, but she had not believed it.23
Now, clearly, it was true—Raoul had not come home after all.
“Where is Raoul?” she asked. “I had hoped he was with you.”24
WALLENBERG HAD BEEN LEFT BEHIND in the gulag, a phantom that some of his own countrymen appeared only too willing to forget.
It is known that Wallenberg was moved that April of 1945 to Lefortovskaya prison, where he stayed until sometime early in 1947. He shared a cell, Number 203, on the fourth floor with a fellow political prisoner, a German Embassy official called Willi Roedel.25
Wallenberg and Roedel were allowed just twenty minutes exercise a day in the overcrowded prison shaped like a K. The only way they could communicate with other prisoners was through tapping on pipes and walls with a toothbrush. The inmates used many different codes; the most basic involved knocking once to signify the letter A, twice for B, and so on. According to Roedel, Wallenberg spent a great deal of time knocking on the walls and pipes, using German and French. Three prisoners later recalled messages he tapped: German diplomats called von Rantzau, Rensinghoff, and Wallenstein, whose cell was below his.26
When Wallenberg explained one day through tapping that he wanted to send a letter to Stalin, Wallenstein suggested that he begin it with these words: “Agreez, Monsieur le President, l’expression de ma tres haute consideration.”27
Wallenberg wrote the letter and handed it to a prison guard. It is not known if Stalin received it.
SWEDISH AMBASSADOR Stefan Soderblom’s time in Moscow was coming to an end. To his great delight and surprise, Marshal Joseph Stalin had granted him an audience before he was to return to Sweden. In a report made public many years later, in 1980, Soderblom described the June 15, 1946, meeting with Stalin, which lasted less than ten minutes, in vivid detail.28 He was clearly starstruck by the yellow-eyed marshal of the Soviet Union, whom he described as “fit and in vigorous health. His short but well-proportioned body and his regular features made an especially agreeable impression. His tone of voice and demeanor gave an impression of friendliness.”29
Soderblom briefly explained the humanitarian activities of Swedish diplomats in Budapest. “Among those who saved twenty-five to thirty thousand Jews was a Swedish diplomat, Wallenberg,” he added, “who was in the protective custody of Russians when he disappeared without a trace.”30
Stalin apparently asked Soderblom to spell out Wallenberg’s name and jotted it down on a pad of paper.
Then came words that Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg’s sister, believed sealed her brother’s fate.
“I am personally convinced,” said Soderblom, “that Wallenberg fell victim either to a road accident or to bandits.”31
Stalin placed the scrap of paper with Wallenberg’s name on it in his pocket. Soderblom then asked for an official statement from the Russians to the effect that all possible action had been taken to find Wallenberg. “This would be in your own interests,” Soderblom reportedly explained, “as there are people who, in the absence of an explanation, would draw the wrong conclusions.”
Stalin is said to have smiled knowingly and puffed on his pipe. The meeting was over.32
ACCORDING TO SOVIET RECORDS, Wallenberg was still very much alive in 1946 as Soderblom returned to Stockholm.
During an interrogation early the following year, Wallenberg was told that he was “a political case.”
“If you think you are innocent,” an interrogator added, “you must prove it. The best proof of your guilt is that the Swedish government and the Swedish Embassy have done nothing for you.”33
“I have asked many times to be allowed to contact the Embassy,” Wallenberg replied. “I am asking again. Or let me get in touch with the Red Cross.”
“No one is at all interested in you. If the Swedish government or the Embassy cared about you, they would have contacted you ages ago.”
Wallenberg wanted to know what the Soviets intended.
The answer must have been chilling: “For political reasons, you will never be sentenced.”34
The last message his cell’s neighbors received from Wallenberg, in the spring of 1947, was just as bleak: “They are taking us away.”35
Wallenberg’s last known communication was two knocks on the wall with his fist.
Before he was taken away, Wallenberg had reportedly said that the Soviets wanted to make him disappear into “darkness and fog.”36 And that is exactly what happened to the man who is said to have saved more lives than any other during the Holocaust.
18
Brave New Worlds
THE COLD WAS INESCAPABLE. It pursued Alice and Erwin, day and night, chilling them to the marrow, slowing but not stopping them as they trudged on blistered feet in late January 1945 through deep snow and bitter winds, determined to reach the university of Szeged in southern Hungary. “The rumbling of blasts slowly died away and no more angry, billowing smoke columns could be seen on the horizon,” remembered Erwin. “Here and there, the ditches along the highway were filled with burnt-out equipment.” As Erwin and Alice trudged on, hungry and close to collapse from exhaustion, they saw “discarded Hungarian military uniforms that were frozen stiff and crackled like glass when stepped on.”1
Finally, on February 6, 1945, they arrived in Szeged, a hundred miles south of Budapest, and found a place to stay so that they could resume their studies. They soon discovered that many of their former friends at the university had not survived the Holocaust.
As they returned to their studies, the trauma of the last year began to burrow deeper and deeper into their bruised psyches. Alice sank into an ever-darker depression at the thought of what might have happened to her family and friends. “I loved her with all my heart, but she could not help the change within herself,” remembered Erwin. “As the distance between us began to grow, I too experienced a heaviness.”2
Soon, Alice could not sleep. Her cheek
s were hollow, and dark circles appeared under her eyes. She barely reacted to a gentle embrace. Then, one night, she began to bleed. It was the fifth month of her pregnancy. Erwin quickly got her to a hospital, but Alice miscarried.
From that moment on, their relationship would never be the same. Erwin tried to find something, anything, to lift Alice’s spirits. All he could think of was chocolate. So he sold some textbooks and went to the local black market with a Russian officer he had befriended. The Russian officer took out his revolver, placed it on a scale, and said to a black market vendor: “Match it!” Erwin returned to Alice’s bedside with enough chocolate to feed the entire ward.3
But no amount of black-market chocolate could cheer Alice. Her depression only deepened when she and Erwin returned late that spring of 1945 to Kormend, the town on the far western border where she had grown up, part of a large and joyous family in a flourishing Jewish community. Alice learned that her sister, Ibi, had last been seen in a concentration camp near the Baltic Sea, probably Stutthof, where she had died just before liberation. Her father, although very sick with dysentery, had been liberated in Bergen-Belsen. But the very next day he had died. Her mother, Cecil, was thought to have been murdered soon after arriving at Auschwitz, one of Eichmann’s hundreds of thousands of Hungarian victims. “Of the once-flowering little Jewish community of Kormend,” recalled Erwin, “totaling perhaps three hundred Jewish people, only Alice, her brother, George, and three [boys] survived.”4
THE PAST WOULD NOT DIE. At medical school that summer, it came back to haunt Erwin with a vivid vengeance: He started to suffer from terrible nightmares, and would wake up in a cold sweat. But he tried his best to carry on with his studies, ever more determined to become a doctor. “There was no further news of Wallenberg,” he recalled. “By then we knew that he was in a Soviet prison, although the Kremlin kept denying it. Perhaps he was mistreated by the Soviets without [their] being aware of his identity, and consequently it was too embarrassing to let him go—so they had to kill him to hide their blunder? But surely the Swedish government would do something. Wallenberg had a powerful family in Sweden.”5
Back in Budapest, there were worrisome signs that the Soviets were not to be trusted when it came to safeguarding Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Hungary; less than 5 percent of the those sent to death camps had returned, often to find that their neighbors or others had moved into their homes. Now, it was “not the Jews but the Hungarian proletariat” that had suffered most under the Nazis. Incredibly, there were cases of Jews being murdered, even after returning from the camps to their former communities.
One day, as they studied, Erwin and Alice heard shouting on a street outside. They looked out of a window and saw three men.
“Jews to Auschwitz!” they shouted. “Kill the Jews.”6
Erwin was so furious that he lost control and ran outside and assaulted them. A crowd quickly formed, and then a policeman arrived. Some of the crowd attacked Erwin. The policeman did nothing to stop them, and Erwin was badly beaten.
IT WAS ALSO DURING THAT SUMMER of 1945 that Alice and Erwin’s marriage ended. Erwin still loved Alice, and he would never stop doing so. But she wanted to be alone. So much suffering and tragedy had created a chasm between them—her family had died, his had not. “Lici decided to be on her own,” Erwin would later write. “The separation was unexpected, and it was tremendously painful for me. I suffered for the longest time and did not know how to ease the agony. And to complicate matters further, Alice became ill. She kept losing weight, had an elevated temperature, slept poorly, waking up frequently with night sweats, and developed a ‘smoker’s cough’ that kept getting worse.”7
Alice was diagnosed with tuberculosis. There was no known cure. Erwin could not sleep for worry and began to drink heavily. His panic attacks and nightmares got worse. He felt he had to do something, anything, to try to stay sane, so he chose to return to Budapest and confront his demons. “I decided to cure myself,” he recalled, “by facing the devil. I rented a room in the just-reopened Majestic Hotel, Adolf Eichmann’s former headquarters. I thought that by doing so I would be able to break the power of evil. But my experiment turned out to be a disaster. I woke up in the middle of the night with a nightmare and a panic attack. I had to open the window to breathe, but in doing so, I had seen the dark abyss, the yawning black shaft, and it took all my strength to tear myself away from the fascination of a tempting oblivion.”8
Alice was moved to a sanatorium in Buda. Although Alice and Erwin’s marriage was over, Erwin stayed true to his vow to look after Alice. He visited her, bringing whatever delicacies he could find on the black market and sharing his class notes with her so she could stay interested in her studies. The stresses and losses of the last year had wrecked her immune system, and Erwin was terrified that she would quickly waste away. He already felt empty, his spirit stolen, by their separation. The only thing that animated him was visiting her in the sanatorium. Then he realized, in a sober moment, that he was being consumed by self-pity. He stopped drinking, but he was still beset by sudden anxiety attacks. He cut his fingernails short to stop himself from scratching his forehead constantly while asleep. He did not know that he was suffering severe post-traumatic stress disorder, which had no name then. The disorder would stay with him for the next twenty-five years.
SUMMER BECAME FALL, and the leaves began to turn. Erwin continued to visit Alice. Slowly, her health improved. After seven months, a remarkably short time for people suffering from TB, she was well enough to leave the sanitarium. Meanwhile, the political situation had changed quickly in Hungary. Stalinism was in full force. All across the country and the newly acquired Soviet satellites, the inhuman power of the informer’s lie now tore friends and families apart as more and more people were arrested for “political reasons.” Hasty show trials and the mass imprisonment of “dubious bourgeois” soon would be in full sway—thousands would be executed and more than 350,000 sent into internal exile or to prison camps under arch-Stalinist dictator Matyas Rakosi.
HAVING SURVIVED THE WAR, Emil Herman decided that he did not want his family to grow up under another oppressive, dehumanizing ideology—communism. In 1947, he and his wife, Margit, and daughter, Vera, now fifteen, decided to leave Stalinist Czechoslovakia for America. They were on an American quota and managed to gain the necessary papers to emigrate. However, due to the acute shortage of doctors in the country, the Czech authorities saw Emil’s wanting to leave as a betrayal. It was uncertain whether they would in fact allow him to do so.
One October day, Emil and his family arrived at the airport in Prague. Vera and her mother wore jewelry and Emil carried some cameras, all of which they hoped to sell in America. They had not been allowed to take their savings out of the country.9 As they tried to board their plane, Emil was stopped and strip-searched. Officials found a small gold piece in his pocket. He was taken aside for questioning while Vera and her mother took their seats on the plane. “At that point, we did not know whether they were going to let him go or not,” Vera recalled. “He could easily have been accused of smuggling. We knew that if he didn’t get on that plane, he would have been stuck for good and would have been disgraced.”10
The pilot on the plane was anxious to leave.
“The propellers are running,” he told Margit. “I have ten more minutes; then I have to take off with him or without him.”
Eight minutes later, Vera saw the pilot reach down through the open door. Vera thought he was moving the steps to the plane. But then, to her immense relief, she saw her father board. Not long after, the Swedish American Airlines plane taxied away and then took off.11 A few hours later, the Hermans arrived in Wallenberg’s birthplace—Stockholm—where they stayed for one night in the Grand Hotel. Vera marveled at the view from the hotel’s third-floor window, gazing at hundreds of well-dressed, prosperous Swedes riding light-blue bicycles to work, and then she gorged on oranges and bananas, which her father bought in a local market. Not one building in
Stockholm bore a bullet hole.
On October 28, 1947, after a stormy ten-day crossing of the Atlantic, the Hermans’ boat, the Gripsholm, approached the port of New York. Vera stood with her nervous parents on deck, looking in awe at the Statue of Liberty—for yet another generation of European émigrés a welcome symbol of a land where individual freedom was celebrated rather than feared. “After the [boat] docked, we were all scrambling for a glimpse of the New World,” recalled Vera. “When I finally had my turn at the porthole, my stomach was tied up in knots, and I felt overwhelmed, as if there were no ground to stand on.”12
The date of her arrival was Czech independence day. “I was sixteen and didn’t understand a word of English,” she remembered. “I went to school two weeks later. My problem was that I was sixteen going on forty-five. The other kids thought I was a rarity. They had never seen a foreign student. They were wearing bobby socks and saddle shoes. I came to school in heels and hose.”13
The following year, 1948, the war for Israeli independence broke out. Vera’s father, she recalled, “said that he did not have it in him to mount the kind of struggle that it would take to make a new beginning in Israel. It was then about building a new country from rock and sand while at war, a constant state of war. He was a very brave man, but he just said he did not have it in him. We did not know at the time that already in his late forties, his heart was not much good. He covered it up. He had this inner fatigue. He could manage the struggle here but not in Israel.”14
