The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

by Alex Kershaw

  Answers to their questions remained just as elusive. In January 2001, a joint Swedish-Russian group published a report on Wallenberg that concluded: “The Russian announcement of Raoul Wallenberg’s death could only be accepted if it were confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt. This has not happened, partly for the want of a credible death certificate, and partly because the testimony about Raoul Wallenberg being alive after 1947 cannot be dismissed. The burden of proof regarding the death of Raoul Wallenberg lies with the Russian Government.”30

  It still does.

  According to Susanne Berger, who spent six years as a consultant to the Swedish-Russian investigation: “There is no longer a debate: It is clear that Russia has documentation which could help solve the Wallenberg mystery if researchers were given proper access. Russia itself does not deny this fact but stresses that it will not allow review of documentation it deems to be of an operational intelligence nature . . . Why does Sweden not fight to see this material?”31

  21

  The Last Survivors

  FOR DECADES AFTER HER ARRIVAL in America, Vera Herman did not talk much about her survival of the Holocaust in Hungary.

  “There was so much pain,” she said in 2009, her hands shaking, seated on a couch in her home in New Jersey. “We lost so many people. The one person who was dearest to me was my grandmother. She was my role model and my idol. The thought that she died, that she ended up ...” Her voice trailed off. “And then my grandfather—he was such an honorable, charitable, decent, and proud man . . . I tried to tell people about it all, once I learned enough English.” But people’s reactions dismayed her. “One was—‘you’ve suffered so much, why not put it all behind you.’ It was well-meaning but impossible. The other reaction made me shut up for thirty-seven years—‘you must be exaggerating. Human beings don’t do things like that to other human beings.’ . . . I think a lot of Americans felt vaguely guilty for not having stopped it.”1

  Then the past stormed back and her life would never be the same. It all began with a telephone call in August 1983. Vera was told that Rider University in New Jersey was planning to celebrate the deeds of a Holocaust rescuer.

  Had she ever heard of Raoul Wallenberg?

  Vera laughed.

  “If I didn’t know who he was I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”2

  Vera agreed to speak about Wallenberg and her rescue. Over several weeks, she prepared her speech, knowing her family would be in the audience. The horror and terror returned, mostly during the night, erupting into vivid flashbacks in her sleep. Fastidious, studious to the last, she kept a pencil and pad by her bed. “I would write down the nightmares and sort out what was and was not reality. I had about six weeks of pretty nasty nightmares. There was delayed PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We survivors had not stopped to analyze what the experiences had done to us. We were just so grateful to be alive.”3

  On October 5, 1983, at Rider University, near her home in New Jersey, Vera walked to a podium before a packed house and spoke at length for the first time about her experiences during the Holocaust. “All of a sudden,” she later recalled, “I came to a sobering realization—a discovery of extraordinary importance: I was among the youngest of the survivors of the Holocaust, western civilization’s darkest hour. None of us were getting any younger. It was our sacred duty to speak for those who perished and, above all, to try to teach love, acceptance, and tolerance to the young through the lessons of the Holocaust in order to stem the ever-rising tide of hatred everywhere in the world.”4

  Vera has since spent much of her free time doing precisely that. She still urges her audiences to remember that “we are all human beings. Only after this do we belong to educational, ethnic, political, racial, religious, or social groups. If we accept that which unites us, our common humanity, the reasons that divide us should not matter.”

  ON A WARM SPRING DAY in 2009, as sunlight floods through windows in her New Jersey home, Vera tells the story of how her father Emil tried to get his family to safety in America in 1939. Sadly, the Nazis arrived before the Hermans could get away. But Emil did manage to get permission to send two containers of family heirlooms across the Atlantic, where they sat for seven long years in a New York warehouse. Remarkably, when Emil opened the containers in 1947, he discovered that nothing had been touched. He also found Vera’s most precious belonging—a Shirley Temple doll—which he proudly returned to her. To this day, Vera treasures it as her only memento of her idyllic childhood before the Holocaust.

  “If anyone deserved to at least see the fruits of his labor, it was Raoul Wallenberg,” says Vera. “The Russians robbed people of their souls. They would convince their prisoners that no one cared about them. It is just horrendous to think that they did that to him.”

  Vera doesn’t hold out much hope that Vladimir Putin will be any more helpful than Gorbachev was in solving the mystery of Wallenberg’s fate: “I don’t think Putin is much different from Stalin.”5 As with others who were rescued by Wallenberg, she struggles with the notion that the man who saved her is, in all likelihood, dead. “I don’t think we can ever accept his probable death,” she says.6

  If by some miracle Wallenberg were still alive, adds Vera, she would show him her family. They are his greatest legacy.

  It is a familiar and deeply affecting refrain repeated around the globe by those rescued—the one hundred thousand lives some credit him with saving have now become, perhaps, a million or more. The living testament to his humanity continues to multiply, growing as the years pass, a perpetual reminder of how one man really can make a difference.

  MARIANNE LOWY, like Vera Herman, escaped communism in 1947 and moved to the United States with her husband, Pista Reiss. She had two children, a girl and a boy, both of whom dote on her today. In 1974, she remarried. Today, eighty-six and widowed from her second husband, she still has the high cheekbones and striking looks of the dark-haired teenager who wore an exquisite Wallenstein gown to her first ball in 1942, practiced pirouettes on the polished parquet floors of her parents’ Budapest home, and dreamed as a young girl, thanks to her family’s friendship with the successful movie producer Adolph Zukor, of being sent to Hollywood to become a child star. “I missed my boat,” she smiles, seated in an Upper East Side studio in New York, where she spends each fall before returning to her home in Palm Beach. “I could have been another Shirley Temple.”7

  Like Vera Herman, Marianne sees it as her life’s last mission to remind the world about the man who saved her, her family, and so many others. She speaks as often as she can in high schools, telling students to live their lives to the fullest, as Wallenberg did. “Life is very precious,” she says. “You have to make the best of every moment that you live. Do not listen to demagogues. Try not to have hatred and prejudice. Try to help others. Never lose hope.”

  Her memories are still vivid; her gratitude to Wallenberg undiminished. She smiles as she recalls that gold and cans of sardines were the most sought-after items on the black market in Budapest during the Holocaust. Gold could buy life. Sardines sustained it. Although she does not like sardines, she still keeps two cans of them in her home, “just in case.”8

  THERE ARE MANY DATES that eighty-six-year-old Erwin Koranyi cannot forget. One of the most poignant was the day in 1990 when he received a letter from his first wife, Alice Breuer, in Stockholm. Erwin opened it, excited to read Alice’s news. The letter included a clipping from the Stockholm newspaper Expressen. On January 13, 1990, it had published Wallenberg’s 1944 diary, page by page. Alice had sent Erwin photocopies of some of the pages.

  Erwin was astonished to read that on August 5, 1944, according to the diary, Raoul Wallenberg had a meeting at 4 p.m. with a certain “Koranyi.” Then on another page of the diary, on August 7, was a note in Wallenberg’s neat handwriting: “5 fanger”—five prisoners, including a “Mrs. Koran”—Alice.

  August 7 had been another unforgettable date—the day Erwin had been reunited with Alice, thanks to Wallenb
erg.

  Erwin read the clipping carefully.

  “My eyes filled with tears,” he recalled, “as I remembered Wallenberg by this silent reminder from his grave.”9

  Erwin was now married to a fellow Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Edie, some of whose family had died on the death marches in November 1944. Their marriage would last fifty years until Edie died in 2009. They did not have children partly because Erwin was still haunted by Alice’s tragic miscarriage in 1945.

  Erwin today lives alone in a spacious apartment, full of midcentury European art, overlooking central Ottawa. A large oil painting of Edie dominates the hallway. In his office, he pulls out a photograph of Alice, his first wife. He has never forgotten her mother’s last wishes—that he should protect and save Alice. He still feels responsible for her.

  Erwin’s wise and still handsome face creases with emotion as he casts his mind back to the years before the Nazis stormed into Hungary. He can still smell the three thousand rose bushes his father planted in a vast flower garden surrounding the family home in Budapest. Yet he has no desire to revisit his youth—he is one of many Jewish émigrés who has never been tempted to return, unlike Alice, Vera Herman, and Marianne Lowy. Erwin cites the murder in recent years of Gypsies and the desecration in June 2009 of the Wallenberg memorial on the banks of the Danube, where so many Jews were stripped of their clothing and shoes before being shot to death by the Arrow Cross. Pig’s trotters were stuffed into the metal shoes that compose the memorial, just one of many anti-Semitic acts in the country in recent years.10 “They [also] shat on the shoes,” he says bitterly. “And you ask why I have not gone back!”

  The increase in anti-Semitism and the rise of the far right in Hungary does not surprise him. Like Austria—the birthplace of Heydrich and Hitler and other mass murderers such as Kaltenbrunner—Hungary is a country that has never properly atoned, in his eyes, for the Holocaust. Erwin implies that perhaps these countries should finally begin to acknowledge the magnitude of their citizens’ crimes, as Germany has done, before the last survivors pass on.

  “I am very deeply Jewish, in a nationalistic sense,” Erwin explains carefully. “I am probably an atheist, but I am definitely, through and through, a Jew. One thing I know; I don’t want to live a minute in this world without a state of Israel.” During the wars in 1967 and 1973, he volunteered to seve as a doctor in Israel. He didn’t get there in 1967 because the war was over so quickly. But the decision to go, magically it seemed, marked an end to his PTSD. During the next war, in 1973, he worked as a field physician on the northern front, treating the severe burns of young Israeli tank crews.11

  Erwin Koranyi long ago achieved his boyhood ambition of becoming a doctor. And he found great and lasting love with his second wife, Edie. “A happy ending?” he has written at the end of a lyrical memoir. “Perhaps. But everything has a price, and the survivor must pay. He must redeem his existence with the pain of remembrance, with the sorrowful memories of lost loved ones.”12

  OUTSIDE, IT IS A SULTRY AUGUST DAY in Stockholm. The clean, prosperous city’s sidewalk cafes are full of Scandinavian tourists, the harbor is busy with pleasure boats and cruise ships. Jewish tourists stand near Stockholm’s central synagogue and look slightly mystified by a Raoul Wallenberg memorial, one of several that now grace capital cities around the globe.

  Although most well-informed people have heard of Wallenberg today, many, including Jews, know less about him than about Oscar Schindler, who saved far fewer people and in any case profited from their forced labor. And sadly, Wallenberg’s extraordinary courage, especially after the Arrow Cross took power, has been overshadowed by speculation about his fate. The voices of those he saved are rarely heard.

  The testimony of these last survivors is immensely valuable, more so than any diplomatic cable from Budapest to Stockholm. Their courage and resilience were in many cases just as inspirational as that of their “lost hero.” Indeed, they deserve to be remembered too. They were not passive. They fought to stay alive. They did not have diplomatic status. All of them believe they are here today because a young man could not stand by while Adolf Eichmann tried to kill every last one of them.

  Eighty-three-year-old Alice Breuer still remembers Wallenberg’s heroism only too well. In her apartment in the center of the city, she points to a photograph taken in Hungary in 1944, before Wallenberg saved her life for the first time by issuing her a Schutzpass. The photograph shows her wearing a coat with a yellow star sewn onto it.

  Sixty-five years later, Alice is soon on the verge of tears as she recalls the summer of 1944, the most destructive chapter in the Holocaust when more than four hundred thousand of her fellow Hungarians, including almost all her relatives, were sent to their deaths by Adolf Eichmann. “I never thought it would be so emotional, thinking back,” she says. “I don’t know why I survived it all. I really don’t. It was fated, preordained.” Nor will she ever forget the cold morning in January 1945 when Raoul Wallenberg saved her for a second time, shouting through a megaphone, demanding that his Jews—Alice and dozens of others—be returned to him rather than shot and dumped into the Danube.

  Alice arrived in Wallenberg’s homeland in 1952 with nothing but a seemingly fatal disease—tuberculosis—to remind her of all she had lost. “I was very ill when I got here,” she says. “A doctor said I was going to die. I didn’t want to live, but everyone made a fuss about me. They gave me all they could. Clinically, I was depressed. I had lost all my family.”

  Alice slowly recovered from tuberculosis, having finally decided she wanted to live. But life for many years was a daily struggle. It wasn’t long before her marriage with Laci Revesz began to unravel. “My private life was not good,” she says. “I had miscarriages. I couldn’t have children. I had treatment. But then, when I was able to get pregnant, we got divorced.” 13

  She eventually began to work as a doctor in Sweden. She also started therapy, as was required of all those dealing with psychiatric patients. “Analysis was very important to me,” she explains. “I was able to think things over. It allowed me to recover.”14 She is today regarded as one of Sweden’s most distinguished psychotherapists.

  Alice and her first husband, Erwin, whom she married to stay alive, still meet occasionally and correspond regularly. They clearly still care about each other a great deal.15

  The last time they saw each other for a joyful reunion was in spring 2009, when they visited Erwin’s sister, Marta. She also owes her life to Raoul Wallenberg, who would now, in 2010, be ninety-eight years old.

  EIGHTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD NINA LAGERGREN, Raoul’s half-sister, also lives alone in Stockholm. She has fought her entire adult life to try to find her brother, but she no longer has the energy she once had. In August 2009, her brother, Guy, died, making her the only living member of Raoul’s immediate family. One senses in speaking to her that the burden of carrying on the fight alone is now too much to bear.

  “My family has been fighting, breaking our hearts, for a very long time,” says Nina. “Another generation needs to carry on now and do whatever it can to solve the [mystery] and keep his name alive.”

  Nina still treasures the wooden box she received in Moscow in 1989, containing his passport and diary. In her home hangs an oil painting of Raoul, which her parents adored, and a bust of him is in a hallway. He is also ever-present in her study. “There’s not one day I don’t spend with him,” she says. “He is with me in the books, papers, photographs, and so on that fill this room. He is with me all the time.”16

  Appendix

  Losses of Hungarian Jews During World War II

  Source: Adapted from The Politics of Genocide, The Holocaust in Hungary, condensed edition, by Randolph L. Braham (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2000), p. 252, and based on data found in Hungarian Jewry before and after the Persecution (Budapest: Statistical Department of the Hungarian Section of the World Jewish Congress, n.d.), 2.

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE. WANNSEE

 
; 1 Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and The Final Solution, Picador, New York, 2002, p. 94.

  2 Mario Dederichs, Heydrich: The Face of Evil, Casemate, 2009, pp. 20-30.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Danny Smith, Lost Hero, Harper Collins, London, 2001, p. 21.

  5 Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and The Final Solution, p. 101.

  6 “We [had] decided to employ it for the mass extermination operation,” the Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess recalled. “Now we had the gas, and we had established a procedure.” The manufacturer later claimed at Nuremberg that it had been developed only as a disinfectant. Danny Smith, Lost Hero, p. 21.

  7 Auschwitz doctor Miklos Nysizli, a Hungarian, recalled: “For every convoy [delivered to the camp] it was the same. Red Cross cars brought the gas from the outside. There was never a stock of it in the crematorium. The precaution was scandalous, but still more scandalous was the fact that the gas was brought in a car bearing the insignia of the International Red Cross.” Source: Ibid.

  8 David Ceserani, Becoming Eichmann, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 114.

  9 Ibid.

  10 So-called Sassen interviews, cited at Eichmann trial, session 75, June 20, 1961.

  11 Danny Smith, Lost Hero, p. 21.

  12 David Ceserani, Becoming Eichmann, p. 115.

  13 Ibid., p. 117.

  CHAPTER TWO. ON THE RUN

  1 A few days earlier, Vera had seen her only teacher for the last time. She and other Jewish children had been barred from local schools, but the principal of a former Jewish day school, in the local town of Banska Bystrica, had continued to teach Vera and several others in secret and at great risk to himself. “I loved him,” Vera remembered. “I loved him dearly. The day before we were to leave, while doing an errand for my parents, I saw him on the top of a hill, and I started running toward him to say good-bye. But then I stopped dead in my tracks because I remembered that my mother had said that our life depended on no one knowing that we were going to leave. So I stood and I watched that wonderful man disappear over the horizon and I never saw him again.” Vera Goodkin, interview with the author.