Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust

by Bierman, John

  Every time I think: This is the end, things couldn’t possibly be worse, and then I find out that it’s always possible for everything to get worse and even much, much worse. Until now, we had food, and now there won’t be anything to eat. At least we were able to walk around inside the ghetto, and now we won’t be able to leave the house…

  14 May We can’t look out of the window, because even for that we can be killed. But we’re still allowed to hear and so I and Marica heard the ice-cream vendor ringing his bell on the other side of the fence. I like ice-cream and I must say I like the ice-cream they sell in cones on the street much more than the ice-cream they sell in confectionery shops, even though in the confectionery shops it’s much more expensive! Of course, I don’t know, because I can’t see if the one ringing on the other side of the fence is the same ice-cream man who used to come to us, but in all of Varad there were just two ice-cream pedlars. Maybe it really was him and now he is sad because his customers are locked up behind the fence…

  17 May I did write in you, didn’t I, Dear Diary, some time ago that every misfortune can be followed by something worse? You see how right I am? The interrogation has begun in the Dreher beer factory…The gendarmes don’t believe that the Jews don’t have anything left of their valuables. They say that they probably hid them or buried them in the ground somewhere or deposited them for safe-keeping with the Aryans. For example, we deposited Grandma’s jewellery for safe-keeping with Juszti, that’s true. Now they come to the ghetto houses and pick up people, almost all of them rich ones, and take them to the Dreher beer factory. There they beat them until they tell where they hid their possessions. I know that they beat them terribly because Agi said that you can hear the cries in the hospital. Now everybody in the house is afraid that they will be taken to be beaten at Dreher.

  18 May Last night, Dear Diary…I couldn’t sleep and I overheard what the adults said…They said that the people aren’t only beaten at Dreher but also get electric shocks. Agi cried as she told this, and if she hadn’t told it I would have thought that it was all just some awful story out of a nightmare. Agi said that from Dreher people are brought to the hospital bleeding at the mouth and ears and some of them also with teeth missing and the soles of their feet swollen so they can’t stand. Dear Diary, Agi also told other things, like what the gendarmes do to the women, because women are also taken there, things that it would be better if I didn’t write them down in you, things that I am incapable of putting into words…I even heard…that in the ghetto here there are many people who commit suicide. In the ghetto pharmacy there is enough poison, and Grandpa gives poison to the older people who ask for it. Grandpa also said it would be better if he took cyanide and also gave some to Grandma…

  22 May…Today they announced every head of family will be taken in (to Dreher) so Grandpa also has to go. Terrific screaming comes from the direction of Dreher. All day long an electric gramophone keeps playing the same song – ‘There’s Just One Girl in the World.’ Day and night the noise of this song fills the ghetto. When the record stops for a moment we can hear the yelling…Agi keeps comforting me by saying that the Russians are doing so well in the war that it can’t be that we will be taken to Poland, because by the time we get there we will fall right into the arms of the Russians. Agi thinks we’re going to be taken somewhere in Hungary, to the Plains area, where we will be put to work in the fields. It will soon be harvest-time and all the farmers have gone into the army. Oh, I wish only that Agi should be right…

  29 May And so, Dear Diary, now the end of everything has really come. The ghetto has been divided up into blocks and we’re all going to be taken away from here…

  30 May … That gendarme in front of the house, the one Uncle Béla calls a friendly gendarme because he never yells at us and doesn’t even speak familiarly to the women, came into the garden and told us that he will have to leave the gendarmerie because what he saw in Redey Park [the railway station] isn’t a fit sight for human beings. They stuffed eighty people into each wagon and all they gave them was one pail of water for that many people. But what is even more awful is that they bolt the wagons. In this terrible heat we will suffocate in there…Dear Diary, I don’t want to die; I want to live, even if it means I’ll be the only person here allowed to stay…I would wait for the end of the war in some cellar, or even on the roof, or in some secret cranny. I would even let the cross-eyed gendarme, the one who took our flour away from us, kiss me just so long as they didn’t kill me, only that they should let me live. Now I see that friendly gendarme has let Mariska come in. I can’t write anymore, Dear Diary, the tears run from my eyes. I’m hurrying over to Mariska.*

  As described by Eva Heyman, conditions in the Varad ghetto seem to have been a good deal better than in some others. Dr Martin Földi described a more typical state of affairs at the town of Uzhorod: ‘The ghetto was established at a brick factory. It could have housed perhaps two thousand people with difficulty. We were fourteen thousand. The sanitation conditions were indescribable. There were no latrines. We improvised something in the open that was awful and had a depressing and demoralizing effect. A German Gestapo officer told me: “You live here like swine.” ’

  When the Jewish Council in Budapest protested to Eichmann about what they had heard of conditions in the provincial ghettos he replied that they were no worse than those experienced by German soldiers on manoeuvres. ‘You are starting again with the propaganda stories,’ he warned. Eichmann and Lászlo Endre, an under-secretary of state at the Hungarian Interior Ministry, went on an inspection tour of the camps. They liked what they saw. On their return to Budapest, Endre said: ‘I found everything in order. The ghettos in the country are virtually like sanatoria. At last the Jews are getting some fresh air; they have exchanged their former mode of life for a healthier one.’

  By this time the Eichmann Kommando had established permanent office and living quarters in the commandeered Hotel Majestic on Schwab Hill, an elegant district of Buda filled with the summer homes of the wealthy. The downtown branch, where Hungarian liaison chief Lieutenant-Colonel Lászlo Ferenczy was installed with his gendarmes and plainclothesmen, was in the back wing of the Pest County Hall on the eastern bank of the Danube. It was disguised, with grim irony, as International Warehouse and Transport Ltd but known more directly by its occupants as the Hungarian Jew-Liquidating Command. When the deportations began, Eichmann threw a small celebration at the Majestic, inviting Ferenczy, Endre, and another under-secretary at the Interior Ministry, Lászlo Baky. They drank champagne, flown in from Paris.

  The deportations proceeded at a ferocious pace. Often as many as five trains a day left for Auschwitz, each carrying up to four thousand men, women, and children, packed like sardines seventy, eighty, or even a hundred to a wagon. Into each wagon went one pail of water and one empty pail for slops. The journey to Auschwitz took three or four days. When Jewish leaders protested about conditions on these transports, Otto Hunsche, one of Eichmann’s assistants, snapped: ‘Stop bothering me with horror stories… There are no more than fifty to sixty dying en route in any single transport.’ Endre was more threatening: ‘The Jews have only been overtaken by the fate they deserve. If members of the Jewish Council stubbornly insist on their allegations they will be dealt with as ordinary rumour-mongers.’

  On arrival at Auschwitz, deportees, picked at random, were required to send a picture postcard, bearing the dateline Waldsee – supposedly a summer resort in Austria but entirely fictitious – and a message, such as ‘All well. I am working here.’ These were intended to dispel panic among those yet to come. The Nazis still feared another Warsaw uprising.

  The Jews were now arriving at Auschwitz in such numbers that, despite the extra gas chambers and ovens recently installed, Hoess rushed to Budapest to tell Eichmann he just could not cope. Eichmann reluctantly agreed to a reduced schedule of three trains a day, but even this was a testament to his extraordinary persistence and influence. With the German Army hard-pressed by the R
ussians, every piece of rolling stock was desperately needed for military purposes. Eichmann’s transport officer, Franz Novak,* kept meeting obstacles. Eichmann appealed direct to Himmler, who in turn referred the problem to Hitler’s general headquarters for a ruling. The answer was that the army could claim priority on transport vehicles ‘only when it is advancing.’ Since it was now retreating, Eichmann got his trains. This meant that German troops, pulling back across the plains of eastern Hungary, had to leave their heavy weapons behind. At the most desperate stage of the war, with the Reich itself now threatened, it was considered more important to use the available rolling stock to transport Jewish civilians – some to the war factories, where they were quickly worked to death, others straight to the gas chambers.

  When the full realization of what was happening to their fellows in the provinces became clear to them, the Jewish executive committee in Budapest issued a clandestine leaflet appealing to ‘the Christian people of Hungary, with whom they have for a thousand years lived side by side in this motherland, sharing good fortune and ill alike.’ It described in detail the horrors of the transports, expressed the Jews’ faith in the ‘sense of justice of the Hungarian nation,’ and concluded ‘should we, however, raise our supplication in vain – beseeching the Hungarian nation for our bare lives only – we ask them only to forbear from the horrors and cruelties preceding and accompanying the deportations and to put an end to our sufferings at home, allowing our bodies at least to rest in the soil of our native country.’

  By chance that despairing appeal more or less coincided with Horthy’s decision to suspend deportations and with Wallenberg’s arrival.

  In mid-1944 neutral diplomatic missions in Budapest included those of Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and one or two Latin American states. In addition there was a papal nuncio and representatives of the International Red Cross. After the Nazis forced Horthy to install the Sztójay puppet government in March, the Swedes and others had downgraded their mission from embassy to legation as a sign of non-recognition. The Hungarian ambassador in Stockholm was obliged to return home, although the Swedish envoy, Carl Ivar Danielsson, remained in Budapest with the title of minister.

  Under the pressure of growing world concern about the fate of the Hungarian Jews, sparked off by revelations from escaping prisoners about what was happening at Auschwitz, these neutral missions had already begun to make some uncoordinated moves towards protecting limited numbers of Jews in the capital, although for those in the provinces they had been unable to do anything. Even before Wallenberg’s arrival, for example, the Swedish legation had begun to issue an agreed quota of 650 protective passes to Jews who could show that they had family or business links with Sweden. The Swiss, who as representatives of British interests had set up a Palestine Office at their legation, had possession of a few hundred emigration certificates for British-controlled Palestine. These were being issued by the Palestine Office and the recipients’ names were entered into a collective passport against the day when it might be possible for them to leave.

  Such documents were of doubtful validity and could scarcely have proved effective had Eichmann been able to launch his blitz on the capital’s Jews, but they were a beginning, and Wallenberg quickly set about building on that foundation. On his arrival at the legation he had been warmly welcomed by Minister Danielsson, who had initiated King Gustav’s appeal to Horthy. Although an old-school diplomat, brought up in the traditions of ambassadorial correctitude, he approved wholeheartedly of Wallenberg’s mission and even of the unconventional methods he knew his new colleague had been sanctioned to employ. So did a younger diplomat, Per Anger, who had known Wallenberg in Sweden. Many years later, when he was Swedish ambassador to Canada, Anger recalled reaction to Wallenberg in the Swedish mission: ‘To start with, he shocked some of us professional diplomats by his unconventional methods, but we very soon found he had the right approach.’

  Wallenberg’s approach was based on a few salient points which he had been quick to recognize had bargaining value. First, the Hungarian puppet régime desperately desired respectability and international recognition as the legitimate government of the country. Second, Sweden represented both Hungarian and German interests in a number of important countries at a time when the tide of war had turned so decisively against the Nazis and their allies. Third, individual Hungarians in high places were increasingly susceptible to threats of post-war retribution and promises of Swedish good offices according to their present behaviour. In addition Wallenberg was quite prepared to descend to outright bribery and blackmail where these might prove effective, and had plenty of funds for such purposes.

  Wallenberg was fully aware, too, of the importance of appearances in dealing with German and Hungarian officialdom and the first thing he did, after setting up his Department C at the legation, was to design an impressive-looking Swedish passport to replace the somewhat mundane certificates so far issued. Here his architect’s training in design and draughtsmanship came into play, and the Wallenberg passport was a stroke of genius. He had it printed in yellow and blue, embellished with the triple crown of the Royal Swedish government, and dotted with seals, stamps, signatures, and counter-signatures. Though it had absolutely no validity in international law, it inspired respect, serving notice to the Germans and Hungarians that the holder was not an abandoned outcast but under the protection of the leading neutral power of Europe. These passports also gave a big boost to the morale of those Jews who received them. ‘They made us somehow feel like human beings again after being reduced to mere things by all the measures and propaganda against us,’ recalled Edit Ernster, one of the earlier recipients (she emigrated to Sweden after the war). As Wallenberg wrote in his first report to Stockholm: ‘The Jews are in despair. One way or another we must give them hope.’

  At first, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry gave Wallenberg permission to issue only 1500 of these passports. By skilful stick-and-carrot negotiation he progressively got this quota increased to 2500 and finally to 4500. In fact, he eventually issued more than three times that number, bribing and blackmailing Hungarian officials to turn a blind eye. When things became really desperate in the final days, when he could get no more of his ‘official’ passports printed, his office was to issue a much simplified version, a mere cyclostyled form, bearing Wallenberg’s signature. In the chaotic conditions then prevailing, often even that worked.

  Noting the effectiveness of the Wallenberg passports, other neutral missions began to follow suit, Consul Charles Lutz, head of the foreign interests department at the Swiss legation, issued at first hundreds, then thousands of passports – more, even, than Wallenberg. The so-called ‘glass house,’ the section that dealt with Jewish affairs at the Swiss legation, was besieged daily by hundreds of Jews clamouring for these Schutzpasse. So, of course, was Wallenberg’s office, which by this time had a staff of 250 Jews, working around the clock in shifts. Through Wallenberg’s skilful intercession with the Hungarian authorities, all his staff were exempted from wearing the yellow star and from service with the Hungarian Army’s labour battalions.

  The small Latin American missions caught the infection and, eventually, the mission of Franco Spain. The Spanish mission actually issued protective passports to a handful of Jewish families whose ancestors had fled from the Spanish Inquisition four and a half centuries earlier, but who had preserved their Spanish language and cultural traditions. Quite independently, and at the prime instigation of Cardinal Angelo Roncalli (then apostolic delegate in Turkey; he later became Pope John XXIII), the papal nunciature began issuing thousands of baptismal certificates and safe-conduct passes. The emphasis of official Roman Catholic policy in Hungary was thus turned from one of seeking protection only for converted Jews to one which embraced all of Jewish descent.

  Meanwhile, Wallenberg was now setting up hospitals, nurseries, and soup kitchens throughout the city, buying food, medicine, and clothing with the unlimited funds available to him through the American
–Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the War Refugee Board. The International Red Cross belatedly followed suit. Wallenberg also initiated co-ordination of all neutral relief and rescue efforts by organizing a joint committee of heads of mission with the papal nuncio, Angelo Rotta, at their head. Wallenberg’s staff increased to four hundred, and while they still worked around the clock in shifts, Wallenberg allowed himself no more than four hours’ sleep a night. He was showing a zeal, energy, and administrative and organizational skills that, put to a different purpose, even Eichmann might have envied.

  His efforts were certainly being noticed in Stockholm. On 10 August Ivar Olsen, the War Refugee Board representative, wrote to John Pehle, his superior in Washington: ‘I get the impression indirectly that the Swedish Foreign Office is somewhat uneasy about Wallenberg’s activities in Budapest and perhaps feel that he has jumped in with too big a splash. They would prefer, of course, to approach the Jewish problem in the finest traditions of European diplomacy, which wouldn’t help too much. On the other hand, there is much to be said for moving around quietly on this type of work. In any case, I feel that Wallenberg is working like hell and doing some good, which is the measure.’

  On the general situation in the Hungarian capital, Olsen reported that he had talked the day before with ‘a chap from Hungary’ from whom he had learned that ‘the Jews are so terrified that they are now simply hiding in their homes. He believed that if the Jews weren’t so terrified the best thing they could do would be to take off their yellow stars en masse, which would cause so much confusion, particularly because of the air raids around Budapest, that many of them could escape out into the country where they could be hidden. He said that about 80 percent of the Hungarian metropolitan population are quite unmoved by the Jewish persecutions and simply shrug their shoulders. The others are too frightened to help.’