He claimed he first heard of Wallenberg in 1951, when he was in prison at a place called Verkhne Uralsk. He was told about the Swedish prisoner by David Vendrovsky, a Jewish author, who was moved into Kalinski’s cell after previously sharing a cell with Wallenberg and a former Latvian cabinet minister, Wilhelm Munters. ‘Vendrovsky told me that Wallenberg was a very interesting and exceedingly sympathetic man,’ said Kalinski. He claimed that Vendrovsky told him in great detail about Wallenberg’s version of his arrest and imprisonment as a spy.
Kalinski said Vendrovsky pointed Wallenberg out to him from their cell window as the Swede was exercising in a yard below.
‘Several times a month until 1953 we saw them, Munters and the Swede, sometimes exercising in the yard, sometimes on the way to or from the bath-house, only this was by accident because we were not supposed to see other prisoners,’ he said.
‘In 1953, following the death of Stalin, Verkhne Uralsk was cleared to make room for the supporters of Beria and we were all transferred by rail to Alexandrov Central Prison. I was travelling alone, under heavy escort, as a dangerous state prisoner, but I saw Wallenberg and a group of other prisoners walk past my compartment. I never saw him at all in Alexandrov Central, though. It’s an old tsarist prison and we were kept in separate blocks, but in 1955, when we were all being transferred to Vladimir Prison, I saw him again at the transit prison at Gorki, where all we prisoners were mustered in a big hall before continuing our journeys. He was in the same company, that is, with Munters and the others.’
Kalinski said his first two months in Vladimir Prison were spent in solitary confinement in cell 21 on the second floor of Corpus II. At the beginning of 1956 he acquired a cell-mate, the Georgian Social Democrat Simon Gogoberidse,* whom the KGB had kidnapped from Paris, where he was a political refugee. Gogoberidse told him he had just come from Corpus III, where he had been sharing a cell with Wallenberg and a former KGB general named Mamulov,† one of those who fell from grace with Beria. Gogoberidse said Wallenberg and Mamulov had also just been transferred to Corpus II and were in cell 23, on the same floor.
‘In fact, on that very day, after only a couple of hours, we saw Wallenberg and Mamulov from our cell window, exercising down in the yard,’ said Kalinski. ‘Afterwards I saw him many, many times when he was exercising either in Yard Four or Yard Five. These were the only two yards visible from my cell window.’ Kalinski said he never got a chance to talk to Wallenberg. ‘Towards the end of my time there I learned that Wallenberg was sharing a cell with a man named Shariyev, a former secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Central Committee. He was still there in cell 23 when I was released from Vladimir Prison on 29 October, 1959.’
Kalinski pointed out at this period that Wallenberg was always made to share a cell with Soviet citizens serving long sentences, never with foreigners. ‘This was done to reduce the risk of evidence about him getting out. If he were to have shared a cell with a foreigner who was later released the Russians would find it impossible to keep it quiet.’
In answer to any suggestion that his story was a subsequent invention, Kalinski was able to produce interesting documentary evidence to support his assertion that he saw Wallenberg at the time stated. During his years in prison he sent out postcards regularly to his sister, who lived in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa. These cards were printed by the International Red Cross, in accordance with Soviet prison service specifications, and prisoners were allowed to send and receive one of these a month.* Each card included a perforated, tear-off bottom half for the return message. When Kalinski finally got to Israel in 1975 he found that his sister had kept all his postcards.
Among them is one from March 1959, written in Yiddish but in Hebrew characters, in which he tells his sister that all the Germans in the prison except: two have been freed and the only foreigners left are now himself, one Italian, two Belgians, and a Swede. In another, which dates from August 1959 and is written in Polish, Kalinski tells his sister that the only foreigners now left in the prison, apart from himself, are one Italian and one Swede ‘who saved many Jews in Rumania during the war.’
‘Rumania’ was a mistake, said Kalinski. ‘Of course, I had heard from Gogoberidse and the others about what he had done in the war and just confused Hungary with Rumania.’ Kalinski insisted that these postcards constitute convincing proof that he was telling the truth about Wallenberg. ‘At that time I had no way of knowing that they were not going to let Wallenberg go eventually,’ he said, ‘and I had no idea that there was a great scandal about the Wallenberg affair. So why should I have mentioned him in those cards unless it was the truth?’
Kalinski handed these two postcards, and others out of the hundred or so in his sister’s possession, to the Swedish Foreign Office in January 1980 so that they could be subjected to exhaustive scientific tests to establish their authenticity. After several weeks the Swedes let it be known that they were perfectly satisfied that the postcards were genuine.
So much for Kalinski’s own testimony. How did he get so closely involved with that of Jan Kaplan?
In October 1978 he was flying from Tel Aviv to Vienna on business when his eye chanced to fall on a small item in Nasha Strana, a Russian-language Israeli newspaper. The story said that the noted Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who took a personal interest in the Wallenberg case, had urged Sweden to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics if the Russians failed to disclose what they had done with Raoul Wallenberg.
As Kalinski told it later, this item transfixed him. ‘Lord, I said to myself, isn’t Wallenberg out yet? I would never have dreamed that he was still jailed in the Soviet Union. If I had only known, of course I would have told far earlier what I knew about him.’
In a state of high excitement, Kalinski called on Wiesenthal as soon as he arrived in Vienna. After this he appeared on West German television and as a result of this the Swedish Foreign Office got in touch with him. What Kalinski told the Swedes appeared to be important confirmation of their earlier information about Wallenberg having been in Vladimir Prison, and it brought forward the date of his last having been seen from mid-1955 to late 1959.
After Kalinski’s return to Israel from that trip to Europe, he heard through the Russian émigré grapevine about Anna Bilder’s telephone conversation with her father. He got in touch with her and she gave him a detailed account of it. Kaplan’s mention of the unnamed Swede he had met in Butyrka Prison hospital excited Kalinski greatly. He decided to check further. On a trip to the United States in December 1978 he telephoned the Kaplan home in Moscow, having obtained the number from Anna. Evgenia Kaplan took the call. Her husband was ‘not available,’* she told Kalinski. But she confirmed that he had told her about meeting a Swede in Butyrka in 1975.
Kalinski then contacted the Swedish embassy in Washington and arranged a meeting at their consulate in New York for 20 December. Swedish Foreign Office Secretary-General Leif Leifland and East European Department Chief Sven Hirdman, then in charge of the Wallenberg case, were present when Kalinski again gave a detailed account of seeing Wallenberg in Soviet jails during the 1950s. He then added the astonishing information emanating from Jan Kaplan about the mysterious Swede in the Butyrka Prison hospital in 1975.
If the story were true, the unnamed Swede would have to be Wallenberg. Only he would have been a prisoner for thirty years at that time, and no other Swede was known or suspected to be in Soviet hands.
As a result of this information, the Swedish Foreign Office contacted their embassy in Tel Aviv and embassy counsellor Hakan Wilkens was instructed to invite Anna Bilder in for an interview. The normally cautious Swedes were so impressed by the evidence from both Anna Bilder and Abraham Kalinski that in January 1979 they formally reopened the moribund Wallenberg case.
On 3 January they sent a note to the Russian Foreign Ministry requesting the Soviets to investigate the new information ‘in order to establish whether Wallenberg had been present in the above-mentioned prisons at the different dates indicated.
’ On 24 January the Russians replied: ‘There is not, and cannot be, anything new regarding the fate of R. Wallenberg.’ As already stated on innumerable occasions, he had died in July 1947, and the assertions that he was in the Soviet Union as late as 1975 ‘are not in accordance with the facts.’
Soon after the Swedes heard from the Russians, Anna Bilder learned that her ailing father was back in prison. What was more, she claims, she received anonymous phone calls – two from Russian-speaking women and one from an English-speaking man. One voice had said, ‘Don’t say anything about Wallenberg,’ and had then hung up. Another said, ‘I’m your friend. I think it’s better for your father if you don’t speak about Wallenberg.’
Then, in the second week of July, Anna received a letter from her mother, dated 14 June 1979. It had been brought out of Russia by a new immigrant to Israel.
I write this letter to you though I am not sure that it will reach you and that the same thing will not happen as with Father’s letter, because of which he is already a year and a half in prison again. But we have nothing to lose after what happened to Father.
All the time I didn’t want and couldn’t write, even more so because of your pregnancy and then after the delivery,* but you cannot help Father. I lost all hope after I was called to Lubianka and learned that all this tragedy occurred because of the letter about this Swiss or Swede Wallberg [sic] whom he met in the prison infirmary when your father was sick with pneumonia and a heart attack. Father wrote a long letter about this Wallberg and for a long time he carried it around with him, looking for a chance to send it to you with a foreign tourist.
Every Saturday he went to the synagogue, where many tourists visit, but for a long time he had no success. He would come home very tired and say that everybody was afraid to take the letter through the border. Then one Saturday Father came home in a very good mood and told me that he had at last succeeded in giving the letter to a young foreign tourist who promised to send the letter to you in Israel from Vienna or Germany, I don’t remember which.
A few days later, it was on Friday night, 3 February,†there was a thorough search of our home and they took Father away with them. Already about a year and a half he is in custody, sometimes in Lubianka, sometimes in Lefortovo. Now I have lost all hope of seeing you again some day.
When I was called in May* to Lubianka, a very angry colonel screamed at me ‘The Soviet authorities behaved humanely and because of his (Father’s) sickness released him, but he ungratefully decided to send out illegally anti-Soviet spy letters to Israel through a foreigner. And your daughter,’ he shouted, ‘started up anti-Soviet propaganda there in Israel.’
Later he calmed down a bit and said, ‘If your daughter wants to see her father again some day she should stop her agitation against her motherland.’ About Father, he said, ‘He is in good health, but his fate depends upon your daughter’s behaviour in Israel – that is to say, he shouldn’t make a fuss there.’
I don’t know if it’s better to keep quiet, as many people here advise, or the opposite, so that American senators and other big people should start campaigning for Father, because many people were released through complaints to American senators and even to the President himself. Some people say that only a fuss in the papers and on the radio will do any good. I don’t know the answer myself. Here we are like blind puppies. You can see better there.
I’m afraid we won’t ever see you again, or your little Daniella. Why did Father have to interfere in this business? He never had anything to do with politics, and wouldn’t even listen to political jokes. Up to now I don’t understand what happened to the letter your father gave to the young foreigner. Perhaps he was an agent of the Lubianka.† I don’t know what went wrong, but I have no hope of anything.
Because of that letter about a poor prisoner they arrest a man and keep him for a year and a half. What good can you expect here? I know this letter must sound bitter. For a long time I didn’t want to write and tell you all the truth, and now I’ve decided that to help him you should know all the truth. My dearest, write and tell me how little Daniella develops and how Marina does at school, and where you spend your holidays. I want to know everything, so write to me and don’t be lazy. Let me know about them all the time.
Anna Bilder agonized over the letter, wondering what to do for the best. She first disclosed the letter’s contents to me on 23 July 1979. Then she consulted Abraham Kalinski, who urged her to turn it over immediately to the Swedish embassy in Tel Aviv. A couple of days later Kalinski and Anna went together to the embassy, where Evgenia Kaplan’s letter was photo-copied and the original sent to Stockholm by diplomatic pouch. There it was minutely examined by police and Foreign Office Soviet experts.
They were sufficiently convinced of the genuineness of the letter and Anna’s verbal evidence to recommend to the foreign minister that grounds existed for a further démarche to the Kremlin. This time Prime Minister Ola Ullsten decided to intervene personally. On 22 August 1979 he sent a letter to his opposite number, Alexei Kosygin. Ullsten asked in strong terms for the Wallenberg case to be reopened in the light of the new evidence, and in particular that a Swedish embassy official be allowed to interview Kaplan, if necessary in the presence of a Soviet official.
On 28 August the Russians replied. They stuck to their old story that Wallenberg died in 1947, and that there was nothing more to add. No reference at all was made to the Swedish request for an interview with Kaplan.
The same day, Prime Minister Ullsten issued a statement calling the Soviet attitude ‘deplorable.’ ‘Personally,’ he added, ‘I am convinced that the whole truth about the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg is still not at hand…We will continue our efforts to get a clarification of his fate. To this end we will, as we have done in the past, carefully test all new evidence that comes to our knowledge and take those measures we deem appropriate. The Wallenberg case remains an unsolved question…’
Chapter 19
Although the United States played no part in the attempts to locate and free Wallenberg after being rebuffed by the Swedes in April 1945, they retained an onlooker’s interest in the case,* as a flow of cable traffic between the US embassy in Stockholm and the State Department in Washington indicates, if only because of its effect on Soviet-Swedish relations.
Thus, when Maj von Dardel addressed a letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on 4 May 1973, seeking his help in the search for her son, US officials were already fully briefed on the ramifications of the Wallenberg affair. In her letter, Mrs von Dardel wrote: ‘I have with the greatest admiration followed your patient and successful struggle for peace in the Far East. I turn now to you concerning my son Raoul Wallenberg, born in 1912. His father was the cousin of Jakob and Marcus Wallenberg, of whom you probably know.’
After outlining briefly her son’s work in wartime Budapest and the unsuccessful attempts to obtain his release from Russia, Mrs von Dardel concluded: ‘I ask you, who by virtue of your extraordinary efforts have liberated thousands of prisoners…to undertake something which can throw new light on my son’s fate and if he is still alive to return him to liberty.’
When the letter reached Kissinger’s desk at the White House, on 21 August 1973, it was accompanied by a confidential memorandum signed by Thomas R. Pickering,* executive secretary at the State Department. This senior official was recommending to Kissinger that the United States should officially take up the Wallenberg case after all these years. He said:
As Mrs von Dardel underlines in her letter, her son went to Budapest in 1944 on the request of the then US ambassador to Sweden to conduct a salvage operation for the Hungarian Jews, and his efforts saved thousands of Jews from death. As Mrs von Dardel is now eighty years old and in bad health, she probably wants to make a last attempt to ascertain the fate of her son before she dies. Against the background of the compassion one must feel in this case, and the fact that the American government was the driving force behind Wallenberg’s mission in Hungary, we consider tha
t we ought to take a positive stand on Mrs von Dardel’s request and offer to make new inquiries at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, though without thereby giving her false hope that these attempts will be successful.
Pickering went on to recommend that Kissinger should approve an enclosed draft letter, to be signed by ‘a State Department official at a suitable level.’ The letter read:
Dear Mrs von Dardel,
Dr. Henry Kissinger has asked me to answer your letter and memorandum of May 4, 1973…Let me first state that I wholeheartedly support your desire to know definitely what happened to your son…Against the background of the humanitarian nature of the case and your son’s efforts for the Hungarian Jews during the last war, the United States government is prepared to ask the Soviet government, via the American embassy in Moscow, what has happened to your son. When an answer is obtained we will transmit it to you immediately, but considering the long period which has passed since your son disappeared and the previous unsuccessful attempts to get further information about his fate, I must ask you not to be too optimistic about the possibilities to obtain exact information in his case. With the greatest compassion for your sufferings during all these years.
Very sincerely yours…
This file included a detailed summary of the whole Wallenberg case for Kissinger’s perusal, and a telex message ready for transmission to the US embassy in Moscow, instructing the ambassador to launch this new initiative, together with all the necessary background information. All that was required was Kissinger’s approval on the file. He never gave it.
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 20
