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

by Bierman, John

  Chapter 20

  We have seen how Swedish weakness in the early years of Wallenberg’s captivity led to a series of disastrous blunders that may have sealed his fate forever. We have seen how the Americans, rebuffed once by Ambassador Söderblom in Moscow in April 1945, made no further attempt to do anything about the man they were instrumental in sending to Budapest and how Henry Kissinger, given an opportunity to make amends in 1973, failed to take it. We have seen how other influential individuals who might have been able to help also failed to do so. What about the other two countries most intimately concerned – Hungary and Israel?

  For a time, the Jews of Budapest – that is, those who refused to credit the Russian radio report of his death – believed either that Wallenberg was safely in Russian hands or that, if a prisoner, he would be released shortly. On 2 July 1945 the Israelite Congregation of Pest wrote to him, care of the Swedish Foreign Office, to convey the minutes of a board meeting of 21 June that ‘solemnly commemorate your immortal achievement and heroic fight.’

  The Budapest Central Jewish Hospital, they wanted to inform Wallenberg, was to have a pavilion named after him, though this would be ‘but a paltry token of our gratitude, which we are unable to express in an adequate fashion.’ They begged this ‘great son of the noble Swedish nation…to keep us in kind remembrance and we pray that the Lord make your life happy and successful.’

  As the months and then the years went by with no news of their saviour, the Budapest Jews came to the conclusion that he must be dead. He had come onto the scene out of nowhere and left in a legendary mist. One of their number, the historian and journalist Jenö Lévai, having discovered that Wallenberg had left extensive and well-documented records of his activities at the Swedish legation, embarked on his own memorial to Wallenberg – a book paying tribute to his heroic achievements.

  The Jews of Budapest set up a Wallenberg Memorial Committee and began raising funds to put up a suitable monument to him. The noted sculptor Pál Patzai was given the commission. He submitted a design, which the committee quickly approved, for a heroic bronze figure, an athlete wrestling with a huge snake that bore the swastika on its head. It took Patzai two years to complete his memorial. It stood over eighteen feet high on its support, which bore a relief profile of Wallenberg and a poetic text in his honour. ‘This monument,’ it said, ‘is our silent and eternal gratitude to him, and should always remind us of his enduring humanity in a period of inhumanity.’ A site for the monument in Budapest’s Saint Stephen’s Park was approved by the Hungarian authorities.

  The monument was put into place and covered with a tarpaulin, awaiting the day of its unveiling by the mayor of Budapest, Jószef Bognár. On the day of the inauguration – a Sunday in April 1948 – the entire Wallenberg Committee, representatives of the Swedish legation, hundreds of other Jewish and Gentile notables, and hundreds more ordinary citizens gathered to witness the ceremony. To their astonishment they found the statue was no longer there. During the night, Russian troops had arrived with ropes and horses and removed it.

  Nobody knew where it had gone and nobody dared inquire. For some years the whereabouts of the statue remained a mystery. A minor civil servant, who had been a former pupil of the sculptor Patzai, told the artist that his work had been discovered in the cellar of an abandoned building in the capital. The support with the relief profile of Wallenberg and the inscription was not with it, and was in fact never found.

  Some time after that the statue surfaced again, this time in the eastern city of Debrecen, where the thrifty Hungarian authorities – long since completely reduced to Soviet-satellite status – had erected it in front of a state pharmaceutical factory. The swastika had been removed from the snake’s head and the monument was now intended to symbolize man’s struggle against disease.*

  In Budapest meanwhile, Phoenix Street, one of the streets where Swedish-protected houses were located, close to the eastern bank of the Danube, had been re-named Wallenberg Street, and, despite official Hungarian attempts to turn him into a non-person, the street name has remained.

  Jenö Lévai, the enthusiastic biographer of Wallenberg, was muzzled by stages. At the end of his otherwise excellent first book on Wallenberg he had accepted the Soviet version of his disappearance and death, perhaps in good faith – though if so with a good deal of gullibility. In a later volume on the terrible events of 1944 and early 1945, Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry, he made scant mention of Wallenberg. In Eichmann in Hungary, published in 1961, he mentioned Wallenberg’s name only once, en passant, and even quoted one of his reports in full without naming him.

  When Lévai went to Stockholm in 1949 to deliver a eulogy on Wallenberg and pronounce him dead, he was involved in acrimonious exchanges with Rudolf Philipp, Wallenberg’s other biographer, who insisted passionately that his hero was alive. When Lévai’s book was translated into Swedish, his Stockholm publishers insisted that he re-write the chapter dealing with Wallenberg’s disappearance to soften his assertion that Wallenberg had died in Budapest. Even with this amendment the book was withdrawn and virtually all copies pulped, possibly as a result of protests by the von Dardels.†

  Despite Lévai’s capitulation to Communist pressure, his book stands as an otherwise excellent and reliable source of information, and his summing up of Wallenberg’s achievements is worth quoting: ‘Of greatest importance is the fact that the Nazis and Arrow Cross men were not free to run amok. They had to take into consideration that all their moves were being watched by the young Swedish diplomat. There were no secrets from Wallenberg. The Arrow Cross were unable to delude him. They were unable to act with impunity…Wallenberg was the world’s observing eye, the one who constantly demanded the criminals’ conviction. This is the great significance of Wallenberg’s struggle in Budapest.’

  Just the same, thousands of Hungarian Jews who were small children at the end of the war and who owe their survival to Wallenberg grew up in Budapest only vaguely aware that there was such a person, and presuming him, long dead. The Hungarian Communist leadership which arrived with the Red Army, having spent the war in Moscow, contained many Jews, such as Matyas Rákosy, Ernö Gerö, and Imre Nagy. The new government, however, accepted Marxist dogma about the nature of anti-Semitism and Soviet propaganda about the fate of Wallenberg and set about suppressing folk memories of him.

  Right up to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the rebirth of Hungary as a Western-style democracy, the Hungarian authorities were at best ambivalent about Wallenberg, at worst dismissive. In the late 1970s the celebrated Budapest film director Peter Bacso made a movie about Wallenberg’s wartime exploits, but at the last moment before its scheduled première in the autumn of 1978 the government withdrew permission for it to be shown. In the late 1980s, as the Kremlin began to loosen its grip on its satellites under Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform programme, the authorities in Budapest, anxious for American investment, allowed the World Jewish Con- gress to commission Hungary’s leading sculptor, Imre Varga, to make a statue of Wallenberg. It was made of Swedish granite and was sited on the edge of a small park in Buda where the Congress president, the Canadian-American distillery magnate Samuel Bronfman, dedicated it at a small and discreet public ceremony on May 2, 1987. No senior member of the Hungarian government attended and it was apparent that the régime was still unwilling to allow Marxist dogma about the causes of anti-Semitism to be challenged too openly. The statue bore an inscription in Latin of vaguely humanitarian import, which however made no mention of the Holocaust or Wallenberg’s work to save the Jews, nor of his disappearance into the Soviet prison system.

  In Israel disappointingly little has been done either to commemorate Wallenberg’s extraordinarily selfless services to the Jewish people and humanity as a whole or to press for his release. In the entire country there was, until the early 1980s, only one street named after him. This was a grubby back street on the edge of what was the no-man’s-land between the eastern and western sectors of Jerusalem at t
he time it was named. Until 1979 the plaque bearing the street name carried the dates 1912–1947. Then, learning belatedly that there was considerable doubt about it, the City Council had the date of Wallenberg’s presumed death obliterated. Eventually, after Wallenberg’s name had become something of a household word around the world, Jerusalem ‘promoted’ him and designated a street in the centre of the western half of the city as ‘Rehov Wallenberg’. It scarcely does him justice. No grand avenue or leafy boulevard, it’s a short one-way street, for use by buses and taxis only as they debouch into the bustling Jaffa Road. Tel Aviv did rather better than Jerusalem; due in part to Tommy Lapid’s efforts, a handsome thoroughfare in the city’s Kiryat Mada district now bears Wallenberg’s name.

  Wallenberg’s name is also given to a pathology clinic attached to the big municipal hospital in Beersheba, a clinic conceived and paid for not by the Israelis but by a group of former Hungarian Jews living in Canada. It was formally opened in April 1971, but since then the hospital authorities, no doubt inadvertently, have built around the original clinic and obscured the commemorative plaque unveiled by the Canadian delegation.

  But for the efforts of one Israeli journalist, Naftali Kraus – himself a Budapest ghetto survivor – Wallenberg might be virtually unknown to the Israeli public. Over the years Kraus plugged away at the Wallenberg story in the daily Ma’ariv. In 1974 Kraus wrote a monograph, Raoul Wallenberg: The Man Who Died Many Times, which was given strictly limited publication by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for the Survey of the Diaspora. In Israel’s only published work on the subject, Kraus writes harshly of his country’s indifference:

  The nation of Israel knows how to hold its martyr-heroes in its memory, but it does not deal as generously with the Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. Many of these – including some who laid down their lives in rescue operations – are forgotten. This is ingratitude…What do Jews know about Raoul Wallenberg, even the tens of thousands he saved from certain death? And what has been done in Israel to commemorate his memory? Nothing. Moreover, there is an embarrassing murkiness which borders on disgrace…In Israel there seems to be a conspiracy of silence…Even the material at Yad Vashem relates only to the period of his activities in Budapest and not to his later experiences. Yet this man is deserving of scrutiny until the end of his days.

  Sadly, I can only confirm the impression so forthrightly conveyed by Kraus. Few Israelis, including those who owed him their lives, bothered to make the journey to Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial complex at Yad Vashem to be on hand when a tree was belatedly planted in Wallenberg’s memory in the Avenue of the Righteous.

  Lászlo Szamosi was an honourable exception, even though he owes his survival and that of his family more to his own remarkable efforts than Wallenberg’s. Tommy Lapid turned up as one of the group officiating at the moving religious ceremony which preceded the tree-planting. So did Anna Bilder, whose father was consigned to the same fate as Wallenberg for daring to speak out about the Swede he met in prison in 1975. Tom Lantos and his wife were there from California, and it was thanks only to her spirited intervention that the American ambassador turned up with the Israeli interior minister, Dr Yosef Burg, and US roving envoy Sol Linowitz, who happened to be in Jerusalem for discussions with the Israeli government.

  Nina Lagergren had stayed behind in Stockholm on businessconnected with the Wallenberg Committee, and her brother Guy went as the representative of the family to perform the tree-planting, which had been delayed for so many years because his mother would never permit it. Maj von Dardel always felt that to allow a tree to commemorate Raoul’s name in the Avenue of the Righteous would somehow signify that he was dead. After her death in February 1979 – followed within three days by that of her husband – Nina Lagergren and Guy von Dardel withdrew the family objections to the planting.

  The ceremony received surprisingly little Israeli media publicity, both before and after the event. Presenting Wallenberg’s Yad Vashem medal and certificate to Professor von Dardel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared in ringing tones: ‘The Jewish people may forget its enemies and the wrongs done to it, but it never forgets a friend…We owe him an eternal debt of gratitude…We will continue to believe that he is alive, and we shall do whatever we can to try and save him.’

  In fact, the Begin government and all the Israeli governments preceding it had done nothing about the Wallenberg affair. In the years from 1948 to 1967, when the Soviet Union recognized the Jewish State and each had full diplomatic representation in the other’s capital, not a single query, note, or memorandum – verbal or written – appears to have been submitted by the Israelis about Wallenberg’s fate. A senior Foreign Ministry official admitted to me in February 1980, after repeated inquiries, ‘We have no file on Wallenberg.’

  In 1982, the Begin government organized a week of events in honour of Wallenberg. These involved a tree-planting ceremony, the naming of a children’s playground, the issuing of a postage stamp bearing Wallenberg’s face, and a number of like events including a speech in which a tame Swedish politician invoked Wallenberg’s name, none too subtly, in defence of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and against what he chose to call ‘the new anti-Semitism’ – i.e. the worldwide wave of criticism against Israel’s aggressive Lebanon policy.

  There were many, Israelis and foreigners alike, who found the use of Wallenberg’s name in justification of the invasion deeply distasteful. It was at the very least arguable that, given his strength of feeling for the underdog, Wallenberg might have felt outrage at the random slaughter of civilians by Defence Minister Ariel Sharon’s offensive. If Wallenberg had been alive and inclined to add his voice to the condemnation, would he too have been dismissed as one of ‘the new anti-Semites’?

  To this sorry catalogue of official Israeli indifference to the memory of Raoul Wallenberg and his works, a small but telling postscript was provided not long before this revised edition went to press.

  In April 1995, while in Jerusalem to film a television documentary, the author went with a camera crew to Yad Vashem. There he found that the carob tree he had seen planted in Wallenberg’s honour some fifteen years before was looking decidedly sickly – its growth stunted, its leaves discoloured and diseased. The trees on either side, one named for Per Anger, the other for members of the Norwegian Resistance, were in a similar condition.

  How could this be? The carob is a native of the Middle East, able to thrive on stony soil and with an absolute minimum of care and water. Carobs grow wild and flourish in the author’s garden in Cyprus.

  A Yad Vashem information officer conceded that the condition of Wallenberg’s tree had been noticed. He said it had been found that the soil conditions in that particular sector of the Avenue of the Righteous were poor, owing to the presence beneath the surface of a large boulder. He said that the Yad Vashem authorities were considering what should be done to rectify this state of affairs, but were hampered by a shortage of funds.

  It hardly seemed an adequate explanation. Why had it taken fifteen years to discover that the soil conditions were unsuitable? Had no one noticed that Wallenberg’s sickly little tree had scarcely grown an inch since it was planted? As for the plea of poverty, Yad Vashem is funded directly, and quite generously, by the Israeli government. No one observing the size of its administrative and maintenance staff would conclude that it is starved of funds. As well, it receives generous donations for specific projects from Jewish organizations and individuals in the Diaspora.

  Surely it: is a bitter irony – although in keeping with the way he was abandoned and forgotten after his heroic performance in wartime Budapest – that of the 2000 trees in the Avenue of the Righteous the one dedicated to Wallenberg, of all people, should be so sickly and neglected.

  Chapter 21

  Why did the Russians seize Raoul Wallenberg? Why did they never let him go? The first question is easier to answer than the second, for it is at least susceptible to logical explanation, however perve
rted the logic.

  With hindsight it is perfectly easy to see how the Russians, especially in the atmosphere of paranoid hysteria that characterized the Stalinist period at the end of the war, should have thought Wallenberg to be a spy, for either the Americans or the Germans, or both. His explanation when found in the thick of the street fighting for Pest that he was looking after Jews must have seemed to the Russians incredible to the point of absurdity. To the average Russian, whose anti-Semitism was bred in the bone, such an explanation would seem an insult to the intelligence, all the more so coming from a Swedish capitalist who could have sat the war out in comfortable neutrality. Anti-Semitism apart, the concept of disinterested humanitarian work performed by volunteers – on behalf of whatever group – would be totally alien to Soviet perceptions of the real world.

  When Budapest fell to the Russians they indulged in an orgy of looting, raping, and deporting to which friend, foe, and neutral alike fell victim. Jewish women who had survived the horrors of the death marches to the Austrian border had to yield their wasted bodies to the systematic violation of the ‘liberating’ Russian soldiery. Even young Jewish men were not exempted. Barrel-breasted Soviet women soldiers behaved little better than their male comrades.

  Lars Berg, Wallenberg’s fellow-secretary at the Swedish legation, tells in his memoir of the period how Russian troops entered the legation – officially sovereign Swedish territory – opened the safe, and emptied it of all the cash and valuables inside. He also tells how they completely cleared out the headquarters of the Hazai Bank, missing, however, a parcel left by Wallenberg in which Berg later found the enormous sum of 870,000 pengös in banknotes.*

  As for deportations, a few experiences related by Jews saved by Wallenberg will give some idea of what went on in the early days of the Soviet occupation. ‘Even Jews who were liberated by the Russians were taken to Siberia for up to ten years as prisoners,’ recalls Tommy Lapid. ‘They didn’t distinguish between Jews whom they saved and Germans whom they captured. So that to think the Red Army would have distinguished between a blond [sic – he was dark] Swedish diplomat and a blond German officer disguised in civilian clothes would be altogether too optimistic.’