Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  He remarked to Raoul, “I didn’t know you had Wiesenmeyer’s direct phone number.”

  Raoul smiled and made a face. “Oh, I thought you did.” He began filling out the safe pass, or Schutz-Pass, cards, while asking the mulling families not to push forward. “Please, let’s get this done orderly.”

  But the old lady, wearing lipstick and the odd hat, had stayed by his side and now handed him an old leather bag, a doctor’s black bag, and set it furtively in his hand. In German she said, “You will hold this for us, yes? For the two families, Dr. Kornis and Mr. Marton. Please.”

  Raoul understood and nodded, and held onto the bag, knowing that inside would be a collection of family heirlooms and old jewelry, maybe some cash and a few bank books, and an important address book. A life in a bag. To be added to his collection.

  The Arrow Cross lieutenant came up and said, “Get the scum out of here soon, or I will change my mind!”

  Raoul allowed the fake sign of bravado, and observed a flock of pigeons flying overhead. He signaled Vilmos to hurry the Jews into the vans and rickety bus that had arrived.

  “What is that smell?” he asked his friend.

  “Coal, probably. There is a plant not far away.”

  “Awful.”

  “Yes, but it is good to be able to have the time for the smell.”

  Raoul smoked, noticed the cold wind whipping now, and walked a few steps back and forth. These minutes were always the most nerve-racking, waiting for everyone to line up and get out before there was a sudden change of mind for any reason, and more desperate measures had to be taken. How could he ever do this without his Vilmos? Well, he couldn’t.

  The ten minutes passed slowly, the crowd dwindled, the light went out from the short day.

  “Perhaps we’ll stop on the way to Pest and grab a few of those custards,” proposed Vilmos, “to celebrate our little victory today.”

  “A charming idea—but I think we would do better to deliver our clients safely, and tonight, maybe at the Arizona Club, then celebrate with a few drinks.”

  “What about the bag?”

  “Leave it in the trunk of the car. Until we can make the transfer, later tonight.”

  Vilmos nodded, a cigarette dangling from his thick sensuous lips, as he shepherded the remaining Jews into the last vehicles. “We can take the final three with us, yes?”

  “Sure.”

  They got into the car and squeezed the three old souls into the back, setting their few bags into the trunk; Raoul kept the bag of valuables in the front, by his legs, alongside his backpack.

  On the streets, driving, they viewed the pitted buildings and the sparse traffic, seeing armed groups of Arrow Cross on the way as they headed down through the hills of Buda. Occasionally Raoul or Vilmos motioned each other when passing a German military vehicle; up here the Germans were fortifying themselves for the oncoming Russians from the East.

  With slow calm, Raoul inhaled and exhaled, enjoying the pleasure of the smoke and the drive, listening to the nervous chatter in the back. He took out his little notebook, wet the lead tip of his pencil, and wrote down the names of the two families … Should he put the bag in the vault or keep it with him? One day he’d have to transfer it all, back to Stockholm. But for tonight, he’d focus on drinks at the Arizona.

  Manny looked up from his computer and thought about the scenario he had just composed. Had he written the railroad scene too smoothly, with Raoul a bit too competent, even though it was based upon research? Was there enough sense of imminent danger, personal risk? What about the times when RW had to use his revolver to threaten a guard? And what if an Iron Cross officer had indeed wanted to call Wiesenmeyer, the German commissioner? Well, the important thing, Manny decided, was to try to recover the visceral scene, the actual moment. But, he thought—playing devil’s advocate—why would a historian go this indirect route, even exotic path? Was Gellerman risking his own career here? Well, he recalled one of his old professor’s advice—was it Curti or Williams?—at Wisconsin: “Get to the heart of the matter, the truth however you can get to it. Sometimes fiction is a better route than the so-called facts.” Said half in jest, but meant seriously. And wasn’t Manny’s scene based on his reading and research?

  Manny gazed out at his meadow, with the rows of trees at the edge of the field, and sighted a hawk flying overhead, circling, hovering, and diving. A New England pastoral scene down there, while up here, in his head, he tried to insert himself back into the Hungarian scene of 1944. Quite a challenge. He wondered if he needed a touch of the real Budapest to continue the quest.

  Doing his ablutions in the bathroom before bed, he washed his face thoroughly with the shea butter soap and studied his reflection. The skin was clear, the hair mostly gone except for silver wings and the slim beard, and the nose prominent. The look read? Determination, skepticism, openness, and … folly. What percentage of each, he wondered? And where was Belief in something beyond his boys? In history, for example? He smiled mockingly at his cynical view, and decided to close the windows in case of hard rain.

  CHAPTER 2

  Manny glanced out his tinted-glass window at the large green, on the Dartmouth College campus. It was March. Some kids were tossing a Frisbee, and others, strolling from classes. A twenty-first-century New England postcard scene down there, while up here, in his office, he tried to imagine Budapest of 1944. Quite a transport. Realistic? Or merely fanciful, hopeful? He set his feet up on the messy desk.

  How did he get into this fix in the first place? Get involved with the long dead and long forgotten Swede? With the horror show of Budapest 1944? He had this easy, comfortable life, here on this protected campus oasis. Why go and tamper with it?

  He recalled the beginning of the fall term, when the bright graduate student had come to see him, said she still hadn’t a good idea for a thesis, and he offered, “Well, maybe I have a topic for you: Raoul Wallenberg. Ever hear of him? His case is full of problems and mysteries, just right for research and educated speculation. See what you think.”

  She immediately took notes as he gave her a few ideas and a few leads, and told her to see him in ten weeks at the end of the quarter. “And if you can find this rumored lady in Budapest …” And he gave her the name. The rest was history, as they say.

  Manny had always wanted to figure out the mysterious Swede, as well as the mysterious circumstances, so here was a chance to start.

  During her December trip, doing research, the student had e-mailed him, saying how excited she was, and her father also. (“He’s half Swedish you know, and Lutheran too, so he was delighted at the project, and he’s even supporting my trip to Budapest.”) Later on, she had e-mailed him from Budapest, saying she was visiting the libraries, meeting people, getting the feel of the place, and making real “hands-on” progress.

  When reading her ten-page proposal, sent via e-mail from Budapest, he had kept his doubts to himself, thinking, Let her get through it. Why not? So what if it produced not much new? Had the legions of experts done any better for the past half century? Not really. Besides, it might trigger his own detective work. Which it did. (But where had his own interest come from?)

  When she called him from Budapest, he told her that the proposal was pretty decent, and cautioned, routinely, “There’s been a lot of stuff written about him, so you will have to come up with some sort of real argument, you understand?”

  “Yeah, for sure!” she responded. “But I just wanted to check with you, to make sure you’ll go along with it, and me!”

  “I’m not really an expert in the field,” he said. “There is Michael Atworthy, who is the European World War II specialist, you realize, and—”

  “Oh, no, sir, it’s you I want to direct it, absolutely. You suggested it, and also, you’re Jewish, not that that makes a great difference. But you’re the one who knows me, and whom I trust totally!”

  “Jewish? Who told you that?” he deadpanned in his voice. “And what difference would that make?”
Then he said, “Okay, it looks good. You’re on.”

  And maybe, he advised, the Budapest lady would be worth a footnote in the thesis, and maybe in history too.

  A few days later, having done some more RW reading, Manny found an observation from C. Vann Woodward on Francis Parkman and tacked it up—“He sought by creative imagination to bring the past to life”—then proceeded with his own imagination to create a new scene for his small portfolio:

  Raoul walked into the Adolph Fredricks Kyrkan in Stockholm, and when the pastor sighted him, he walked up the aisle to greet Raoul. “Well, it has been a while, Raoul,” said the graying pastor, in his sixties. “Five years?”

  “Probably more, Johann.”

  “Good of you to come in, Raoul. Your cousins will be pleased that you accepted my invitation. Let us go to my office. Your mother, she is well?”

  “As well as can be expected, thank you.”

  “I don’t see her often, you know.” He smiled narrowly, showing forbearance. “And I was sorry to hear about grandfather. But you are looking fit and handsome. Please sit.”

  Raoul nodded, and sat, holding his hat on his lap.

  “So, you must catch me up on so many things. You have been all over the map, haven’t you? America, Palestine, South Africa.” He laughed. “Where haven’t you been is the better question!”

  “Yes, I have been around, haven’t I?” Raoul mused, to himself as well.

  “And now I understand you are off again, to Budapest, yes?”

  Raoul nodded.

  “For the foreign ministry, yes?”

  “Yes,” he said, lighting up a cigarette.

  “I know these are difficult days in Hungary, and I know too that the Jews are in particular trouble over there, so you will have your hands full, Raoul.”

  Raoul nodded. “I am glad you keep up with things, Pastor.”

  “We may be neutral politically, but morally we have to stand firm.” The pastor smiled narrowly. “But I asked you in, to ask you, before you go, if you have thought more about your faith?”

  Raoul took up his hat and twirled it, hiding his impatience. “‘Thought more about it?’ That is an odd way to put it.”

  “But you know what I mean, son.”

  “Did my cousins—” Raoul smiled. “Yes, I do. But I am not sure I have thought much more about it than I did when I was younger.”

  The pastor, his neck straining in his white collar, leaned forward. “Do you not believe, even now, that Jesus died for your sins?”

  “Please, Pastor, I have not come for this sort of testing now.”

  “But Raoul, my son, this is crucial for you, as you are about to embark on this journey. It is a journey of danger as much as one of challenge.”

  Raoul nodded. “I think you are right.”

  “Please, then, you should come to terms with yourself, with your faith, with Christ, before you embark. This will be a comfort for you, in your trials ahead.”

  Raoul smoked, and said, rather casually, “You don’t really think that that man named Jesus actually died for my personal sins, do you, Pastor? Don’t you really think that that is an elaborate interpretation of that curious man’s death?”

  The pastor reddened. “Raoul, so you don’t have faith, after all these years?” He paused. “At your confirmation, I was worried, and now … I am dismayed.”

  Raoul restrained himself. “Oh, I think that would be an exaggeration to say that. I do have faith, sir, but it is not quite in the form, or frame, of your belief. My faith is in the human side of things, rather than in the divine. Or, the divine is rather subsumed under the human.”

  “Subsumed? How strange a term to use here. What do you mean, Raoul?”

  “Well, if we bring Jesus into the argument, that he died for our sins, does that include all human beings, or just Christians?”

  “For all people, of course—once they are believers.”

  “But are Jews believers?”

  The pastor stood and rubbed his hands together. “Not in their present form, no. But certainly once they become believers—”

  “But supposing they don’t wish to become believers of Jesus as a God?”

  The pastor shook his head and spoke sternly, “You always were a rebel, Raoul, stubbornly rebellious. Rebellion for its own sake? I don’t know …” He strolled up and down in the office. “You are so different from the rest of your family. Never in step, always out on your own. In everything, from what I hear, but especially here in our sacred place. Why, Raoul, why?”

  Raoul smoked and eyed the leather chairs, the large crucifix, the framed documents of divinity degrees, a portrait of Luther, alongside one of Marcus Wallenberg, Bishop of Linköping, 1819, and was comforted by these hard inanimate objects. “I want to thank you, and my cousins, for their concern over my spiritual welfare, Pastor. I appreciate it.”

  The pastor pulled up into a chair opposite his pupil. “Do you not believe yourself a sinner, Raoul?” He paused. “All of us?”

  “Tell me, Johann, are the Jews sinners too? And are they being punished by our Christ for not being believers yet? Is that why they are being persecuted and sent off to be murdered in Nazi camps now?”

  The pastor swallowed visibly. “Are you being intentionally perverse?”

  “No, not at all, sir.”

  “You are confusing current political struggles with essential spiritual truths and facts. Is this intentional?”

  “I am simply trying to apply principles to realities and see what the outcome is, Pastor.”

  The pastor reached out for Raoul’s hand, but Raoul refrained, and withdrew his hand, out of reach.

  “What happens now, here, on this globe, is less important than what occurs afterward, to our eternal souls.”

  “Perhaps. But for now, before eternity, I have immediate situations to take into account.”

  The pastor shook his head. “I will only repeat, from 2 Corinthians 5:7, ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’ And from Ephesians 2:8, ‘By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.’”

  Raoul had prepared, just in case, and chose a favorite essayist instead of Spinoza for his retort: “Let me quote to you from one of my bibles: ‘How many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today.’” He stood up and put out his hand, and the pastor hesitated, then shook his hand. “Montaigne’s Essays.”

  Dryly, the pastor said, “I wish you luck, Raoul. And God’s blessing.”

  Raoul nodded, released the grip, and walked out of the office and back through the church. What had Johann meant, “from what I hear?”

  Professor Gellerman sat and considered the scene. Had he put Raoul too much in charge? Was he too strong there at the end? … Raoul’s rebelliousness against authority and against the church—that was fitting, in keeping. And maybe too he resented his cousins putting up the pastor to invite him over and gossiping about him? (“from what I hear …”) … What about the pastor? Would—or should—he have been more openly anti-Semitic? Quite possibly. But perhaps, by 1944, something of a guilty conscience in a Christian minister was certainly realistic … So what Manny had presented in the end was a Raoul of his own personal faith, neither religious nor patriotic, but human and humanistic, standing for justice and for fairness. That indeed sounded a lot like the Raoul that Manny had learned about and come to believe in. Not a well-costumed saint, but a very good man and a brave soul … Not the Church, not the State, not the Family, with all of their bullying chauvinism and lip-service pieties, would deter him from following his high principles. Nor would the Swedes with their self-interested neutrality, or the Hungarians and Nazis with their brutality, deter him. Raoul was a man on a mission, a life mission, it may be said, shaped early on by his pragmatic and open-minded grandfather, and sustained by his own firm independence …

  He went for a long walk, strolling briskly around the idyllic campus of huge trees, golf course, and oval pond, and onto the paths snaking around
the redbrick buildings, and down along the boathouse and Dartmouth Canoe Club set alongside the Connecticut River; all the while, in the soft spring air, he passed joggers and walkers and bicyclists. So orderly, so bucolic, this site. Could he have imagined it as a boy in Brooklyn? And how many other green campuses and private oases were there, tucked away amidst the vast, busy, noisy, crazy country? Who ever dreamed, in history, of such a protected, lucky geography?

  When he ambled on down the one main street of two or three blocks long, filled with spry shoppers, stores, banks, realtor offices, Manny again felt the presence of free and easy serenity, sanity. Just as God—or Private Property and well-heeled capitalism—had ordered, in His Intelligent Design, right? At the end he returned to the large oval green at the center of the campus, sat on a white rocking chair at the Hanover Inn, and read through the New York Times while sipping a bottle of water. A leisurely wait to pick up his son after school. Engulfed in this autumnal comfort, could he really project himself back into the gray world of East Europe, the unimaginable world of the Holocaust? A reach of the imagination, to be sure. And maybe even a world too far for the imagination to encompass? But how else to search for that RW mystery, now that his own past interest was re-ignited? …

  As he basked in the spring sun, within the safe port of the campus, he remembered fondly his days in Madison, as a grad student, sitting in the student building overlooking the glorious lake, and waiting for one of his dynamic professors to join him for a coffee. It didn’t really matter who it was—Hesseltine or Curti, Williams or Mosse or Goldberg. Each contributed a different intensity, a new idea, to stir him up for the month. (George Mosse, the transplanted German Jew, had first talked to him about Wallenberg, suggesting he was a perfect ‘mystery study.’) A vibrant history department, in the late 1960s, in one of the heated intellectual centers of the country. Activism—including a real blowup or two!—combined with the scholarly. But the scholarly always trumped activism, no matter how activist the prof, and it remained the password to accomplishment.