Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  In a slave-labour camp in the Urals near Sverdlovsk in 1972, two prisoners met and one of them said: ‘My name is Asher Hanukajev.’

  ‘I am Raoul Wallenberg,’ he says the other said.

  ‘Is Wallenberg a Jewish name?’ Hanukajev says he asked.

  ‘No, I’m a Swedish diplomat. I was kidnapped by the Russians from Hungary in 1945.’

  Hanukajev says he spent four days with Wallenberg, who ‘told me why he’d been kidnapped: for freeing 35,000 Jews from German occupation.’ Hanukajev, who still had six years to serve on a twenty-six-year sentence, remembers Wallenberg’s farewell to him: ‘God help you to get out sooner. Probably they will never let me go.’

  Another former Soviet prisoner, Victor Hermann, says that, in 1977, he heard Wallenberg was in ‘an intermediate prison’ in the central Russian city of Gorki34 before being ‘sent north’ and that other prisoners had seen him as late as 1979. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the last hours of the seventies, détente crashed to a halt. Emigration slowed to a trickle and so did ‘sightings’ of Wallenberg. ‘Now they mention places so far east in the Soviet Union,’ Simon says, ‘that they are impossible to check. In the late 1970s and well into the eighties, there were reports he was in a camp near Irkutsk for special people who should not come into contact with ordinary political prisoners. But these are not prisoners they release, so nobody can come out and say “I saw this man there.” All they can say is that it is very VIP there, so it is the kind of place where they might hide Wallenberg.’ Other reports have placed ‘an old Swede’ as far apart as the Chinese border (in the Blagoveshensk Special Psychiatric Hospital, used for brainwashing home-grown dissidents) and wandering the streets of downtown Leningrad.

  A 1985 Simon Wiesenthal Centre Trbute to the Lost Hero of the Holocaust offered one hopeful hearing of Raoul – perhaps! In 1963, Greville Wynne, a British agent imprisoned in Lubyanka for eighteen months, was delivered to his daily airing and exercise in a solitary pen atop the prison. As Wynne reached the roof in a tiny, filthy, cage-like elevator, he heard another cage arriving at the next pen. When its gate opened, a voice called out ‘Taxi!’

  Wynne chuckled at this defiant humour. Five days later, it happened again.

  ‘Are you American?’ he called out.

  ‘No, I’m Swedish!’ the voice answered in English before guards subdued both men.

  More ominously and precisely, one later report placed Wallenberg in the early 1960s on Wrangel Island, a remote, icy outpost inside the Arctic Circle some 270 miles north-west of the Alaskan coast. This account – based on the testimony of a former KGB and NKVD agent named Efim Moshinsky, who spent two years on Wrangel Island and later emigrated to Israel – had Wallenberg banished to the island prison-camp’s hospital, where Soviet Navy and space scientists were said to perform medical experiments on foreign prisoners the Kremlin had already declared dead. Injected with experimental drugs, exposed to prolonged radiation, fed possibly contaminated foods, immersed under water for long periods, and breathing varying amounts of oxygen, the victims’ premature official obituaries quickly became self-fulfilling prophecies.

  Given half a chance, Dr Mengele could have picked up his practice there with scarcely any loss of momentum. Such a fate for a liberator like Raoul, however, might have given Kafka pause when writing In the Penal Colony. And it is almost unbearable to think that, in the gulag, too, there could have been a whole category of living, dying non-persons like Wallenberg.

  Moshinsky said Wallenberg shared a two-room wood hut with another thorn in the Soviet side, a Russian anti-communist leader named Aleksandr Trushnovich. If Moshinsky is to be believed (and, over the years, circumstances have tended to confirm rather than refute his report), then he lends credence to Lost Hero authors Werbell’s and Clarke’s thesis – shared, incidentally, by ex-Prime Minister Erlander – that, for one reason or another, Wallenberg’s health worsened on Wrangel Island and he was eventually transferred back to either Vladimir or a special Moscow prison hospital, where he died in 1964 or 1965.

  Across Western Europe, Wiesenthal went on organizing Wallenberg Congresses in Austria, Holland, and West Germany. He held hearings every January, the anniversary of Raoul’s disappearance, and August, the month of Raoul’s birth: there is very good propaganda value, he admits, in reminding the world that Wallenberg is now ‘a man nearing ninety, a man almost my age, who is still in the concentration camps of the Second World War.’ He prodded Sweden to join the US, England, and Switzerland in bringing the Wallenberg case before European Security Conferences in Madrid and Vienna as a Basket Three (Reunification of Families) issue of the 1975 Helsinki Treaty, which was reviewed periodically for compliance. He exhorted Sweden to boycott 1980’s summer Olympic Games in Moscow unless the Kremlin told the truth about Wallenberg.

  As it turned out, sixty-two nations stayed away from Moscow, but Sweden wasn’t one of them – and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, not Raoul, was their reason.

  Prodded by Wiesenthal and Wallenberg’s siblings, the Swedish government did, in recent years, offer to exchange a captured communist spy or two for Raoul, but the Russians simply smiled and said the Swedes would be fools to exchange anyone for someone who was cremated in 1947. Most Swedish diplomats, too, saw a worrisome precedent: if the Russians wanted to retrieve one of their agents, they could frame a Swede in Moscow and then exchange him (as happened as recently as 1986, when an American journalist in Moscow, Nicholas Daniloff, was ensnared by the KGB after a Soviet spy was caught receiving secret data on a New York subway platform). But Wallenberg’s colleague Per Anger said of the new Swedish willingness to barter: ‘If only this had happened years ago, then perhaps Raoul would be a free man now.’

  In the late 1970s, very late in Leonid Brezhnev’s life, Wiesenthal, at Henry Kissinger’s suggestion, had persuaded Armand Hammer – the American petroleum magnate who once knew Lenin and therefore was trusted by all his successors – to intervene with the Soviet President and party chief. ‘One day, Hammer was talking to Brezhnev,’ Wiesenthal reports, ‘and Brezhnev answered that he had never heard the name Wallenberg, but added that “I will inform you.” Later, he told Hammer: “Gromyko already gave the answer.”’ At that time, neither Wiesenthal nor Hammer knew that it was Major-General Brezhnev of the 18th Soviet Army in Hungary who had ordered Raoul’s arrest in 1945.

  Around the same time, a report surfaced in Israel from the dentist daughter of a former Moscow music conservatory administrator who had been jailed for eighteen months as a black-marketeer after he’d applied for an exit visa to Israel. Upon his release from Lubyanka in 1977, Jan Kaplan placed an international call to Dr Anna Kaplan Bilder in Jaffa to tell her he was out. ‘How did you manage to live through all that time?’ she asked her father solicitously.

  ‘Oh, you can survive for a long time in there,’ he responded. ‘Why, when I was in the Butyrka prison hospital in 1975, I met a Swede who told me he’d been in prison for thirty years and he seemed reasonably healthy to me.’

  Almost immediately, Anna Bilder was invited to the Swedish Embassy in Tel Aviv for an interview. Her father’s remarks had coincided with intelligence received from a young Russian Jew who had gone to a May Day party at the Moscow home of a senior KGB officer. ‘Much vodka was drunk,’ the young man recalled, ‘and the younger men at the party began to speak of dissidents and the rough time they must have in prison. The KGB officer burst out and said: “Don’t you believe it! Things aren’t as tough nowadays as they used to be. You can live a long time in jail now. Why, I have a Swede under my charge in Lubyanka who’s been inside for thirty years!”’ Only when he emigrated to Israel did the young Russian Jew hear the name of Wallenberg and the story of his disappearance. When he did, he went to the Swedish Embassy and filed a report.

  On the basis of its new information, Sweden announced in early 1979 that it was formally re-opening the Wallenberg case and sent a note to the Russians requesting an investigation. The reply from Moscow to
this belated inquiry was:

  There is not, and cannot be, anything new regarding the fate of Raoul Wallenberg. As already stated on innumerable occasions, he died July 1947, and the assertions that he was in the Soviet Union as late as 1975 are not in accordance with facts.

  There was a more ominous response – in Moscow. On 3 February 1979, the Kaplan home was searched by Soviet criminal investigators and Jan Kaplan was re-arrested. In Israel, his daughter learned this from three anonymous phone calls (one in Hebrew and two in Russian) which warned her, for her father’s sake, not to speak of Wallenberg again. As of 1986 Kaplan was still in prison.

  * * *

  Wiesenthal’s greatest service to Wallenberg has been to focus public attention on him. Around 1972, he tried to persuade the novelist Leon Uris to write one of his fact-filled fiction epics about Raoul. But Uris said he was busy with a book about Masada, the one-time fortress of King Herod where 960 Jewish men, women, and children committed mass suicide in AD 73 rather than face total slaughter by 15,000 Roman soldiers.

  ‘Masada has waited 2000 years. Wallenberg cannot wait that long,’ Wiesenthal told Uris in vain.

  In 1977, a Californian mother named Annette Lantos read a small item in the back pages of the New York Times saying that Simon Wiesenthal was sure Raoul Wallenberg had been alive into the 1960s and may have been sighted as recently as 1975.

  To Annette Lantos, this was a voice from the dead – the deaths Wallenberg had spared her and her husband, Tom, and the death they thought Raoul had died in 1945 at Nazi hands in the battle of Budapest, as they and all other Hungarians had been told by their Soviet ‘liberators’ and their Hungarian puppets. Since 1972, under the auspices of the Jewish Community Relations Council – which sent Holocaust survivors into schools, clubs, and churches – Annette had been lecturing on the impact of one man, ‘the late Raoul Wallenberg’.

  When Annette Tillemann was twelve, her father had been dragged from a shelter by Arrow Cross men and killed in the street. But she and her mother had been saved by Wallenberg and, after surviving the war, they emigrated to Canada still thanking the ‘memory’ of Raoul. In 1950, Annette married Tom Lantos, who had escaped from a forced labour camp and hidden in Budapest’s ghetto under Swedish protection – only to flee Hungary in 1947 after protesting communism’s takeover. Tom became an economics professor at the University of California and a widely known television commentator on world affairs.

  That such personally involved and well-informed people as the Lantoses should not have known Raoul might still be among the living not only tells much about official Western unconcern and Eastern disinformation, but also shows Wiesenthal’s educational impact worldwide. ‘Not only the Wallenberg case, but just his name, had been all but forgotten,’ Annette recalls. ‘At that time, it seemed that no one but his mother cared whether he lived or died. After reading the story from Wiesenthal, I was determined that from then on the rescue of Raoul Wallenberg would have to be my number-one priority.’

  She formed Concerned Citizens for Wallenberg in 1977; later, it became the Free Wallenberg Association. In October 1979, US President Jimmy Carter promised her the support of the US government in obtaining Wallenberg’s release. Though Carter lost his bid for re-election the following year, Annette’s husband Tom ran for Congress in the same race and withstood the Ronald Reagan Republican landslide to win election as the Democratic representative from San Mateo County. In Washington, one of his first acts was to introduce a bill making Raoul Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States. It passed the House of Representatives by 396 to 2 and the Senate unanimously in the autumn of 1981.

  Signing the bill into law at a White House ceremony a few days later, with Wiesenthal and the Lantoses on the platform, President Reagan said that in bestowing honorary US citizenship, ‘I think we’re the ones that are being honoured. Raoul Wallenberg is the Swedish saviour of almost 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children. What he did, what he accomplished was of biblical proportions . . . Wherever he is, his humanity burns like a torch.’ The President noted that ‘Sir Winston Churchill, another man of force and fortitude, is the only other person who has received honorary US citizenship.’

  In his concluding remarks, Reagan said eloquently:

  ‘I heard someone say that a man has made at least a start in understanding the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows he will never sit. Raoul Wallenberg is just such a man. He nurtured the lives of those he never knew at the risk of his own. And then just recently, I was told that in a special area behind the [Yad Vashem] Holocaust Memorial in Israel, Hungarian Jews now living in Sweden planted 10,000 trees in Raoul’s honour.’

  Turning to Raoul’s half-sister and half-brother, who had come from Sweden, the President of the United States said:

  ‘Mrs Lagergren, Mr von Dardel, we’re going to do everything in our power so that your brother can sit beneath the shade of those trees and enjoy the respect and love that so many held for him.’

  In January of 1981, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Raoul’s disappearance, Simon Wiesenthal convened a formal hearing in Stockholm to review testimony on the Wallenberg case. He was joined on the panel by Gideon Hausner, chief prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem; Elie Wiesel, conscience and chronicler of the Holocaust (the name of which he coined); and retired Swedish Supreme Court Justice Ingrid Gärde-Widemar.

  Held in co-operation with the International Sakharov Committee of Copenhagen, the Wallenberg hearing attracted such witnesses as British Member of Parliament Greville Janner and French Nobel Laureate André Lwoff, chairmen of Raoul Wallenberg Committees in their own countries, as well as Annette Lantos and Elizabeth (Mrs Daniel P.) Moynihan, secretary of the US Senators’ Free Wallenberg Committee. Virtually all witnesses spoke of Raoul in the present tense.

  Red herrings abound. During the Wallenberg hearing, Wiesenthal introduced excerpts from the diaries of General Gennadi Kuprianov, a Soviet war hero imprisoned by Stalin from 1948 to 1956. General Kuprianov had encountered Wallenberg thrice during his eight years in the gulag: in 1953, 1955, and early 1956. Years later, he mentioned his meetings with Wallenberg to another ex-prisoner, who later emigrated to Israel and told a Russian émigré newspaper about Kuprianov and Wallenberg. Summoned to KGB headquarters in Leningrad early in 1979, the rehabilitated retired general was warned by a colonel not to spread rumours that an officially dead person was still alive.

  Four months later, Kuprianov received another ominous green summons from the KGB. This time, the colonel told him that to ‘help refute American-Israeli provocations . . . you must go home now and compose your denial of these false reports.’

  ‘But I cannot deny the truth,’ Kuprianov insisted. ‘I cannot say “No, I haven’t met the Swede” when I met him on three different occasions.’

  He was told to come back the next day with his denial. That night, the old general told his wife and his former secretary, who had stayed a family friend, that ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand that questioning.’

  He went back to the KGB next morning, empty-handed. He never returned. Five days later, his wife received a call from the KGB: ‘Your husband is ill. You may visit him in the police hospital.’ When she went there, she was directed to the morgue. Like Raoul Wallenberg her husband had been pronounced dead of ‘heart failure’.

  Kuprianov’s ex-secretary – whom Wiesenthal would identify only as ‘I.L.’ – had an exit visa at that time and came to Vienna with key pages from Kuprianov’s diaries, which she had copied before the KGB seized them. Wiesenthal said he had authenticated the documents, but sceptics seized upon Wiesenthal’s refusal to identify ‘I.L.’ and other discrepancies to condemn his hearings. Wiesenthal explained that, while ‘I.L.’ was now living in the US, she still had relatives in Leningrad she wished to protect. And indeed, in 1986, when I pressed Simon for more details about the Kuprianov affair, he told me to ‘forget about Kuprianov; it didn’t go anywhere.’

 
; Despite dissent, the Stockholm session overwhelmingly adopted a Wiesenthal resolution pronouncing Wallenberg alive until proven otherwise. ‘The family and the world have a right – in fact, a duty – to call for further investigation and clarification,’ he insists. ‘Until the Russians can give a better accounting than they have in the past, there is no sense debating whether he is dead or alive.’

  In 1983, Wiesenthal was instrumental in reviving Albert Einstein’s 1948 ploy of nominating Raoul Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since Nobels aren’t awarded posthumously, the prize would reaffirm not only the value of Raoul’s work, but a predominantly Swedish panel’s faith that he is still alive somewhere. Thus far – and, it is likely, forever – the Nobel Prize has eluded both Wallenberg and Wiesenthal.

  On 17 January 1985, Simon Wiesenthal sent Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme a cable:

  FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY, A MAN TO WHOM THE FREEDOM OF OTHERS WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN HIS OWN LIFE, WAS ARRESTED BY THE SOVIETS. THOUSANDS THANK HIM FOR THEIR LIBERTY. WHAT HE HAS ACHIEVED FOR SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS LIVING IN FREEDOM TODAY CANNOT BE BORNE UNTIL THIS BENEFACTOR AND TRUE HERO OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IS HIMSELF RESCUED FROM SOVIET HANDS. I AM TOGETHER WITH YOU THIS EVENING IN A SHARED WISH THAT RAOUL WALLENBERG SHOULD ONCE AGAIN PARTAKE OF THE FREEDOM HE FURTHERED.

  Wiesenthal says he received a warm reply from Palme, though his secretary at the Jewish Documentation Centre has been unable to lay hands on it. Not long after Palme’s assassination on a Stockholm street in early 1986, his successor Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, on an official visit to Moscow, raised the Wallenberg question with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, explaining ‘why the fate of Raoul Wallenberg is still important to the Swedish Government as well as to Swedish and international public opinion, and why earlier Soviet statements in his regard could not be considered satisfactory.’