Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
On Jan. 17, 1945, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Second World War, was arrested by Soviet authorities and never seen or heard from again. Last Oct. 26, at the request of his family, he was formally declared dead.
There are few positive stories that emerged from the Holocaust. Most ordinary people could do very little to help Jews, even if willing to risk their own lives and those of their families.
That is why a few well-placed diplomats played an outsized role in saving Jews. They had the wherewithal to provide Jews with safe passage out of Europe, or to supply them with documents granting them some form of asylum or otherwise enabling them to stay out of the clutches of the Nazi executioners.
Arguably the best-known was Raoul Wallenberg, who was appointed secretary in the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, Hungary, in the summer of 1944.
Hungary was by then virtually the only state in Axis-dominated Europe whose Jewish community had remained safe from the Nazi “Final Solution,” despite its regime being allied to Germany.
But that changed on March 19, 1944, when German troops occupied the country. In the two months that followed, the Nazis deported 440,000 Jews, mainly from outside Budapest, to the largest and most infamous death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
An additional 230,000 remained in the capital, where they awaited their fate.
Meanwhile, the American War Refugee Board requested that Sweden, which had stayed neutral during the war, send a special envoy to Budapest to spearhead a rescue effort. So in the summer of 1944, the Stockholm government agreed to use its diplomatic mission in Budapest to help Hungary’s remaining Jews.
Raoul Wallenberg, a member of one of Sweden’s wealthiest and most prominent families, was selected to be that envoy. He was an ideal choice, as he was sympathetic to the plight of European Jews, could speak Hungarian and German, and was familiar with Budapest.
He was given full diplomatic privileges and his principal task would be to deal with issuing passports.
By the time Wallenberg arrived that July, the only Jews left in Hungary were in Budapest. The Swedish embassy began issuing travel documents to Hungarian Jews. Wallenberg introduced the colours of the Swedish flag, marked the documents with government stamps and added Swedish crowns.
Altogether, he issued Swedish diplomatic papers to more than 30,000 Hungarian Jews, preventing their deportation and murder.
Wallenberg also bought and rented more than 30 buildings in Budapest. He ordered that the Swedish flag be flown over these houses, thus converting them into official Swedish embassy annexes and shielding their inhabitants from the Nazis. At least 10,000 Jews moved into these safe houses for protection.
As Hungary was falling to Soviet forces, on January 17, 1945 Wallenberg began a journey to Debrecen, located 120 miles east of Budapest, where the Soviets and a provisional Hungarian government were headquartered.
The exact purpose of the trip is unknown, but Wallenberg was taken into custody by Soviet forces and was never seen or heard from again. The reason for the arrest was never made clear.
On Feb. 6, 1957 Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko released a report to the Swedish authorities informing them that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack on July 17, 1947 in Moscow’s infamous KGB-run Lubyanka prison. In the ensuing decades, various sources claimed that Wallenberg was still alive and being held by the Russians.
On Dec. 23, 2000, Russian officials admitted Soviet forces had wrongfully held Wallenberg at a Soviet prison. But no document certifying that he was executed has ever been found and his exact fate still remains a mystery.
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