介绍： The persistence of hope: The persistence of hope
The saviour of the Jews of Budapest disappeared in 1945 at the age of 32
From The Economist 20161112

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BRONZE replicas of his briefcase, stamped “RW”, are scattered across the world. One stands on Lidingö island near Stockholm, on the grasse...

介绍： The persistence of hope: The persistence of hope
The saviour of the Jews of Budapest disappeared in 1945 at the age of 32
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00




BRONZE replicas of his briefcase, stamped “RW”, are scattered across the world. One stands on Lidingö island near Stockholm, on the grassed-over foundations of the summer house where he was born. Others wait at the Holocaust memorial outside Nottingham, and by the United Nations in New York. In Budapest one has been left on a bench, as if at any moment Raoul Wallenberg, with his long coat, receding hairline and dark, burning eyes, will hurry past and retrieve it.

With the blue-and-yellow “protection passes” he carried in that briefcase, a diplomat’s bluff made “authentic” with Swedish government stamps and decorative Swedish crowns, he saved the lives of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary in a mere five-month tour in 1944. In the 31 safe houses he set up round Budapest, decked with huge Swedish flags, he fed, clothed and cared for thousands more. As a result he was made a citizen of Canada, Israel, Australia and the United States; awards and institutes were set up in his honour, and streets and parks named after him. Yet the many memorials to him lack one thing, a date of death. In 1945, aged 32, he disappeared; and ever after the world refused to let him go.

The last public sighting was with Russian soldiers round him and, in his hand, the briefcase, containing his plan to save more Jews. He was sent to prison in Russia, ending up in the Lubyanka in Moscow, where no file was kept on him, because (though he may have been a CIA asset) there was no case against him. The prison doctor claimed he died of a heart attack on July 17th 1947. But the doctor’s report had oddities about it, and was not believed. Another Russian officer said he had been shot. But a cleaning woman claimed to have seen him after that date; another prisoner said he had talked to a “Wallenberg” whose shadowy face he could not see; in 1951 an Italian reported that he had been in the next cell. In 1961 came a startling claim that he was alive, though weak, in a Soviet mental institution.

Emptying the trucks

Mystery was fortified by the cold war. The Russians would not co-operate to solve it until glasnost, in the 1990s, began to melt the ice. The Swedish government, too, was not keen to risk reviving scrutiny of its wartime behaviour, when the heroism of Wallenberg would be contrasted with pro-Nazi collaboration. Both countries would have preferred to let him lie. But without a date of death, that was impossible.

Besides, to those he had saved and their families, he was still alive. There was no forgetting the charismatic young Swede who had climbed onto cattle trucks bound for Auschwitz, kicked the doors open and handed out his passes, under the rifle fire of the astonished guards, to anyone who could grab one. There was no forgetting his ferocious arguments with the soldiers who, beside the Danube, were preparing to kill Jews and dump them in the river; these, too, he saved. His motto, from a letter home, was “happy to fight”.


To those who never saw him, he became a saviour angel and a legend; he was surely one of the 36 “hidden saints” who helped hard-pressed Jews in each generation. In Budapest several of his safe-houses survive on the streets where he walked, unsleeping, intent to save “as many as possible”. Well into this century, descendants of the saved still wanted to kiss his cheek, hug him and thank him.



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