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

For those and they must be very few by now who need reminding, Raoul Wallenberg was a pseudo-diplomat who left the safety of neutral Sweden and went to Nazi-dominated Hungary in the summer of 1944 on a seemingly impossible mission. There, he managed, through a combination of courage, determination, guile and cunning, to rescue upwards of 20,000 Jews (some claim as many as 100,000) from the Nazi gas chambers. After that, he was taken prisoner by the advancing Red Army and was swallowed up in Stalins Gulag, never to emerge.

Together with Oskar Schindler, Wallenberg is the best known of that small band of Righteous Gentiles, as the Israelis call them, who stood up to Nazi barbarism and saved significant numbers of Jews from the death camps, thereby demonstrating that lone individuals can, indeed, make a difference.

It would be hard to imagine two individuals more different than Wallenberg and Schindler the Swede quiet, serious and idealistic, the Sudeten German flashy, lecherous and opportunistic. Yet they had one very important attribute in common: a fundamental decency Schindlers Ark (1983) and by Steven Spielbergs memorable film Schindlers List (1993), based on Keneallys book.

In the case of Wallenberg, Righteous Gentile and a television documentary I made on the same subject for the BBC played a similar if somewhat less emphatic role. When I was researching the book and filming the documentary during 197980, Wallenbergs name was virtually unknown, so far as the general public was concerned, outside his native Sweden. I myself had never heard of Wallenberg until, while working as a BBC correspondent in Israel, I chanced across a brief and intriguing reference to him in the Jerusalem Post in the summer of 1979.

The subsequent screening of the BBC film in a number of English-speaking countries in 1980 and the publication of the book in Britain and the United States the following year helped to make Wallenbergs heroic deeds during the Holocaust, and his disappearance into the Soviet prison system, known throughout the world.

A closed-circuit showing of the BBC documentary to members of the US Congress in the spring of 1981 helped persuade an overwhelming majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to vote for a bill conferring honorary US citizenship on Wallenberg, the only foreigner apart from Sir Winston Churchill ever to receive it. That measure, signed into law by the newly elected president Ronald Reagan in a ceremony at the White House, had a more than symbolic purpose. Its sponsors hoped it would put some diplomatic muscle behind US efforts to get the Kremlin to disclose the truth about Wallenbergs fate. They wanted to know not just the how, when and why of his purported death in Soviet captivity, but to test the possibility that he might still be alive somewhere in the Gulag, and if so to secure his release.

Compelling evidence led many people including myself to believe it just possible that Wallenberg could have survived three and a half decades of incarceration and that even in the intense Cold War atmosphere of the early 1980s it might be possible to rescue him, in however pitiable a condition, to spend his last years in freedom with friends and family.

Another fifteen years on, it is well-nigh impossible to hold on to that belief. After all, if still alive Wallenberg would be eighty-three, which is some ten years longer than the average life span of Western men, even under comfortable conditions. And the collapse of Soviet Communism, with the emptying of the prison camps and the admission by the Russians of crimes of far greater magnitude than the wrongful imprisonment of one individual, however noble, has failed to produce a clue to his whereabouts.

None the less, a small band of surviving siblings, old friends and colleagues, and younger admirers not only believe but declare their conviction that he has survived and is alive perhaps under an imposed false identity somewhere in the vastness of post-Communist Russia. Their fervour must be respected, even if it cannot be shared. Certainly, this tireless band of true believers deserves support and encouragement in its unremitting efforts to find out exactly what did happen to this remarkable man while in Soviet captivity. For the tantalizing fact remains that, so far, not one scrap of documentary evidence has surfaced to support the Russians official assurances that, regrettably, he died in custody during the bad old Stalinist days. Against this, a formidable body of circumstantial evidence exists to suggest that Wallenberg was alive, somewhere in the Gulag, well into the 1970s and perhaps beyond.

For reasons which remain obscure, the Soviet official file on Wallenberg was destroyed and all that remain, scattered here and there throughout the compendious but poorly organized Kremlin archives, opened to investigators since Gorbachev began the process of liberalization which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union, are tantalizing hints and ambiguous references.

In some dusty corner of those archives the definitive document may yet be found which discloses when, where, on whose orders and by what means Raoul Wallenberg, the saviour of so many, met his end. Meanwhile, his fate remains one of the most poignant and disturbing mysteries of the Cold War, just as his deeds during the Holocaust remain among the most inspiring achievements of the World War that preceded it.

Paphos, Cyprus.
June 1995