IN THE EARLY 1940s, Raoul Wallenberg was a slight, balding young man living modestly in Stockholm. He worked for a trading company that imported Hungarian poultry to Sweden. Wallenberg’s colleagues were mainly Hungarian Jews.
He had trained in the U.S. to be an architect. But on his return to Sweden, Wallenberg discovered that he didn’t have the engineering courses required to be hired in his homeland. His other career alternative, banking, also eluded him. The extended Wallenberg family owned one of Sweden’s most prosperous banks, Stockholms Enskilda Bank. But they found Wallenberg to be overly talkative, too artistically inclined, and having a penchant for drama that did not signal, for them, the makings of a top-drawer Swedish banker. So Wallenberg fell into depression, feeling that he was a failure, now known to his family disparagingly as “the grocer.”
Yet this unfulfilled young man would become, virtually overnight, one of the great heroes of World War II.
Veteran Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlberg has written a remarkable, nuanced, 600-page biography featuring extensive original research and new material: Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. The English translation of this award-winning work was released earlier this year.
When the Germans sent 500 Norwegians to Auschwitz in late 1942, the outraged Swedish government, which had remained neutral, declared that Sweden would accept any Jew who could make it to the Swedish border. They also decided to set up a special humanitarian aid mission in Budapest to help Hungarian Jews being annihilated by Hitler’s troops. A colleague at the trading company immediately recommended Wallenberg to the Swedish Foreign Mission to head the new mission.
Wallenberg spoke both German and Hungarian, and he quickly put together an eclectic network of Hungarians to help him. Although it was practically unknown to hire someone with no diplomatic experience for such a key mission, the Foreign Ministry entrusted him with nearly $5 million. With the money, Wallenberg personally designed and issued thousands of authentic-looking Swedish protective passports to Hungarian Jews. His staff set up an entire hospital in downtown Budapest. A complex food distribution system was developed to feed thousands, along with a large number of Swedish safe houses for refugees on the run.
A Budapest colleague described Wallenberg as a warm person who was “courageous, he had imagination and always found solutions.” But he also could transform himself into a steely negotiator, the colleague said, and “when he spoke with the Germans he used their language ... and screamed at them.”
Wallenberg appeared at the Budapest train station one morning as thousands were being forced into boxcars destined for concentration camps. “I have your name,” he’d say in a stiff, official tone to a deportee. “Where is your document?” The deportees would show him whatever crumpled piece of paper they had. “Excellent,” said Wallenberg. “Next.” Nazi guards watched respectfully as Wallenberg marched off with 500 people.
On another day, Wallenberg showed up at a Budapest synagogue. Again, he called out many names, mimicking the surrounding Nazi soldiers with his bearing and shrill language. In all, Carlberg estimates that Wallenberg’s mission saved about 100,000 Hungarian Jews, mainly in the year 1944.
But in January 1945, Wallenberg’s luck ran out. Soviet soldiers forced their way into his building, and at his own request, he was taken to the Soviet general in charge. He was detained by the Soviets on suspicion of espionage.
He was never seen again by family or friends, and is believed to have been killed in Soviet custody in 1947. In one brief year Wallenberg became a genius of invention, able to use his many talents in a spectacular, iconoclastic way before he disappeared forever at the age of 32.
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