Statue of Anti-Nazi Hero Rises in Square

A statue honoring the Swedish envoy who saved thousands of lives during the Nazi occupation of Hungary is spreading its wings over Raoul Wallenberg Square despite initial objections from a municipal art expert.

Now being installed outside a bank branch at one end of the Fairfax Avenue business district, the statue “in no way captures the spirit of what Mr. Wallenberg accomplished,” said Scott Canty, curator of the Permanent City Art Collection of the city of Los Angeles.

In a report submitted earlier this year, Canty said that the design by Italian artist Franco Assetto “reminds me of a winged messenger from the financial district, descended to dispense financial advice to the masses.”

But his objections were overridden by the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, and Canty himself now says: “We should wait and see what it looks like.”

Dedication of the 18-foot statue is scheduled for Dec. 4 at 11 a.m.

Private Donations

Fashioned as the bronze silhouette of a man reaching out from two stainless steel wings, the statue was paid for by private donations and donated to the city.

It will be displayed on a plaza in front of the Great Western Bank branch at the northeast corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, an intersection that was named Raoul Wallenberg Square by the Los Angeles City Council two years ago.

It was at the dedication ceremony for a Wallenberg Square sign in September, 1986, that Hungarian Jews now living in Los Angeles announced their campaign to erect a plaque or bust in his honor.

“I’m alive and a few other survivors are alive,” said John Brooks, a Budapest survivor and semi-retired contractor who headed the tribute effort. “If we can leave something for our children and grandchildren, that’s why we’re doing this. So they’ll know that their lives were dependent on him (Wallenberg).”

Brooks turned to art dealer Suzanne W. Zada to find a designer for the project.

“I was one of the people he (Wallenberg) did not save,” said Zada, an art dealer who was deported from her village in rural Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp as a girl. “But I was indebted to the Swedes because after the concentration camps I ended up in Sweden. In my case it saved my life because I would have died of starvation in another week.”

Symbol of Goodness

When she heard of the Wallenberg tribute, “I became excited because he was a symbol of everything that was good in that time of inhumanity,” Zada said.

Deciding that a plaque was insufficient, she recruited Assetto, an artist who launched his career with a pioneering show that included a display of cast-bronze bread loaves in 1953. Among other works, Assetto designed the gaunt figures in reinforced concrete that depict the Stations of the Cross at St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.

“Most of my clients are painters, but only Assetto is a sculptor,” she said. “He had never heard of Wallenberg, but I told him about what the Swedes had done for me and what Wallenberg had done . . . and three or four days later he came back with this incredible idea . . . to symbolize him as an angel of mercy, and at the same time the wings had bars on them to show that he was also imprisoned.”

Another Assetto fan is Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, who worked with the artist on a statue of a giant red piece of candy that can be seen on the north side of MacArthur Park.

“I’ve always had a lot of respect for him and his work,” Nodal said, noting that Canty’s original assessment was based on a photograph of a preliminary scale model.

Work’s ‘Physicality’

“I think very much that when the piece is up and the physicality of the piece is there, it’ll translate into something a lot more than when Scott (Canty) looked at it, and I’m sure Scott feels the same way,” he said.

Brooks, too, pronounced himself satisfied with the final design. While the wings are already in place on their stainless steel base, the burnished bronze outline of the man himself is getting its final polish in a shop in Burbank.

“It’s like a silhouette or a shadow of a human figure. He represents not a human figure but his spirit,” Brooks said. “His face resembles Wallenberg stepping forward and stretching out his hand. We called him the angel of mercy, and these are the wings he took us under.”

Working with professional fund-raiser Jane Fantel, Brooks and other survivors raised $135,000 from about 350 donors to cover the cost of producing and installing the statue. Assetto did not charge for the design.

“It wasn’t a difficult project to raise funds for, because people were so emotional about it,” Fantel said. Gifts ranged from $10 to $10,000, she said.

Donors of $1,000 and up will be listed on the base of the statue along with Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area and whose efforts helped move the project through the city bureaucracy.

‘It’s Wonderful’

“We think that it’s wonderful that the city of Los Angeles and the people of Los Angeles wish to honor one of the truly extraordinary heroes, I think, of this century,” said Rachel Ostreicher Haspel, president of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States, based in New York.

“There have been so many people in our century who have taken 100,000 lives but so few that have 100,000 souls to their credit,” she said.

Wallenberg, scion of a Swedish Lutheran banking family and a University of Michigan-trained architect, would be 76 years old if he is still alive.

He was sent to Hungary in July, 1944, to try to save the last major Jewish community that had not been exterminated by the Nazis. Although he was an official diplomat assigned to the Swedish legation in Budapest, his operation was largely financed by the War Refugee Board of the United States.

Acting under the eyes of Nazi troops and Hungary’s own Arrow Cross Fascists, Wallenberg issued documents claiming protection by Sweden and other neutral countries for more than 20,000 Jews who were destined for the death camps.

He is also credited with saving another 70,000 lives by persuading a German officer not to demolish the Budapest ghetto.

Sightings Reported

The man himself met an uncertain fate, vanishing shortly after the Soviet army reached Budapest in 1945. Soviet spokesmen have said that he was arrested and that he died of a heart attack in a Moscow prison in July, 1947, but former prisoners have reported seeing Wallenberg or someone like him as recently as 1986.

“I love the fact that the city of Los Angeles made it very clear that it was done to honor him, not to memorialize him,” said Haspel of the Wallenberg Committee.

She said that there are parks, streets and plaques honoring Wallenberg in several American cities but that the Los Angeles project would be the first statue.

“There’s a psychologically important message that comes from this project, and that is courage,” said Sharon Butler, Great Western Bank’s vice president and director for community development. “How important it is to have it and use it and exercise it.”

Great Western also displays a larger-than-life statue of the actor John Wayne on a horse outside its headquarters building in Beverly Hills, but bank officers said that was a coincidence.

“We don’t intend for this to be a pattern, but this was something we wanted to be part of,” Butler said.