Wallenberg’s Kin Invited to Meeting in Moscow

The Soviet Union has invited relatives of the disappeared Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to Moscow amid signs it may at last be prepared to clear up the fate of the man credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.

The invitation was handed to the Raoul Wallenberg Assn. in Stockholm last week by Soviet Ambassador Boris Pankin, association chairman Per Anger said Monday.

Anger, who was serving with Wallenberg in the Swedish Embassy in Budapest when he disappeared in 1945, said he would travel to Moscow in October together with Wallenberg’s half-sister, Nina Lagergren, and half-brother, Guy von Dardel, and association secretary Sonja Sonnenfeld.

Sonnenfeld said it is the first time anybody connected with Wallenberg had been invited to the Soviet Union.

“It’s a breakthrough. It’s clear they want to talk with us, and we were told the meetings would be at a high level,” she said.

Wallenberg was last seen in public on Jan. 17, 1945, being driven to see the commander of the Soviet troops occupying Budapest after the Nazi retreat.

In 1957, then-Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko said in a diplomatic note to Sweden that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in a Moscow prison 10 years earlier.

But frequent accounts by former inmates of the Soviet Union’s vast prison and labor camp system suggested that he was alive well into the 1970s. He would be 76 if he were still alive today.

Wallenberg has been hailed as one of the great heroes of the struggle to save Jews from Nazi extermination.

Using his Swedish diplomatic status to move around, he took at least 20,000 Hungarian Jews under his personal protection, commandeering abandoned buildings and handing out special Swedish passports ensuring immunity from Nazi deportation.

In the 1957 note, which has served as the basis for all further Soviet statements on the subject, Gromyko regretted Wallenberg’s arrest and imprisonment and blamed Stalin era officials who were later executed.

Sweden did not accept the Soviet explanation and has kept an open file on Wallenberg ever since.