At Long Last, Some Clues to Wallenberg’s Fate - Soviet Union: A former camp inmate believes he saw the man who saved thousands of Jews at least two years after his reported death in prison.

The Swedish prisoner in a remote Siberian camp looked weary, his clothes were tattered and he seldom spoke, but he was respected by the other inmates, who called him “the Baron,” a Leningrad biologist said Friday.

The biologist was recalling a man he believes was Raoul Wallenberg who was alive at least two years after Soviet authorities said Wallenberg was dead.

In meetings that are astounding just because they are held in the Soviet Union, a number of Soviets are offering their recollections to the Raoul Wallenberg Assn. The group is still trying to determine the fate of the Swedish diplomat credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

On Friday, the biologist, Alexander A. Smovsky, identified pictures of Wallenberg, who was arrested by Soviet authorities in January, 1945. Smovsky, who spent six years in Soviet prison camps, contacted the Wallenberg Assn. after a Soviet television news program last week asked that anyone with information about Wallenberg call a special number. The association is entering into a computer data from people who telephone with information about Wallenberg, whose mother was a wealthy baroness.

It is a remarkable change for this country, which refused for 12 years even to acknowledge that Wallenberg had been in its custody--and then said he had died of a heart attack a decade earlier in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison.

The shift is part of a Kremlin effort to revamp its image abroad. In line with this effort, the KGB is scheduled for the first time to meet Monday with Wallenberg’s brother and sister, who are traveling here from Sweden. A representative of the association also will attend.

Near the end of World War II, Wallenberg was assigned by the Swedish government, at the urging of the Americans, to its embassy in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, ostensibly as a diplomat. But his real mission was to help save Hungarian Jews.

He saved at least 20,000 Jews--sometimes taking them off trains waiting to go to death camps--by handing out passports that placed them under the protection of the Swedish Embassy. These came to be known as “Wallenberg visas.” Some reports credit him with saving as many as 100,000 lives.

In the early weeks of 1945, as the Soviet army occupied Budapest behind the retreating Nazi troops, Wallenberg went with his driver to see Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the Soviet troops, ostensibly to discuss relief efforts.

His car was confiscated, and he was never seen again in Budapest. Moscow denied any knowledge of him until 1957, when it said that Wallenberg had died in a prison cell in 1947 of an apparent heart attack and that his body had been cremated. The Soviet Union expressed regret but made it clear that it considered the case closed.

For 32 years, Soviet officials have clung to this version despite hundreds of statements from former Soviet prisoners that they had seen Wallenberg after 1947. The most recent reported sighting placed Wallenberg in a prison camp in Blagoveshchensk, near the Chinese border, in December, 1986.

Wallenberg’s half-sister, Nina Lagergren, and half-brother, Guy von Dardel, say they believe Wallenberg is alive. They celebrated his 77th birthday in August.

Smovsky, 61, who was in prison camps from 1949 to 1955 for anti-Soviet activity, recalled meeting “the Baron” twice in 1949 in the Krasnoyarsk transit camp in eastern Siberia, where food was meager and the barracks icy cold.

Because he was a titled foreigner who seemed well-educated and calm in the face of the rigors of prison life, “everyone paid attention to him,” Smovsky said.

“He seldom spoke, although he seemed to understand Russian,” Smovsky said. “I was told he was Swedish and very important. I think he was ill and something had happened to his legs, because he never stood.”

Smovsky said “the Baron” looked like he was about 40 years old, was bearded and thin.

Smovsky said he had never heard of Wallenberg until two months ago, when someone in an office where he was waiting handed him a book about the famous Swede.

“All of a sudden, I realized I knew him,” Smovsky said.

He said friends tested him by putting sets of photographs before him and asking him to point out the man he knew as “the Baron.”

“Each time, I pointed to Wallenberg,” he said.

Mikhail I. Danilash, 67, who was a Hungarian translator for the Soviet army, said he was at Soviet army headquarters in Budapest the day Wallenberg was arrested and met him there. He said they spoke in Hungarian.

“He didn’t behave like someone who had been arrested,” Danilash said. “He was very polite, confident and questioned me about where I was born, how I came to be in the service of the army, how the Red Army troops behaved toward Jews and prisoners.”

It has never been clear why the Soviet Union detained Wallenberg. Some have speculated that it was because the Soviets feared he was a spy for the Americans. But Danilash has a simpler explanation.

“He said to me, ‘Please tell your superiors that I demand the return of my car, and I will not accept another car as a compromise,’ ” Danilash recalled. “I think if he had been willing to drive away in another car, he might never have been jailed in the Soviet Union.”