Wallenberg Kin Meet KGB, Get Personal Effects

In an emotional meeting Monday with the family of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews in World War II, the KGB handed over his personal effects but did not provide the information the family says it needs to clear up the mystery of what happened to him.

Wallenberg’s brother and sister said they were given his personal effects and that this raised their hope that other documents about his imprisonment might be handed over in keeping with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or openness.

The family presented the KGB, the Soviet security agency, with a list of about 20 witnesses who say they saw Wallenberg alive after 1947, when Soviet authorities say he died in a Moscow prison of an apparent heart attack.

According to the family, the latest information they have is that Wallenberg, who would be 77 years old, is still alive after 44 years in Soviet prisons and is being held in isolation.

“It is terrible for us to think that Raoul has spent this long in prison, but we are confident he was able to survive,” Nina Lagergren, a half-sister, told reporters at the Swedish Embassy. “He had enormous resources.”

Wallenberg captured the public imagination after he saved at least 20,000 Jews--as many as 100,000, according to some reports--by issuing them special visas that placed them under the protection of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, Hungary.

When the Soviet army drove the Germans out of Budapest, the Soviets arrested Wallenberg, presumably because they suspected he was an American spy.

The Soviet Union refused to acknowledge that it knew anything about his whereabouts until 1957, when the Kremlin admitted that Wallenberg had been held in Moscow but said he had died a decade earlier.

Yet there have been scores of reported sightings of the Swedish diplomat after 1947--particularly at Vladimir Prison in the 1950s.

At Monday’s private meeting, the deputy KGB chief, Vladimir Pirozhkov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Valentin M. Nikiforov gave the family Wallenberg’s driver’s license and diplomatic passport, along with some currency, an address book and a calendar he was carrying at the time. The family said it had not expected to receive Wallenberg’s personal effects.

“It was terribly emotional to see his handwriting and his photograph and his identity papers,” the half-sister said.

The KGB also showed the family the original of a document they say proves Wallenberg died in Lubyanka prison two years after his arrest in Budapest in 1945. The family said they found the document unconvincing.

“Nobody on our part ever believed that document,” said Per Anger, a former Swedish diplomat who worked with Wallenberg in wartime Hungary and was present at the meeting Monday.

The list the family provided of former prisoners who claim to have seen Wallenberg alive after 1947 included some who have died and others who now live in the West, but at least a few are living in the Soviet Union, Anger said. The KGB promised to look into the list, and another meeting was scheduled for later this week, he said.

But Nikolai Uspensky, a Foreign Ministry official who was present at the meeting, told reporters that the Soviet document shows clearly that Wallenberg died in Lubyanka and was cremated and buried in a common grave at Moscow’s Donskoy monastery.

“Of course, you cannot rule out eventual additional findings, as we have just discovered the articles belonging to Wallenberg,” he said. “The only fact that we reiterate, and this is absolutely irrefutable, is that he died in 1947.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said Wallenberg’s death was a tragic mistake of the Stalin era.

The family said it is possible that Wallenberg had become lost in the prison system and that even the Soviet officials do not know where he is.

“Perhaps they haven’t been able to trace him,” Lagergren said.

The document quoted by the Soviet Union as proving Wallenberg’s death is dated July 17, 1947. It says: “Wallenberg died in his cell last night, presumably of a myocardial infarction (heart attack). . . . The body was ordered to be cremated without a postmortem.”

The family said the document did not seem authentic because it was not on official paper, had no official stamp and did not give Wallenberg’s first name.

“As long as we have no proof,” Lagergren said, “we go on.”