He Deserves All Honor

Raoul Wallenberg’s family and friends say they haven’t given up hope that the Swedish diplomat may still be alive, nearly 45 years after he was kidnapped by Soviet forces in Hungary as he completed perhaps the most noble humanitarian mission of World War II. But with this week’s repeated Soviet claim that Wallenberg died in captivity in 1947, little basis for any such hope would seem to remain. Were he alive today, Wallenberg would be almost 80, a remarkable age for any inmate of the Soviet penal system to achieve. The Soviets may well be lying when they say Wallenberg died of a heart attack two years after he was arrested--he would have been only 37 at the time--but almost certainly he died in captivity, probably many years ago.

A foreign ministry official who met with Wallenberg’s relatives in Moscow this week expressed remorse for the diplomat’s fate, blaming it on “this tragic phase of our history” when millions of people were seized and killed, often on the merest suspicion that they represented a threat to the Soviet state. The Soviet Union, which first announced in 1957 that Wallenberg had died in captivity and had been cremated, has to this day given no public explanation for why he was arrested or why he was held.

When Wallenberg was seized in January, 1945, he was in Budapest--which had just been liberated from German rule by the Red Army--as the official representative of a neutral nation. He had been sent by his government at the request of the United States to do what he could, so terribly late in the day, to try to save Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps. Much of Hungary’s Jewish community had managed to survive the war under an indigenous pro-Nazi regime. But when Germany occupied the country in late 1944 the arrest and deportion of Hungarian Jews became a top Nazi priority, taking precedence even over urgent military needs. Wallenberg was able to provide Swedish travel documents and other forms of protection to as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews, often snatching some--literally--from the trains that were about to carry them totheir doom.

The terrible, inexplicable irony is that Wallenberg was able to defy the power of one tyranny only to fall victim to another. He had succeeded in doing what few people in history have had the privilege of doing. Almost single-handedly, with enormous courage and dedication, he was directly responsible for saving the lives of tens of thousands of fellow human beings. For that he deserves, and has largely won, universal respect and remembrance. Even in the Soviet Union, a foreign ministry official has told Wallenberg’s family, “he has become a hero.”

This week, Soviet authorities handed over to Raoul Wallenberg’s family some of his personal belongings, retrieved from secret police files. Among them was the blue Swedish diplomatic passport that granted Wallenberg the diplomatic immunity he needed to carry out his life-saving activities. The Nazis in Budapest, though they hated to do so, felt compelled to respect that immunity. The Soviets, when it came their turn, did not.