Raoul Wallenberg – An Appreciation

The 80th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s humanitarian mission to wartime Budapest in July 1944, to protect Hungary’s remaining Jewish population from Nazi terror gives rise to a wide range of reflections and emotions.

Now more than ever,  Raoul Wallenberg’s legacy of humanitarian activism continues to resonate. His exceptional courage, both physical and moral, provides hope that our humanistic values can prevail – if we are willing to fight for them.

Susanne Berger        September 2024

It is difficult to fathom that nearly 80 years after the victory over fascism, we find ourselves at a crossroads once again, confronted with the deeply worrisome question if democracy can survive the year 2024. 

And yet, now more than ever,  Raoul Wallenberg’s legacy of humanitarian activismcontinues to resonate. His exceptional courage, both physical and moral, to confront evil  provides hope that our humanistic values can prevail – if we are willing to fight for them. 

The brutality and the scope of the Hungarian Holocaust was simply staggering. 500,000 Jews were rounded up and murdered in just a few months after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. The Allies essentially stood by, unable and in part unwilling to intervene.

There has been much debate in recent years about how to assess Raoul Wallenberg’s role and achievements during this horrific period in Hungarian history. How effective were his rescue efforts? How many people did he actually save? 

In my view, this is the wrong question to ask. 

Ultimately, Raoul Wallenberg’s enduring legacy rests far less in the number of people he rescued than in the humanitarian spirit he embodied and the courage he displayed. 

One could argue that the Swedish rescue action was little more than a small ray of light in an otherwise disastrous failure to stem the tide of the Holocaust. Wallenberg’s mission, backed by the U.S. War Refugee Board and the Swedish government, was conceived late and haphazardly at best, with no organizational plan to speak of. Yet in the murderous hell that was Budapest in the second half of 1944, the effort by Wallenberg and his associates managed to protect, house and feed many of the more than 100,000 Jews left in the city. They must have felt desperate, discouraged and afraid countless times, yet they carried on. In their work, they received crucial support from the Hungarian resistance and the diplomatic representatives from Switzerland, the Vatican and other neutral countries. In addition, thousands of not-so-ordinary Hungarians risked their lives every day on behalf of their fellow human beings.

The official Swedish rescue action – based on the policy of bureaucratic resistance– was made possible in part by the fact that the Swedish Legation members refused to leave Budapest, even as the military situation became ever more dangerous; as well as the Swedish government’s full backing of the Swedish protective passports[Schutzpässe] issued by Wallenberg’s organization – despite the documents’somewhat  questionable validity. Others have cited the opening created by the fact that by the summer of 1944 the Nazi leadership in Hungary realized that the war was almost certainly lost, and it greatly feared the rapidly advancing Soviet Red Army. One must remember, however, how small this opening actually was and what extraordinary determination it took for Wallenberg and his colleagues to take advantage of it.

In the end, the impact of the Swedish rescue efforts was profound. Per Anger, Wallenberg’s diplomatic colleague who was himself honored by Yad Vashem for his rescue work, once said what made his friend special is that he was “a true humanitarian”. 

What Wallenberg brought to Budapest was the idea of possibility, the hope that rescue was indeed attainable. He worked day and night, driving himself to exhaustion and ignoring the threats to his own life. It was this relentless attitude, the will to take action and to sustain it, combined with a unique talent for organization and negotiation, which turned a small Swedish protective mission into an extensive rescue operation with safe houses and care offered to orphans and the sick. 

Wallenberg’s extraordinary spirit, his almost reflexive determination to jump into the fray to help others, is the enduring legacy that has captured the world’s imagination. The Jewish community of Budapest certainly understood what they had witnessed. When Wallenberg disappeared in January 1945, after he was detained by Soviet military counterintelligence, there was an almost instantaneous emotional reaction from survivors who held a moving memorial service in his honor. 

Unfortunately, for a long time, his home country did not show him similar warmth or appreciation.

As you all know, here in Sweden, above all, form matters – and from the very beginning, Raoul Wallenberg’s life has defied those clear forms. He was born a Wallenberg but was raised outside the influential banking family. He was an architect by training but jobbed as a businessman. He was not a real diplomat, not a real spy and ultimately neither dead nor alive. And, like any visionary, he was not afraid to test boundaries and to break the rules. 

Raoul was born in 1912 to a young widow and raised in a household with two women in mourning: His mother Maj and his grandmother who lost her husband a short time after the untimely death of Raoul’s father, Raoul Oscar Wallenberg. When his mother remarried, he grew so close to his stepfather Fredrik von Dardelthat he asked him if he could call him “Far” (Dad).

By all accounts Raoul was sensitive and kind. He once invited a woman who lived in his apartment house to use his balcony so she could get some fresh air and sunshine while recuperating from a serious accident. 

He was a talented artist who happened to be color blind. Those who knew him all say that Raoul had a fantastic sense of humor. He was known at dinner parties tosolemnly sign formal affidavits for the children of his friends, swearing that they were definitely not responsible for the giant sauce stains that had suddenly materialized on the fancy tablecloths … I also recommend to all of you to read the account he gave to his sister Nina of a society party he attended in 1943. It is priceless. You can find it in full in the book “Älskade farfar : brevväxlingen mellanGustaf och Raoul Wallenberg 1924-1936“. [Redaktör: Karin Jacobsson. Bonniers,1987].

But Raoul also had a very serious side. Throughout the war he was a highly respected instructor in the Swedish Home Guard. You may remember the live footage that was discovered some years ago in the Swedish TV archives, showing him at a rifle range, overseeing the training of young recruits. This military training undoubtedly served him well in Budapest. 

Interestingly, Raoul was very proud of his Jewish heritage at a time when this was not at all common among his contemporaries in Sweden. As early as 1937, he traveled to Germany on behalf of German businessman Erich Philippi who had been arrested by the Gestapo. Once Philippi managed to come to Sweden, Raoul founded a company so Philippi could earn a living since only Swedish citizens could own businesses. In 1941, he joined Kalman Lauer, a Jewish Hungarian businessman, as a director of a small but successful import-export company called Mellaneuropeiska. When Lauer’s family faced deportation and death in the spring of 1944, after Nazi Germany’s occupation of Hungary,  Raoul tried to mobilize all available resources at his disposal to save them.

Miguel Cervantes is credited with saying that “in order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” That approach defined Raoul Wallenberg the man as well as his mission. Wallenberg was soft-spoken but had a steely determination. He was daring (as illustrated, among other things, by his cooperation with the Hungarian resistance), courageous and impatient. He chafed at bureaucratic restrictions, including those imposed by his own government. He was also impulsive, creative and empathetic. Wallenberg infuriated his opponents and alsoquite often his colleagues. He could be pragmatic and yet, at heart, he was an idealist. As Per Anger recognized, his mission was true humanistic philosophy in action. He led by example, making it clear that to counter horrendous crimes like genocide, every person is called upon to take a stand. And we all know how difficult this really is. 

Activism all too frequently imposes a brutal price on those who dare to stand up and speak out. 

Unfortunately, Raoul Wallenberg himself was no exception. The man who managed to save so many was shamefully abandoned, not only by his own country, but also by the U.S. government which had initiated and financed his mission; and sadly, also to a large extent by the international Jewish community after the war. However, Wallenberg’s closest family – his parents [Maj and Fredrik von Dardel]and his siblings, Nina Lagergren and Guy von Dardel – never gave up the fight to rescue him. In that fight, they were just as stubborn and determined as their brother was in his battle to save the Jews of Budapest.

For decades, they were forced to wage an exhausting two-front war: Trying to confront the Soviet authorities, while also having to deal with the confounding lethargy of the Swedish government that did not want to provoke its powerful neighbor to the East; not even for a man who today is celebrated as one of Sweden’s most important citizens – representative of everything that is good and right about the country and its people. 

Not surprisingly, many important questions about Wallenberg’s mission and his fate are still unanswered. Today, it is not so much a question if the truth is known, but rather why Russia and also to some degree Sweden seem to lack the political will to fully reveal it. 

80 years later, we are once again keenly aware that the line separating democratic societies from authoritarian regimes is very thin indeed. Remembrance enables us to learn from history, to avoid repeating the same mistakes. So does the search for historic truth – about the real causes of Anti-Semitism and xenophobia; about mass repression and the Holocaust; about the plight of ethnic minorities and political prisoners, all over the world. 80 years after Raoul Wallenberg pointed the way and with his spirited example he set the standard of humanitarian activism, for all of us.