Raoul Wallenberg (born in 1912, date of death unknown) was a Swedish diplomat who became immortal through his selfless and heroic efforts to save Hungarian Jews. His moral and ethical courage stood in stark contrast to the world’s appalling failure to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, and he remains, with Anne Frank and Oscar Schindler, among the best-known names to emerge from the largely nameless mass of victims and heroes of the Holocaust.
President Reagan granted him honorary American citizenship in 1981, making him only the second person so honored (Winston Churchill was the other), and Israel awarded him honorary citizenship in 1986.
Wallenberg’s autograph is one of the rarest and most expensive for Judaica document collectors. The reasons are obvious: he was a low-level diplomat from a foreign country and during his lifetime there was no reason for anyone to care about his signature or to save and value it. In addition, he disappeared into the Russian Gulag at a very young age (32) and almost immediately after he had gained fame. While a few Shutz-passes (letters of protection issued by Wallenberg to Hungarian Jews) signed by him do exist (though they are rarities), other autographed documents are virtually non-existent.
Exhibited with this column is an August 21, 1943 correspondence on Wallenberg’s personal letterhead regarding Central European Trading Company business, which may be the only Wallenberg correspondence in private hands in the world today. (In my many years of collecting Judaica documents, I have never seen another.)
Though the content is rather mundane, referring to a relatively straightforward and simple business transaction involving an unspecified method of payment, an error in the draft contract, and the validation of a chattel mortgage, it is a truly extraordinary rarity. (I encourage any readers interested in a verbatim translation of the letter to contact me at [email protected].)
While conducting research on Wallenberg in 1997, I learned that he had attended the University of Michigan in the 1930s. I was intrigued because I had recently investigated another famous person who, to the best of my recollection, had also attended Michigan around the same time. This led to the intriguing discovery of a remarkable and generally unknown fact: Wallenberg and Gerald Ford (1913-2006) graduated from the University of Michigan together in 1935. I wrote to the former president about this astonishing coincidence and, in this August 6, 1997 letter, he responded as follows:
Dear Mr. Singer:
Regrettably, to the best of my recollection, I do not recall meeting or speaking with Raoul Wallenberg while a student at the University of Michigan – September 1931 to June 1935.
I have tremendous admiration for him, so I regret we apparently never met.
An architect by profession, Wallenberg was a member of a prominent and wealthy Swedish banking family. In 1936, in the course of his business, he traveled to Eretz Yisrael, where he spent six months in Haifa studying management at the Holland Bank and where he first met Jewish German refugees. He was introduced to Kalman Lauer, a Hungarian Jew and owner of the Central European Trading Company, a specialty export firm. As a Jew, Lauer found it virtually impossible to travel to Hungary, the main market for his specialty foods, and Wallenberg became his partner and trade representative. While visiting Nazi-occupied Europe on the company’s behalf, he personally witnessed the Nazi persecution of the Jews and agonized over their plight. Wallenberg’s maternal grandmother, Sophie Wising, in whose home he was raised, was “one-fourth Jewish” – enough to be included in Eichmann’s transport, had she lived – and Raoul was enormously proud of his Jewish roots, occasionally exaggerating the extent of his Jewish heritage.
Because the Hungarian government had mostly refused to cooperate with the Nazi deportation of Jews, the largest community of surviving European Jews could be found there, but that changed on March 19, 1944 when a furious Hitler sent in his own occupying forces and Eichmann began rounding up Hungarian Jews and sending them to Auschwitz. At the request of the United States government and the World Jewish Congress, the Swedish government asked Wallenberg to serve as an attaché in Budapest (1944), and he thus became in essence the representative of the newly-established U.S. War Refugee Board, whose charge was to rescue as many surviving European Jews as possible. Wallenberg, having already volunteered to bring Lauer’s relatives out of Hungary, seized the opportunity to help other Jews there.
Using his diplomatic status as cover for a heroic rescue mission that became legend, he printed and distributed Shutz-passes – a fabrication of his inventive mind which became known as “Wallenberg passports” – and he established the “International Ghetto” through the purchase of 30 safe houses where over 33,000 Jews found refuge.
In November 1944, when thousands of Budapest Jews were forced on a death march to the Austrian border, Wallenberg followed them in a truck convoy and distributed food and medicine and managed to free about 500 of them. He literally ran after Nazi death marches distributing Swedish identity passes and ushering doomed Jews by the thousands to safety. In one notable incident, he thrust himself in front of a group of Jews who had been selected for deportation and announced to the Nazis: “This is Swedish territory…. If you want to take them, you’ll have to shoot me first.”
Though exposed to great personal danger at all times, Wallenberg succeeded in saving many thousands of Jews from certain death through threats, bribery, blackmail, and sheer strength of conviction. Perhaps his greatest single act took place during the final days before the fall of Budapest to the Russians, when the Hungarian fascists were planning the immediate liquidation of the more than 100,000 inhabitants of the Budapest Jewish ghetto. Wallenberg warned that the executioners of this mass murder would be tried as war criminals after the war, and the ghetto was left alone.
In December 1944, Wallenberg attended a dinner party in Budapest where he found himself sharing a table with Adolf Eichmann. He pointed out to Eichmann that the war was almost over and urged the Nazi barbarian to give up his mission of mass murder. Eichmann maintained that he would walk to the gallows, head held high, with the knowledge that he had fulfilled his Fuhrer’s orders and successfully carried out his assignment.
He added a not-so-subtle threat that even a neutral diplomat could meet with an “accident,” but before that threat could be executed – although in once incident Raoul escaped injury when his car was blown up – the Red Army marched into Budapest in January 1945.
Wallenberg was last seen on January 17, 1945, leaving Budapest by car to meet Soviet military officials in Eastern Hungary. The Soviet motivation for taking him prisoner is unclear, and speculation continues even to this day; one theory suggests the Russians suspected him of being an American agent.
His ultimate fate, which remains an abiding mystery, has been the subject of controversy for decades. The Soviets persistently denied all knowledge of his disappearance until 1957, when Deputy Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko alleged that Wallenberg had died ten years earlier of a heart attack in a Soviet prison. Notwithstanding periodic subsequent reports from former Soviet prisoners, who alleged that Wallenberg was alive and still incarcerated by the Russians, the sad fact is that Western authorities have never been able to determine the ultimate fate of this great Holocaust hero.
