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August 4: Raoul Wallenberg
The best-known “Righteous Gentile,” Raoul Wallenberg, was born near Stockholm on this date in 1912. While serving as Sweden’s special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg saved tens of thousands of Jews from the last devouring wave of the Holocaust, which swept away 550,000 Hungarian Jews. Wallenberg and his staff of more than 300 (many of them Jews) achieved this by issuing protective passes and declaring some thirty buildings in Budapest to be sovereign Swedish territory, where some 15,000 Jews were hidden. Wallenberg personally boarded deportation trains to hand out his passes and pull people off; he bribed and negotiated; he worked relentlessly and courageously. In January, 1945, after the Red Army had overrun Budapest, Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet authorities and accused of espionage. He is widely believed to have been executed in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1947, but numerous Soviet prisoners claimed to have encountered him in the gulag system in subsequent years.
“Never postpone until tomorrow what you can postpone until the day after.” —Raoul Wallenberg
On October 28, 2012 the American Swedish Institute and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas co-hosted an event.“Unfinished Business: Recognizing Raoul Wallenberg,” commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg. The event featured a lecture on “The Legacy of Raoul Wallenberg” by Ingemar Eliasson, who chaired a 2003 Swedish Commission of Inquiry into what happened to Wallenberg inside the Russian prison system. The program also included music by Janet Horvath, cello, and Heather MacLaughlin, piano; and a panel discussion by three survivors saved by Wallenberg. Watch a video of the two-hour event below.
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