November 2005

UN News Centre. General Assembly designates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

1 November 2005 – In a resolution co-sponsored by 104 Member States, the General Assembly today designated http//www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/ga10413.doc.htm 27 January as Holocaust Remembrance Day, drawing immediate praise from Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said the United Nations would do its part to keep the memory alive in a bid to prevent future acts of genocide.

Read the report

Dear Mr. President. Letter to President Harry Truman.

This 1947 letter to President Truman is a man’s plea for help in finding his brother, one of the many thousands of brothers – and sister too, and dons and daughters and parents and friends – who dissapeared in the chaos that marked the end of the war in Europe.

Read the letter

El Salvador, a rescuing country

While the heroic efforts of saviors in Europe have increasingly come to light in the years since World War II, El Salvador which when translated into English means ‘the savior’ is receiving increased attention for the role it plays in saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

Read the article

In Memory of a Hero

Varian Fry (1907- 1967), a 32-year -old American, was sent to France in August 1940, on a mission to save the anti-Fascists and Jews from persecution by Hitler.

Read the article

A righteous man among the nations

It was just a man and he was running out of time he had 8 months and 32 weeks only. Less than pregnancy time. Nevertheless, in ”only” those 8 months from May 1944 to January 1945 Friedrich Born managed to save ”only” 15,000 souls in the European city of Budapest.

Read the article

Globeandmail.com. Alexander Yakovlev, 81

Moscow – Alexander Yakovlev, a onetime Soviet ambassador to Canada and a key architect of former president Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost reforms that shook the last years of the Soviet Union, died Tuesday, according to a foundation he headed. He was 81.

Read the news

Welcome to New Members

The International Raoul Wallenberg welcomes to Mari Bim Amude Alkatiri, Prime Minister of Timor Leste; Wolfgang Boehmer, Minister of the State Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany; Hugues Martin, Mayor of Bordeaux, France; Thomas C. Schelling, The Nobel Prize in Economics 2005.

Appeal to People saved from the port of Calais, France, by Frithjof Utne, Captain of the S.S. Leka. May 1940

As German troops advanced through Belgium, many Belgians were forced to flee to the port city of Calais in search of safe-passage away from the continent. Captain Frithjof Utne, Captain of a Norwegian Cargo ship, took on 1,125 passengers at great risk to his ship and himself and deposited them safely in England, saving them from certain death. If you or someone you know is a survivor because of this act, or if you have any information at all regarding Frithjof Utne and the S.S Leka, please contact the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation so that we may learn more about this man and properly honor him.

Please contact The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation by writing to irwf@irwf.org mailtoirwf@irwf.org