Von Dardel, like myriad private and governmental committees, failed even to pry loose from Moscow definitive proof of what befell Wallenberg. (The Kremlin has maintained since 1957 that he died of a heart attack in 1947.) But he never stopped searching for his big brother, scavenging Moscow on trips that left him with scabies, hypothermia and few answers.

I recently wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal about the horrible and hidden toll that Wallenberg’s disappearance took on his closest kin – half-brother Guy, half-sister Nina, mother Maj and stepfather Fredrik. Wallenberg’s parents – exhausted, heartbroken and disillusioned – committed suicide two days apart in February 1979.

Today, Nina continues to spread word of her half-brother, focusing less on his whereabouts through the six decades that followed his arrest than on his heroism in the six months before it.

Following are what she and four other surviving people who knew Wallenberg told me about him.

Nina Lagergren, 88; Djursholm, Sweden

Lagergren was born almost nine years after Raoul to his mother and stepfather. (Wallenberg’s father, the scion of a banking dynasty in Sweden, had died before his son was born.)

”You can imagine,” says Lagergren, ”a little girl having an older brother – good-looking, witty, speaking languages. Perfect!”

The younger sister was 15 years old when, in 1936, Wallenberg returned to Sweden after five years abroad at school and at work. He was a gust of fun.

”I remember vividly,” says Lagergren, ”at a Christmas party in the country, he mimicked different nationalities” – an American businessman, a German officer, French and British diplomats – each in their own language. ”Everybody laughed.”

Wallenberg, says Lagergren, was also ambitious and empathic. When, during wartime, they watched on Sveavägen Street the film Pimpernel Smith, the fictional tale of a professor rescuing refugees from the Gestapo, Wallenberg told her, ”That is what I want to do.”

Wallenberg instead turned to business, trying in vain to sell a better zipper and bottle cap, then trading foodstuffs through Europe. He lamented his lot to his sister in February 1944 after she moved to Berlin, where her husband worked for the Swedish embassy.

”It is frightfully boring here without you,” he wrote her. ”The dinner table at home is straight out of a play by [August] Strindberg.”

Months later, Wallenberg got his opportunity to rescue refugees. And on July 6, wearing a homburg, a trench coat and a Browning revolver, he flew to his sister en route to Hungary.

”We came and fetched him at the airport,” recalls Lagergren. The trio retired to their terrace overlooking Wannsee Lake in the village of Caputh, where Wallenberg spoke excitedly of his mission. Adds Lagergren, ”It was a beautiful July night.”

An air raid siren woke the siblings before dawn, and hours later, Wallenberg, 31, boarded a train bound for Hungary.

Rolf af Klintberg, 97; Alby, Sweden

Af Klintberg and Wallenberg were classmates in Stockholm from age 10 to 18.

”He was one of my best, best friends,” says af Klintberg, adding, ”I was more popular. He was more special. The other boys admired him.”

Wallenberg, he says, was smart, artistic, funny, skilled at debate, and confident.

”He was never arrogant, but he was sure that he would be more successful than other people,” he recalls. Wallenberg particularly aspired to the clout of his paternal uncles: ”His ambition was to be one of the big Wallenbergs.”

The friends, firstborn sons, sang in choir together, did homework together, were drafted together, took walks together in their matching black school caps. And as they grew older and war came to Europe, it was politics that they discussed most. Af Klintberg says he was mainly interested in domestic affairs, Wallenberg in the world outside Sweden.

”He told me that it was necessary to go against Nazism,” says af Klintberg. ”I was more neutral. He had been in America and he thought like America in these things.”

Af Klintberg never told his close friend that he was Jewish. But, he says, ”I’m sure that he knew it.”

Caroline Grinda-Christensen, 84; Stockholm

Grinda-Christensen was a rising dancer and singer, often performing during World War II for the Swedish military, when Wallenberg heard her sing in 1942. He phoned her and they went to a restaurant.

She was 17 and beautiful; he was 30 and balding and unsure of a profession. But, she says, he was ”chivalrous” and possessed a sense of humor that ”made me more or less fall in love with him.” When she wrote him that she had gained a kilo, he wrote back that he hoped the kilo was in the proper place.

Over some 15 dates, she says, the couple shared food and wine and their aspirations.

”He wanted to be an ambassador,” says Grinda-Christensen. ”That was his private wish.”

She adds, ”I think he looked at himself as the hero… He wanted to make a name. He wanted to be famous.”

He also wanted, she says, ”a beautiful wife.” And one night at Hasselbacken restaurant, Wallenberg asked her to enroll in a school run by nuns.

”An ambassador couldn’t have someone from the theater,” she explains. He then sketched for her, on a tablecloth she still has, the home that would someday be theirs.

Says Grinda-Christensen, ”He gave it to me and said, ‘Save this until I come back.’”

János Beér, 86; Winchester, Massachusetts

In November 1944, Beér, a university economics student in Budapest, bumped into his friend Thomas Veres, who invited him to the nearby Swedish legation where he worked for Wallenberg as a photographer. Beér went. He did not tell Wallenberg that he was Jewish (though he believes Wallenberg knew, despite his forged identity papers). Wallenberg put him to work in his ”Schutzling Protokoll,” an elite group he had created to rescue abducted Jews and to transfer Jews from the general ghetto in Budapest to the international ghetto.

”This sounds very romantic,” says Beér, ”but with Wallenberg in the background, we felt very safe… If we were not back, it was sure Wallenberg would be there for us. We looked at him as a half-god.”

The two men spoke, in German, roughly every other day for six weeks. Wallenberg, says Beér, was optimistic, calm, respectful, reassuring and full of humor.

On November 28, Beér, Wallenberg, his photographer and driver arrived in his Studebaker at the Józsefváros railway station where the Nazis had packed Jews into a cattle car for deportation. Wallenberg and Beér spent hours negotiating the release of those Jews who held ”Schutzpasse” – the passport-like credentials Wallenberg had created to claim the Jews under Swedish jurisdiction.

Says Beér, ”Several hundred people were taken out of the railway car.”

The men had returned to their car when Wallenberg saw a man on the train waving a piece of paper. He asked Beér to see if it was one of his passports. Beér approached the train.

”The gendarme said, ‘Get away or I shoot you,’” he recalls. Beér got back in the car, off to the safe house where Wallenberg saw to it the rescued Jews were fed soup.

”Wallenberg had not eaten all day,” adds Beér. ”Tommy Veres sat on his sandwiches.”

Margaretha Hamacher Merz, 85; Salisbury, England

Merz met Wallenberg in 1943 at a restaurant through her friend and his cousin Jan Bönde. The two became friends, sharing light conversations over monthly dinners.

”We didn’t talk politics,” says Merz.

The next summer, she says, ”suddenly he said, ‘I must go to Budapest.’”

There is no record that Wallenberg phoned anyone with any regularity from Hungary – not the Swedish or US foreign departments or even his parents. (Wallenberg spoke to his family just once from Budapest, when his sister’s husband Gunnar phoned him with the news that he was an uncle.) But there was one person Wallenberg rang every third day.

”Budapest calling,” the operator would say, recalls Merz. Her mother would then call out to her 20-year-old daughter that Wallenberg was on the phone.

”He just asked whether it was snowing, the weather. He wanted all the talk,” says Merz. ”He was very interested in horseracing. I think he wanted to buy a horse.”

Says Merz, ”this went on half a year, and then it stopped.”

Today, almost 65 years later, Russia should provide definitive answers about what befell Wallenberg while the last few people who knew him – chief among them his sister – are still alive.

Von Dardel never accepted Soviet authorities’ claims that Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who is credited with saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War II, died in a Soviet prison in 1947, two years after the Soviets arrested him in Budapest on spying charges.

Von Dardel’s wife, Mathilda, said von Dardel, who had worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, died after an illness.

Von Dardel, who compiled a massive archive on his half-brother and visited the Soviet Union in his search for him, maintained there was evidence that the Soviets wanted to exchange Wallenberg for defectors and other Russians in Sweden, but the offers were rejected by Swedish authorities.

”Mistakes were made in the very first years that influenced very much the fate of my brother,” von Dardel said in 2001.

Wallenberg — a member of one of Sweden’s wealthiest and most prominent families — distributed Swedish passports to Jews in deportation trains and on death marches in Hungary.

He won diplomatic protection for whole neighborhoods in Budapest and organized food and medical supplies. His efforts are credited with saving at least 20,000 lives.

He was arrested on espionage charges in Budapest soon after the Soviet army entered in January 1945, and he vanished at the age of 32. A 1957 Soviet memo said Wallenberg died of a heart attack in Soviet custody in 1947.

Details on von Dardel’s survivors were not immediately available. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

With his only weapons being ingenuity, an authoritative air, a savvy
understanding of the enemy, and most of all unflinching courage, Raoul
Wallenberg managed to save an estimated 100,000 Hungarian Jews from
Hitler’s gas chambers during the waning months of World War II.

The son of a prominent Swedish family of respected bankers, diplomats,
and politicians, Wallenberg entered Hungary at the request of the
United States War Refugee Board and the Swedish government in July
1944, undercover as a Swedish diplomat.

On January 17, 1945,
just six months after he began his mission, Wallenberg was captured by
Russian soldiers. He was never heard from again.

This spring
marks the 65th anniversary of Wallenberg’s mission to Hungary, and a
group of Canadians who have been working to uncover what became of the
brave Swede are hoping the mystery surrounding his disappearance will
soon be solved.

Wallenberg’s mission was to rescue as many
of Hungary’s Jews as possible from Nazi extermination. At the time of
his arrival in Budapest there were only 230,000 Jews left; Adolf
Eichmann, the so-called architect of the Holocaust, had already sent
the other 400,000 to the gas chambers.

In the middle of enemy
territory and under the noses of the German soldiers, Wallenberg handed
out fake passports he had designed to Jews who were crammed onto trains
and on foot in 125-mile ”death marches.” They were then hustled to
waiting international Red Cross trucks or cars marked in Swedish
colours and taken to safe houses.

”He was a great hero of the
war and I think that knowing what happened to him would help in
remembering what he did,” says David Matas, a Winnipeg-based
international human rights lawyer and Wallenberg researcher.

”It’s also simply a matter of justice to him in his memory. I think
after he did so much to help so many people we owe it to him and his
family to do what we can to help in finding out what happened to him.”

Matas says there’s a ”wide variety of conflicting strings of evidence”
pointing in many different directions, including that Wallenberg was
shot, stabbed, poisoned, or died of a heart attack.

The
Russian government has been accused of stonewalling attempts to
discover what happened to Wallenberg after his capture and subsequent
imprisonment in the notorious Lubyanka prison.

Immediately
after the war, the USSR said Wallenberg died in Hungary of a motor
vehicle accident, says Matas. Then in 1957 they said he had died in
1947 of a heart attack. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow
said he was murdered in 1947 but did not say how.

For years,
however, there were numerous reports from former gulag prisoners who
claimed to have seen, heard of, or communicated with Wallenberg in
various Russian prisons after 1947.

”The Soviet Union has
always had a position about Wallenberg. The trouble is the position
kept on changing over time and the subsequent position contradicted the
earlier position. So it’s just this constant shift of conflicting
positions without any real evidence behind any of them,” Matas says.

Matas authored a report on Wallenberg in1998, financed by the
Department of Foreign Affairs under then-Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd
Axworthy.

”The conclusion of my report was that the answer to
the question of what happened to Wallenberg is not known but it is
knowable,” he says.

He found that the primary difficulty in
determining Wallenberg’s fate is the inability of independent
researchers to access Russian confidential archives.

However,
Vladimir Lapchin, senior councilor with the Russian Embassy in Ottawa,
says what documentation there is on Wallenberg was made available to
researchers in the early 1990s.

”There is nothing new since,”
he says. ”There are just documents confirming that he was in prison and
that’s it. Was he shot, was he executed—there are no documents about
this.”

He says allegations of a cover-up by Moscow are
unfounded. ”People try to find the black cat in the black room even if
there is no black cat.”

Nominated twice for the Nobel Peace
Prize, Wallenberg is an honourary citizen in four countries including
Canada and the United States. There are monuments to him in 12
countries while commemorative stamps have been issued in eight. He has
also been the subject of numerous books and films.

Canada has
declared January 17, the day he disappeared, as Raoul Wallenberg Day,
and there are commemorative parks in several Canadian cities. It is
largely thanks to Ottawa resident Vera Gara’s efforts that Raoul
Wallenberg Park was built in Ottawa.

Gara, herself a survivor
of the Nazi death camps, has been involved with the ”Wallenberg
project” since 1986. She says there’s a new and promising lead
currently being investigated.

Wallenberg researchers have
asked the Hungarian Embassy for help in obtaining information on three
men, one of whom shared a cell with Wallenberg’s assistant in Lefortovo
prison prior to 1947.

The other two men worked in the
Hungarian resistance movement, which had direct contact with
Wallenberg. All three are known to have worked with Wallenberg in
Budapest in 1944.

Consular official Imre Helyes said in her
reply that ”it is possible” the Hungarian National Archive could have
some material relating to the three men and that, upon receiving more
information, ”researchers in the Archive may be able to determine what
sources of information may exist there.”

Gara sees this as a positive sign.

”I’m very optimistic,” she says. ”My feeling is something is happening,
and it has to be now. Quite frankly it has to be now, because there has
to be closure on this.”

Speaking at a dinner to commemorate
Wallenberg’s heroism in April, Wallenberg researcher and former MP
David Kilgour was critical of Hungary, Sweden, and the U.S. for not
doing more to find out what became of the war hero.

Wallenberg
and his team rescued more than one-third of all Jews saved by the U.S.
War Refugee Board, he said. ”Until his seizure, he was the board’s best
asset. Yet successive U.S. administrations have offered little more
than tokenism since 1945 in solving the mystery of his disappearance.”

Kilgour told The Epoch Times that Canada should also be more active in
uncovering the truth about Wallenberg’s fate—especially after the
incident in which the St. Louis, a ship loaded with Jews fleeing the
Holocaust, was not allowed to land on Canadian shores.

”We did
so little to help the Jewish people before the war, and in a small way
this is what we should be trying to do to try to make up for that
terrible injustice [to the people aboard the St. Louis].”

At
one point, Wallenberg studied architecture at the University of
Michigan, where he was known for his good humour, energy, and
”anti-snobism,” according to Kilgour.

During vacations, he
hitchhiked around the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. After graduating, he
spent some time in South Africa and the Middle East. It was in
Palestine (now Israel) that Wallenberg, a Christian, first met Jews
fleeing Hitler’s Germany.

Kilgour hopes the mystery of Wallenberg’s fate will be solved while his two siblings are still alive.

”The truth will come out. It’s just whether it’s going to come out
before all Wallenberg’s siblings are dead. It would be nice if it could
come out now rather than 25 years from now.”

But once she is standing before her massive work of art, inspired by the Holocaust and dedicated to a young diplomat who saved 20,000 lives, her voice and her memories regain their strength.

”Do you know the story of Raoul Wallenberg?” she asks.

In a soft but unwavering voice, Cahana weaves Wallenberg’s story into her own. He was a young businessman who handed out fake Swedish passports to Jews, who used them to escape the Nazis. She was 15, a teenager in a cattle car with no water, watching her grandfather degraded in ways that, 64 years later, are still so painful she can barely describe them.

”There was one bucket in the car …,” and she is lost in her memories.

* * *

Michael Z. Cahana, rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, arranged for his mother, a resident of Houston, and her art to be part of Portland’s Yom Hashoah commemoration, which aims to open up the annual observance to more non-Jews. The tribute to Holocaust survivors will be held in the Gerding, a public space dedicated to the arts, and will include ”Through My Mother’s Eyes,” a performance of Alice Cahana’s words and traditional melodies by her son and his wife, Cantor Ida Rae Cahana, and pianist Janet Guggenheim.

When it came to choosing a speaker for the event, Rabbi Cahana reached outside Oregon’s Jewish circle. Precisely because global Jewish-Catholic relations have been strained in recent months, he invited the Most Rev. John G. Vlazny, leader of the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, to speak. ”The connection here in Portland between us has been amazing,” Cahana says. He wanted the community to see that for themselves.

”Our relationship has been a good one,” Vlazny says. He credits Rabbi Emanuel Rose of Congregation Beth Israel and the late Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Paul Waldschmidt for laying the groundwork.

”There are memories that we share,” he said, ”some of the same traditions and language. We have some different ideas, of course, but we share the same hope for our future.”

Vlazny was a young seminarian in the 1960s when he visited a concentration camp in Germany. He walked through the grounds and saw the ovens where Jews had been gassed.

”It was a profound moment,” Vlazny says, ”when what the Holocaust was really hit me.” Since then, he thinks of a line from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize lecture: ”It is memory that will save humanity.”

That is Alice Cahana’s hope and the lingering pain of her losses.

Born in Hungary, she survived the labor camp at Auschwitz/Birkenau and the death march to Bergen-Belsen. Her mother, sister, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins were among the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. She and her father, who had escaped to Budapest and received one of Wallenberg’s fake Swedish passports, were the only survivors of a vigorous and thriving family.

She struggles to find the words to continue her story. The face of her hero, Wallenberg, who eventually was arrested and disappeared, stares out from the massive mixed-media memory of the Holocaust. Photographic images surround his likeness, from a young Jewish woman paraded as she wears a sign that says ”I am a pig,” to the gates of Auschwitz, where, Cahana says, the world learned ”a language we did not know.”

”The German people got used to it,” she says. ”No one said, ‘This is the 20th century. How can you do that?’”

The question still rings in her head, along with the one that echoed through her own mind for the 18 months of her own imprisonment: ”I am just a normal human being. What do you want from me? What did I do wrong?”

Cahana was an abstract expressionist influenced by Mark Rothko when she encountered revisionist historians in the 1970s. Since then her work has focused on the Holocaust. One of her paintings hangs in the Vatican museum’s collection. Her work does not render specific villains or victims but evokes what one scholar calls ”visual equivalents for memory.”

”I cannot forget,” she says as she stands before another of her paintings. Covered in numbers, flames and smoke, all its imagery is organized under the days of the week.

”Somewhere in the world, it was an ordinary day,” she says. ”Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

”But not for us — not in the camps.”

Pictures

Pictures by Motoya Nakamura, The Oregonian

1. Alice Lok Cahana is overcome by her memories as she stands before a piece of her art, a mixed-media remembrance of the Holocaust. A survivor herself, Cahana is showing two exhibitions of her art as part of Portland’s Yom Hashoah community commemoration. A likeness of her hero, Raoul Wallenberg, lies at the center of this particular piece.
2. Photographs of soldiers and Jews are details from Alice Lok Cahana’s mixed-media piece recounting memories of the Holocaust. The work is dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved at least 20,000 lives before his own arrest.
3. ”I cannot forget,” Alice Lok Cahana says as she stands before one of her paintings. Covered in numbers, flames and smoke, all its imagery is organized under the days of the week. ”Somewhere in the world, it was an ordinary day,” she says. ”Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.”

Nancy Haught: 503-294-7625; nancyhaught@news.oregonian.com

Wallenberg, who was working as a diplomat in Nazi-occupied Budapest when he managed to rescue tens of thousands o f Jews destined for death camps, went missing after his arrest by Soviet forces in Hungary on January 17, 1945.

His fate has remained a mystery since then.

Wallenberg’s half-sister Nina Lagergren told Swedish media for the first time Monday that Raoul’s stepfather Fredrik von Dardel and mother Maria Wising Wallenberg killed themselves by taking overdoses of sleeping pills two days apart in February 1979, 34 years after Raoul’s disappearance.

”That is correct. It was very difficult for them that they never managed to find Raoul,” Lagergren, who turns 88 on Tuesday, told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.

The information was part of a long investigative article on Wallenberg published in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday.

Wallenberg rescued thousands of Jews during the Holocaust by providing them with Swedish passports and buying off Hungarian fascists and Nazis. He was supported in his efforts by Sweden and the United States.

After the fall of the Nazi regime, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet troops and is believed to have then been transferred to a prison in Russia.

The Soviet Union claimed he died in the prison in 1947, although his body was never recovered.

For decades, his family and loved ones, as well as experts around the world, rejected the official Soviet version of his death.

A Swedish-Russian working group claimed in a 2001 report that he was kept alive in Soviet prisons as a possible bargaining chip with the West, even though there was no hard evidence to support that suggestion.

Reported sightings in Soviet prisons over the years fuelled rumours that he could still be alive.

Wallenberg would be 96 years old now.

In the months that preceded his abduction, the young Swedish diplomat, succeeded with a great deal of resourcefulness and courage, to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi monster.

More than six decades went by and yet, Wallenberg’s legacy is more relevant than ever before. Fanatic and totalitarian ideologies call upon our destruction, very much like the days which preceded WWII.

The volunteers of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which I established together with my late friend, the US congressman Tom Lantos, relentlessly work days and nights to preserve the deeds of Wallenberg and of the thousands of people who risked their lives in order to save the Jews during the Holocaust.

At the same time, we continue our activities before the Russian authorities with the aim of securing clear answers regarding the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.

Baruch Tenembaum
Founder
The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation

Raoul should, of course, already have inherited part of his grandfather Gustaf Wallenberg’s estate. Gustaf Wallenberg was by all accounts a very capable and enterprising businessman. As head of the Wallenberg Rederi in the late 1890s, he had been instrumental in instituting the Sassnitz-Trelleborg ferry line. He later played a key role in the development of Saltsjöbaden, a resort and conference center outside of Stockholm. Despite reported financial troubles in the 1930s, Gustaf left a sizable estate, valued at about SEK 1,100,000. According to Swedish Riksbank data, this sum equals an estimated $3,6 million today.

In his will Gustaf stipulated that some money be set aside for certain persons in his household and then added: ”All my other belongings, with the exception of my daughters’ and grandson’s lawful share, shall become property, with full ownership rights, of my wife Annie Wallenberg, born Adelsköld.” This meant that Annie would receive about 75% of the total estate, while Raoul and Gustaf’s daughters, Nita Wallenberg and Karin Falkman, together could claim 25%. In the will, Raoul Wallenberg took the place of his father, Raoul Oscar, Gustaf and Annie’s son, who had died in 1912.

The main repository of Gustaf’s wealth lay in an impressive stock portfolio. Its core consisted of 90 shares of Stockholms Enskilda Bank, valued together at SEK 396,000. (His father, A.O. Wallenberg was founder of the bank) Gustaf also had significant holdings in other Wallenberg blue chip companies, like Skandia, L.M. Ericsson, SKF, NK and Investor. Altogether, they were assessed at about SEK 900,000. In addition, he left valuable real estate and a beautiful collection of Asian artifacts, acquired during his time as Swedish Ambassador to Japan and China. His official estate inventory seriously underestimates the value of these items, plus it lists only a surprisingly small amount of cash – 2869 SEK. Most interesting for his heirs, however, the estate was almost entirely free of debt.

Gustaf stipulated that his daughter Nita should receive a sum of SEK 40,000 beyond her lawful share of his estate as compensation for the cost of the education he had afforded his grandson Raoul Wallenberg. Gustaf and Annie’s other daughter, Karin Falkman, received a valuable set of Meissen porcelain.

In 1937, inheritance tax would have been progressive but fairly low. Raoul should therefore have claimed a sizable sum from his grandfather’s will, amounting to at least SEK 70,000 (about $230,000 today). It is not clear how much he actually received from this inheritance, especially since the estate showed very little liquidity. Raoul appears as signatory to the will and should have been aware of the official inventory list. It is known that Raoul inherited at least part of his grandfather’s wine cellar, valued at about 2000 SEK and some of his furniture.[2]

When Raoul disappeared in 1945, he left at least SEK 75,000 in private assets, about ($170,000 today). [3] This made him far from rich, but certainly comfortable and not nearly as wanting for money as it has sometimes been portrayed. The sum included his furnishings (SEK 10,000), a few back salary payments from the Swedish Foreign Ministry and a set of printing machines valued at about SEK 20,0000, which were part of a small printing shop he had purchased in 1943. It is not known how much Raoul earned in his job as director of the export-import firm Mellaneuropeiska, but he had joined the firm only in 1941. Before that he had spent weeks, often months at a time in military service.

There is no evidence that Raoul received any part of his grandfather’s share portfolio. According to various experts, Gustaf’s shares could have been split up and divided among the respective heirs. An article in ”Affärsvärlden” from 2004 describes a stock portfolio currently held in Raoul Wallenberg’s name. It was then valued at SEK 2,316,000 ($301,000 in 2008 figures). Fredrik von Dardel – in his role as Raoul’s official legal representative – had established a stock portfolio in 1951, as a way to secure his son’s assets. It had an original value of SEK 80,000 ($140,000 today). It is not possible to determine whether the current portfolio includes any shares from either Gustaf or Annie’s estates or possibly Raoul’s own share purchases, or which assets flowed in or out of it.

When Gustaf’s wife Annie Wallenberg died in 1952, Raoul had already been missing in the Soviet Union for seven years. Her estate was formally valued at SEK 940,0000 (about $1,600,000 today) In 1947, Nita Wallenberg’s children (Annie’s grandchildren) had received a SEK 180,000 advance on their inheritance. Annie’s will clearly states that this sum should be subtracted from Nita’s share of Annie’ estate. The only other two heirs were Karin Falkman – who forfeited her rights of inheritance to her own children and grandchildren (with the exception of SEK 90,000) – and Raoul Wallenberg.

Like her husband Gustaf, Annie owned an impressive stock portfolio, valuable jewelry and Far Eastern art. Raoul’s share of her estate should have been around SEK 400,000 (worth around $650,000 today.) Invested over a period of fifty-six years, such a sum would be worth in 2008 at least $5 million today. Annie’s will made no mention of Raoul’s special circumstances after 1945.[4]

The haggling over the will caused considerable tensions between the von Dardels and Annie Wallenberg’s family, although there were strenuous efforts from both sides to remain on a cordial footing. Annie’s family offered to set aside some of the income generated by Annie’s estate for at least a time of five years to help with expenses in the search for Raoul – if the settlement of the will was allowed to proceed. The family assured Fredrik that Raoul would receive his rightful share if he did in fact return.

As time went on, the main question centered on whether or not Raoul should be declared dead. In a formal statement to Södertörns Domsagas Häradsrätt in 1968, Annie’s heirs stressed that it was certainly their concern as well to ensure that ”future information about Raoul Wallenberg’s fate should not be jeopardized for economic reasons”. Still, Fredrik von Dardel and Raoul’s mother, Maj, faced a very difficult situation. If Raoul were to have been formally declared dead, it could have indirectly preserved his claim to his grandmother’s estate. Annie’s family considered this a preferable solution, because – as they saw it – if Raoul came back, a false declaration of death could be overturned and any share of his inheritance would have to be returned by the other heirs.

Fredrik, on the other hand, argued that even more was at stake: As he outlined in several letters, if one followed the time proscribed by Swedish law necessary before a person could be declared dead, this would push the official date of such a declaration in Raoul’s case to 1955 – three years after Annie Wallenberg’s death in 1952. Under Swedish law, Fredrik concluded, Raoul’s share of his grandmother’s estate should not fall to Annie’s family, but to Raoul or his own heirs, provided the declaration of death was executed. If, on the other hand, the ‘preskriptionstid’ simply ran out, Raoul would forfeit his claim altogether.

For Fredrik and Maj, a formal declaration of death was absolutely out of the question — the symbolic weight of such a step would have undercut any ongoing efforts to establish their son’s fate. From the von Dardels’ perspective, everything therefore hinged on the good will of Annie’s heirs. Fredrik succeeded in having the ‘preskriptionstid’ extended again and again until 1972, when the courts and ultimately the government (Swedish Justice Department) finally ruled against his appeals.

In Fredrik’s eyes, the government’s failure to extend the ‘preskriptionstid’ amounted to a formal betrayal of his son, since it constituted official confirmation by the Swedish government that it believed the chances of Raoul Wallenberg’s survival to be slim to none. Fredrik, a trained lawyer, felt strongly that in 1972 the indications that Raoul could still be alive in the Soviet Union were at least as strong as the Soviet government’s assertion that he had died in 1947. Regardless of how this question would ultimately be settled, when in doubt, it was the law’s obligation to protect those who cannot do so themselves. As Fredrik noted in his diary on November 7, he asked the head of the Swedish Justice Department’s Legal Office, Ulf Nordenson, if ”he and his colleagues were not ashamed, to which Nordenson would not reply.”

The 1970s were undoubtedly one of the most difficult periods in the case. These years fell into the ”dead period,” the time between 1965 and 1979, when the Raoul Wallenberg question was essentially off the Swedish government’s formal agenda. It only picked up again with new witness testimonies in 1979.

In accordance with the law, Raoul’s family did not receive any share of Annie’s estate (aside from some loose property items). Annie’s family, however, promised to give Raoul Wallenberg at least part of his grandmother’s inheritance should he ever return home. [5] On April 7, 1973 they signed a formal agreement to this effect, which was notarized and carried the signatures of all of Annie’s main heirs. [6] They also stipulated that SEK 1000 a month should be aside for researcher Rudolph Philipp through his lifetime. It does not appear that they provided any additional financial assistance to Fredrik and Maj von Dardel. Raoul Wallenberg’s parents also apparently never received any financial help with defraying the cost of the search for Raoul from other members of the Wallenberg family . Raoul’s private funds were available to cover some research expenses, but all transactions had to be approved by the legal authority overseeing his interests, the ”Överförmyndare”, (trustee) a very tedious and time consuming process. Plus, only certain types of costs could be offset.

By 1974, the von Dardels, Maj at 83 and Fredrik at 89, saw no other options but to apply for funds from the official Wallenberg Family foundation, Knut & Alice Wallenberg Stiftelse, in order to continue the search for their son.[7] After years of bureaucratic wrangling to meet the complicated application requirements, they received a modest grant.

NOTES

1. Thank you to Dagmar Thullberg and her staff at Stockholm Stadsarkiv for obtaining the records
2. The document showing how exactly Gustaf’s will was divided, the so-called ”Arvskifte”, was apparently not finalized until early January 1947. This is not unusual. Heirs have great discretion in the division of the inheritance. The ”Arvskifte” must be on file with both the executors of the will (SEB Notariatavdelning) and the respective heirs. In Raoul Wallenberg’s case, if the ‘Arvskifte’ was not formalised until 1947, Fredrik von Dardel as ”godman” would have received a copy. Release of the documentation today requires the consent of the next-of-kin. A formal request for the papers is currently pending.
3. Raoul also left official funds from his mission to Budapest, in both Sweden and Switzerland. (This included in January 1945 SEK 63,287 in S.E.B. and Sfr 107,239.53 in Schweizerischer Bankverein) Much of this money was later used to settle claims from individuals who had aided Wallenberg in his humanitarian activities, other parts helped with early expenses of the search for him. The sums are distinctly separate from his private assets.
4. The document of ”Arvskifte” for Annie Wallenberg’s estate was not formalized until June 1957
5. There does exist a purely academic question of what would happen if Raoul Wallenberg were formally declared dead today, i.e. whether this would – according to Fredrik von Dardel’s reasoning – at least in theory maintain Raoul Wallenberg’s claim to his share of Annie Wallenberg’s estate or whether the fact of the expired ‘preskriptionstid’ would trump all such considerations.
6. Raoul’s share at the time was valued at SEK 1,767,000. In 1973, this was equal to roughly $200,000; equivalent to about $1,2 million today).
7. They were assisted in this effort by Otto Danielsson, retired Chief Inspector with the Swedish Security Police (SÄPO) and Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna, the former Private Secretary to the King of Sweden.

(All calculations according to www.historia.se [prisomräknare]; legal consultants: Advokatfirman Sjölund AB, Lund and Aldéns Advokatbyrå AB, Jönköping)

A pampered son of the Swedish upper class, he was a diplomat from a neutral country who saved the lives of an estimated 100,000 Hungarian Jews at the end of World War II.

He’s one of only two people in history to be given honorary U.S. citizenship. (The other was Winston Churchill.)

More than once, he physically removed imprisoned Jews from railroad cars bound for death camps.

”He bluffed his way through,” a friend later recalled. ”His only authority was his own courage.”

He went toe-to-toe with Adolf Eichmann and won the day. But he lost his final confrontation with Josef Stalin’s mass-murderous ways. He’s believed – though it’s not certain – to have died in a Soviet prison camp two years after the end of the war.

And, as everyone knows, Oct. 5 is the official designated day when New Yorkers will honor and remember Raoul Wallenberg.

Raoul who? you say. You, and practically everybody else.

The quiet man who saved so many is a hero to a few who know the dangers of forgetting.

Baruch Tenembaum founded the not-for-profit Raoul Wallenberg Foundation in 1997 out of an abiding awareness that heroes like Wallenberg must not be forgotten.

Tenembaum has made the rounds of the state’s highest educational and political offices and found the discouraging answer to his own question: Is anything being done in New York to turn this day into something meaningful?

The answer is no.

Raoul Wallenberg Day isn’t part of the ludicrous, lobbyist-induced legislative practice of naming, say, the first Tuesday of June Upstate New York Cheddar Cheese Day. It’s a serious proclamation reserved to recognize worthy ”person[s], group ideal, or goal.” Pearl Harbor Day is the only such commemorative day of which you’re likely to know. Other such official days include Korean War Veterans’ Day, Workers’ Day and New Netherland Day.

No one has a satisfactory answer why Wallenberg has been so easy to forget. Tenembaum calls it ”a fascinating and sad topic.”

Another Wallenberg Foundation member, Daniela Bajar, said the group had better luck in bringing programs about Wallenberg to a dozen individual schools in the New York metropolitan region.

Michelle Tuchmann of the Ulster County Jewish Federation remembers Wallenberg. Last year Tuchmann was instrumental in making sure a former Kingston man, Laszlo Ocskay, received local recognition for saving 2,300 Hungarian Jews from German death camps.

She finds it fitting that Raoul Wallenberg Day should fall during Sukkot, a time reserved on the Jewish calendar for celebration and reflection.

There are those who hold that Wallenberg didn’t die in a Soviet labor camp. As recently as 2001, Sweden’s prime minister declared, ”It cannot be said [Wallenberg] is dead,” because no conclusive evidence of his fate has ever been found.

On Aug. 4, Raoul Wallenberg would have celebrated his 92nd birthday.

Mr. Levine was very active in spreading Raoul Wallenberg’s legacy. In 1997 the United States Postal Service issued a Raoul Wallenberg Stamp following his initiative. Original letters, as well as material from the Second day issuance ceremony were donated to the IRWF. The Foundation will add the documents to its own collection of stamps issued in Argentina, Sweden and Israel, among other countries.

Photographs and official letters related to the naming of a street after Raoul Wallenberg in Fort Collins, Colorado, are part of the documentation donated by the Levines

The donation includes a copy of the manuscript of Carl Levine’s play ”Wallenberg still lives”; original newspaper articles regarding Raoul Wallenberg’s fate; the Congressional record of November 15th 1983, which includes Tom Lantos’ speech: ”Raoul Wallenberg: Tribute to a lost Hero” and a proclamation signed by Ann Azari, Mayor of Fort Collins, declaring April 25, 1997 as Raoul Wallenberg Commemorative Stamp Day, among other documents.