For the hundreds of inmates inside Moscow’s Lubyanka prison who most likely heard the sounds of the fireworks and explosions — 1,000 cannons shot 1,000 times — this moment no doubt stirred a wide range of emotions. Lubyanka housed many top generals and officials of the defeated Nazi regime, some sharing cells with former resistance fighters, including a 32-year-old Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg.

Upon learning the news, the young Swede must have felt hopeful that for him the end of the war also signaled  the end of his ordeal. After having saved thousands of Jews from certain death in wartime Budapest, Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet military counterintelligence in January 1945. Yet many details of his imprisonment and final fate have never been revealed.

Sweden declared 2012, the 100th anniversary of his birth, as the official Wallenberg year, dedicated to celebrating his creativity, stamina and courage in saving Hungarian Jews. But in terms of establishing the full circumstances of Wallenberg’s disappearance in the Soviet Union, the 2012 commemoration was a resounding disappointment.

For a variety of reasons, the Swedish organizers decided to focus attention entirely on highlighting Wallenberg’s legacy, excluding almost completely the question of his fate. As a result, many observers feel that Sweden once again missed a golden opportunity to press the Russian authorities for answers. The approach was also troubling because it signaled that Sweden no longer considers solving the Wallenberg mystery important.

Just as perplexing is that Swedish officials continue to emphasize all the obstacles that  stand in the way of clarifying Wallenberg’s fate instead of energetically pursuing the many options that are available to investigators. Unfortunately, this position plays directly into the hands of President Vladimir Putin, who still shows only a limited willingness to properly reckon with the Soviet past.

As historian Nikita Petrov argued in an April 12  article in Novaya Gazeta, the Kremlin’s  restrictive approach to reviewing the crimes of Stalin’s regime is deeply troubling since it appears closely linked to Putin’s broader political aim of strengthening the state’s power.

According to Petrov, the fact that Russia still refuses to present complete information about sensitive issues, like the Katyn massacre in which thousands of Polish officers were slaughtered in 1940 on Josef Stalin’s orders, raises serious concerns about Russia’s political maturity and its political future.

The official attitude to the Katyn question and similarly complex historical issues, such as the Wallenberg case, serves as an important indicator of the health of Russian civil society overall.

It will be interesting to see if Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt presses his Russian counterparts on the ruling issued recently by the Russian Constitutional Court in another sensitive case, namely to allow Petrov to review collections of the Soviet intelligence operations in post-war Germany from 1948-53.

The Constitutional Court agreed with Petrov’s argument that the term of secrecy for these records has expired. This decision sets an important precedent for similar requests, including those currently pending in the Wallenberg case.

Swedish diplomats say they remain interested in thoroughly investigating all aspects of the Wallenberg question, including reasons for his arrest, but so far they have not lobbied for access to the archives of Soviet security  and intelligence agencies that could shed light on the matter.

They have not firmly protested the fact that Russian archivists have withheld key documentation in the Wallenberg case, such as records from Lubyanka prison from late July 1947 that could verify if Wallenberg was held there as “Prisoner No. 7.”  Similarly, Swedish officials have ignored several false claims made by representatives of the Federal Security Service archives, including the spurious statement that no investigative file was ever created for Wallenberg, which is patently untrue.

Discovering the full  truth about Wallenberg’s disappearance requires bold, carefully targeted action, just like the rescue of the Jews of Budapest. But Sweden can’t seem to muster the same level of courage and determination regarding the Wallenberg file. Unfortunately, both Sweden and Russia consider the current status quo in the Wallenberg investigation acceptable and perhaps even preferable because of the many problematic revelations a complete resolution  of the case could produce.

For instance,  what exactly did Wallenberg’s diplomatic colleagues tell Soviet officials about him in the spring of 1945, when they believed that Wallenberg had died in Budapest? Why were they allowed to return home while Wallenberg was not?

Key questions also remain about Wallenberg’s prominent relatives, the Wallenberg bankers, especially their business relations with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II and beyond. These ties appear to be connected with the mystery of Wallenberg’s disappearance

The Swedish government and its international partners should find the courage to use the  Wallenberg case as an important test case for democratic values in Russia. The West needs to draw a line in the sand, just as a young  Swede once did in Nazi-controlled Hungary. Such a step would commemorate Wallenberg’s legacy better than any monument or celebration and could lead to an important affirmation of democratic principles for all Russians fighting for civil liberties and human rights in their country today.

One evening last fall in the Parliament Hill office of a Canadian senator, a group of influential Canadians met with a controversial Russian oligarch bearing an intriguing offer: to help reveal the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat hailed as a hero for saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, before he disappeared in Soviet custody.

Two bodyguards stood outside Conservative Senator Linda Frum’s office watching over Vitaly Malkin, founder of a private national bank, once listed as one of the world’s wealthiest people and a member of the Russian senate.

Inside, Mr. Malkin and Ms. Frum were joined by Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler, who brought with him Mr. Wallenberg’s niece, Louise von Dardel. Charles Wagner, Mr. Malkin’s Toronto lawyer, and Moshe Ronen, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, were also there, all of them looking to Mr. Malkin to pry the Wallenberg secret from KGB archives.

Despite a whiff of Hollywood thriller about the after-hours gathering, it likely seemed entirely normal to Mr. Malkin, whose life is writ against a backdrop of international intrigue, precipitous geopolitics, high-level access and massive financial deals.

For 20 years, Mr. Malkin has eyed Canada, applying to live here and seek citizenship, investing millions in Toronto real estate.

Immigration rejection, RCMP probes, secret notations about him with Canada’s spy agency, accusations of organized crime ties, court battles with the government and lawsuits with former business partners have been his reward.

His November visit can be seen as something of a triumph, as it meant overcoming a 19-year ban on entering Canada for alleged involvement in organized crime, an accusation he steadfastly fought as unfair and baseless. Mr. Malkin, never charged with a crime, says he is a victim of Western prejudice against Russia’s business elites, with an assumption that their wealth comes from mobsters or corruption.

However, Mr. Malkin also found that not everything about his past was forgotten when he again crossed the Canadian border.

This summer he raised international ire when he led a delegation to Washington to defend Moscow against accusations of human-rights abuses in the 2009 death of Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky, which has become a global cause célèbre and a source of significant diplomatic friction between the U.S. and the Kremlin.

It all left Mr. Cotler and Ms. Frum telling the National Post they regret the meeting with Mr. Malkin, with Mr. Cotler now wondering if, by offering help on the Wallenberg mystery, Mr. Malkin: “felt this was a way to perhaps sanitize his reputation.”

On Nov. 21, 2012, Mr. Cotler was hosting Ms. von Dardel, Mr. Wallenberg’s niece, during her visit to Ottawa. They shared a stage that evening with Jason Kenney, the immigration minister, at the opening of a Wallenberg exhibit at the Canadian War Museum. Wallenberg — who issued bogus Swedish passports to protect an estimated 100,000 Jews in Hungary from Nazi death camps — was arrested in 1945 by the invading Red Army and disappeared. He is presumed to have died in Soviet custody; how, when and why remains a mystery, but his legacy is celebrated as much in Canada as anywhere: He was named Canada’s first honorary citizen in 1985 and, in January, Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honour.

“I don’t really know very much about him,” Ms. Frum said, when asked about the meeting with Mr. Malkin. “I simply took at face value that he was a member of the Russian legislature and therefore potentially somebody of influence and potentially somebody who could help solve this important Jewish mystery, this moral mystery that is of great emotional significance.”

Added Mr. Cotler: “[Mr. Malkin] said that sometimes people go through official channels and don’t get anywhere but he had — quote — ‘informal’ channels that he could go through and that he believed that he could, in fact, get us some information with respect to Wallenberg.”

For his part, Mr. Malkin declined to divulge details about the meeting. “I did indeed have a discussion about Raoul Wallenberg — but the sensitive nature of the case precludes me from offering any additional details,” Mr. Malkin said in an e-mail interview.

It wasn’t until afterwards that Mr. Cotler and Ms. Frum learned more about the friendly Russian senator, they both said.

Mr. Cotler said it became clear that “I didn’t want to have anything further to do with him.” Ms. Frum said it was “wrong to seek help down this avenue.” Mr. Ronen said he is just looking to solve the Wallenberg mystery and has no involvement in political concerns. Mr. Wagner declined to discuss it. Later, Ms. Frum added: “If Russia were an exemplary democracy, these files would have been opened long ago. But those of us who want truth in the Wallenberg matter must deal with Russia as it is, not as we would like it to be.”

By Stas Holodnak

Sixty-six years after his disappearance, Israel has a moral obligation to find out why the Swedish diplomat was detained and what really happened to him.

January 17, 2011 marks 66 years since a historic injustice was done to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a man designated by Israel as a Righteous among the Nations.

The Russian government maintains that Soviet troops, who liberated Hungary from Nazi Germany, detained and then transferred Wallenberg to the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in 1945. The Russians claim further that Wallenberg was executed in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD in Moscow, in 1947. The Kremlin, however, does not offer any proof of this. The account of his execution is based entirely on hearsay. What’s more, several former prisoners in the gulag claimed to have met Wallenberg years after 1947. If alive, Wallenberg would now be 98.

Wallenberg is famous for saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from extermination. He was a diplomat but his methods were the opposite of diplomacy. Inside Nazi-occupied Hungary, Wallenberg ran an enterprise that distributed Swedish schutz-pass – a document that protected its bearers from Nazi detention – and harbored Jews in buildings marked as a Swedish territory.

He accomplished the unimaginable by befriending, bribing and threatening Gestapo and Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi Party) bosses with inevitable prosecution, promising to put a good word for them. “The Wallenberg Effect,” an article in The Journal of Leadership Studies, cites Sandor Ardai, one of Wallenberg’s drivers, who recalled how he intercepted a trainload of Jews about to leave for Auschwitz: “He climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colors. I don’t remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it.”

WHAT WALLENBERG did for the Jewish people went beyond humanitarian, nonviolent resistance. This was an open war on fascism fought from within by him and his team. Then, shortly after the Red Army liberated Budapest, Wallenberg vanished forever.

The world has not forgotten Wallenberg. For decades Swedish governments quizzed the Kremlin about him.

Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi hunter, collected testimonies about him. Prof. Guy von Dardel – Raoul Wallenberg’s brother – searched for him until his final days. The efforts of Von Dardel and other researchers are documented on www.raoul-wallenberg.eu. The US and Hungary, having named public spaces in his honor, are not indifferent to the fate of their honorary citizen.

Yet there is only one nation in the whole world that has a motivation to search for Raoul Wallenberg. The only nation that tracked down Adolf Eichmann years after his crimes. The only nation that keeps sending school children on a trip to the death camps of Poland every year. The only nation that should ask itself what is more important, flying warplanes over Auschwitz half a century later, or finding a man who faced Eichmann at the height of the Holocaust? Wallenberg is just one person out of millions of other innocents, the vast majority of them Soviet citizens, whose life was destroyed by the NKVD and whose fate remains unknown. There is, however, only one more well-known case where, after 72 years, people are still looking for answers and, judging by the recent developments, they are about to receive them. This is the case of what is known as the Katyn massacre – the wipeout of Polish officer corps by the NKVD in forest of Katyn in 1939.

Progress in Wallenberg and Katyn cases comes in tidal waves caused by the gravitational pool of the Kremlin. At times, when it moved toward the West, the high tides carried in bits and pieces of shipwrecked lives onto Western shores.

• 1989 – The Soviets returned Wallenberg’s personal belongings to his family, including his passport and cigarette case.

• 1990 – The first and last president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted that the NKVD had executed the Polish officers at Katyn.

• 1991 – A Swedish-Russian working group was created to search for Wallenberg.

• 1991 – After an internal investigation, the Russian government announced that Wallenberg was executed inside NKVD headquarters in 1947.

• 1991 and 1992 – Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered top secret documents about Katyn transferred to Poland.

• 2007 – A number of files pertinent to Wallenberg were turned over to the chief rabbi of Russia by the Russian government.

• 2008 – In an interview with a Polish newspaper, Vladimir Putin called Katyn a political crime.

On May 8, 2010, Russia handed over to Poland documents from the criminal case launched in the 1990s to investigate Katyn massacre.

THE PROGRESS in the Wallenberg case is impossible without Putin’s direct intervention and today, more than ever before, Israel has a very good chance to get it. Twenty years ago, when 15 Soviet republics turned into 15 independent countries, no analyst would have predicted that today Russians wouldn’t need visas to visit Israel, that a Russian army would procure Israeli arms and that Russia would show more understanding for Israel’s selfdefense than some countries in Western Europe. Annual trade between Russia and Israel stands in billions of dollars from just a few millions in 1991. This vodka glass is only half full but, undisputedly, the Kremlin no longer treats Israel as a hostile proxy of the US.

Russian-Israeli ties are supported by Putin whose views are somewhat surprisingly more pro-Israel than those seen at a Russian grassroots level. Unlike his predecessor, Putin also enjoys full control of Russian Security Service (FSB), the ultimate successor to the NKVD. If Putin decides to help Israel, the search for Raoul Wallenberg, just like in Katyn case, can finally go beyond lip service.

Israel has a moral obligation to find out why Wallenberg was detained and what really happened thereafter.

This is an opportunity for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who purportedly has good relations with the Kremlin, to use his native Russian to bring a closure to the Wallenberg family and to the millions of people who care about Raoul Wallenberg. Unfortunately, Russian anti-Semitism, though officially suppressed, is still in the mainstream. Factors like the economic downturn in Russia may also affect the Kremlin’s attitude toward Israel.

As the abrupt deterioration of Israeli-Turkish ties indicates, relations like these can’t be taken for granted.

Today, at the peak of the high tide, the Jewish state can issue an Israeli schutz-pass for Raoul Wallenberg.

The writer, originally from the former Soviet Union, now lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

Our Worldwide campaign of ”100,000 names for 100,000 lives” has reached the first 10,000 signatures.

After six decades of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation launched a worldwide campaign to collect 100,000 signatures, as many as the lives saved by the ”Hero without a grave”. The signatures will be presented to the United Nations to urge the solution of one of the most controversial and unresolved cases of modern history.

Baruch Tenembaum
Founder

Mr. Vinogradov’s statement, coming after a ten-year study on the fate of Mr. Wallenberg, was supposed to give closure to the mystery behind the Swedish diplomat who has become a legendary figure for having saved the lives of many thousands of Jews from deportation during the Second World War. Soviet troops arrested Mr. Wallenberg in 1945, and while Soviet officials claimed he had later died of a heart attack, firm, substantiating evidence has, despite the report, not been found. The fact that the Wallenberg Case may be closed for some Russian researchers, many are still not satisfied enough to call closure to the debate.

Researchers, even Swedish members of the commission investigating the Case, are still skeptical about how Mr. Wallenberg spent his final days.

The mysterious and tragic fate of the Swedish diplomat has symbolic and real value for many. Although Mr. Wallenberg shines out in the public eye, there are still other Hungarian individuals, organizations, religious officials, and diplomatic bodies that also participated in life-saving activities during the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944. The stories of the handful of like-minded heroes, now lying in the shadows of the Wallenberg mystery, have remained unsung.

Mr. Wallenberg is classified among the select few who undertook impassioned life-saving activities during those turbulent years.Szabolcs Szita, professor of history and director of the Hungarian Auschwitz Foundation’s Holocaust Documentation Center, refutes the popular notion of creating a de facto pecking order, among wartime heroes. As some religious Jews would say, ”Whosoever saves a soul for mankind, saves the entire world.”

Other, perhaps lesser known heroes of the War include Papal Nunciate Angelo Rotta, Friedrich Born of the International Red Cross, and the Swiss diplomat, Carl Lutz. Spurred on by moral conviction, all of these individuals by far surpassed their official spheres of responsibility.

At the time of Mr. Wallenberg’s arrival in Budapest, most of the Jews from the countryside had already been deported. Mr. Wallenberg’s original assignment called for the issuing of exit passes for 250 individuals. It was only later, however, after understanding the gravity of the situation, was he able to convince authorities to accept the distribution of some 5000 additional so-called ”Schutzpasses”, or travel documents. These represented merely a third of the number of those distributed among persons under his, or Swedish, protection. While there was no basis in international law for the validity of these travel documents, somehow they were respected by dull-witted Nazi collaborators.

The Swedish Schutzpass differed from the rescue documents issued by other embassies earlier in the War. It is even believed that Mr. Wallenberg had actually designed the document himself. After 15 October, 1944, the collaborative Arrow Cross-Nazi government took control, and the conflict intensified in Budapest. It was at this time that Mr. Wallenberg, on his own, decided to remain in Hungary despite the fact that his mission had expired earlier in September. The young and robust Swedish diplomat continued to circulate in public, at a time when doing just that was highly dangerous. With his self-assured demeanor he rescued individuals under almost impossible circumstances. It was his charisma, personal conviction and courage that helped him establish an elaborate network of Hungarian collaborators. In peoples minds, it is these actions that have distinguished Mr. Wallenberg from other rescuers. And it is these qualities that have contributed to the myth that has surrounded his life and story.

Upon his capture by the Soviets, Mr. Wallenberg was accused of espionage. This allegation may have been simply out of routine, as the Soviets accused many foreigners of collaboration. Many of these people were subsequently deported, including Mr. Wallenberg. Paul A. Levine, professor of history at the Swedish University of Uppsala, questions the paradoxical role played by Regent Horthy, who on July 7, 1944 ordered a stop to deportation when he finally realized Adolf Eichmann’s mission of destruction. It was also under his leadership that Hungary’s Jews were deported from the countryside. In this context Mr. Levin asks how to weigh the act of ‘heroism’ of Regent Horthy in de facto saving the lives of a good deal of the Jewry of Budapest, with the life-saving work of Mr. Wallenberg? ”Mr. Wallenbergs deeds and human dimensions have become distorted by time,” Mr. Levin concludes, ”and his story has been enshrouded in myth since his arrest in 1945 by the Soviets.”

Mr. Levin, who has been researching the Wallenberg story for the past decade, claims that Mr. Wallenbergs’ feats have been glorified with the passing of time. And such myth-making, he claims, can obstruct the moral importance of his mission, and its historic example. It is, therefore, important to nurture, without exception, the memories of all those who stood their ground during the bloody eras of both Nazism and Communism.

Wallenberg commission ends divided

A joint commission consisting of Russian and Swedish experts set up to investigate the fate of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg concluded in division in mid-January, after ten years of research on the mystery surrounding the diplomat. While the Russian representatives concluded that it was probable that Mr. Wallenberg was dead by 1947, Swedish researchers have maintained that the central mystery of Wallenberg’s death has remained unsolved.

”We feel that there is no reliable document concerning his death,” said Ambassador Jan Lundvik of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, also a member of the Commission, ”and we feel that there is no conclusive evidence that he actually died in 1947. On the other hand, there are a number of witness stories that he has been alive later. While these stories have not yet been proven, they have not been disproved.”

Mr. Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet troops in 1945. Russian officials now maintain that he died of a heart attack in 1947. Swedish panel members suspect that the diplomat may have died a violent death while a prisoner, yet they will continue to research reports by some who claim to have seen Wallenberg alive as late as the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet, the full truth about Wallenberg’s own fate remains unknown.

The international community, and most especially the American government, must redouble their efforts to establish the facts of what happened to him. Additional pressure must be brought to bear against Russia to open all archives related to his case, even if it means unleashing embarrassing secrets of the Soviet era – or more recent secrets, and not just Russian ones.

Anyone who knows Wallenberg’s story is aware that humanity owes him a huge debt; when so many others were less courageous or even complicit in the evil of their time, he chose to risk his privileged life in order to help friends and strangers alike.

The scion of a prominent Swedish family, Wallenberg was sought out by the U.S. War Refugee Board in Stockholm for a dangerous task: to rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews. At age 32 he was appointed secretary of the Swedish legation in Hungary, which received financial help from the United States and guidance from the War Refugee Board under the supervision of the American secretary of state.

The Nazis had already deported more than 400,000 Hungarian Jewish men, women and children to the camps. Only about 230,000 Jews were left in Budapest. Wallenberg set out at once to save them through courage, ingenuity, diligence and bluff. He devised creative and effective solutions, such as protective Swedish passes bearing official signatures and safe houses flying the Swedish flag, and he employed traditional techniques in use at the time, including threats and bribes. Wallenberg spared tens of thousands of people from deportation and death marches while Nazi power was at its peak, and many more from an all-out massacre as the desperate Germans withdrew toward the war’s end.

But Soviet military authorities arrested Wallenberg in January 1945, in violation of international law. Three months later, American Secretary of State Edward Stettinus instructed the American ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, to offer help on Wallenberg’s behalf to Sweden’s ambassador, who reportedly rebuffed the offer. This response was enough to signal to the United States that little could be done to help Wallenberg, even though it was known at the highest level of the State Department that his life could be in danger.

However, members of Congress continued to press Wallenberg’s case. In 1947, the prominent chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, appealed directly to Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson to intervene, but Acheson refused.

The State Department’s official position appears to have remained unchanged for decades. In 1973, 28 years after Wallenberg was taken into Russian custody, his ailing mother wrote to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pleading with him to seek information about her son from the Kremlin. The State Department’s European Bureau strongly supported her request, but for reasons that have never been adequately explained, Kissinger did not.

Meanwhile, congressional efforts to shine a spotlight on Wallenberg’s situation continued sporadically. As a new member of the House of Representatives in 1981, the first bill I introduced was to grant Wallenberg honorary American citizenship. At the time, only one other person had been made an honorary American citizen, Sir Winston Churchill. The legislation sped through Congress, and President Reagan signed it into law in the Rose Garden that fall.

Some of us in Congress continued to press the Russians through the years, using the vehicle of Wallenberg’s honorary citizenship. Unfortunately, our progress in solving this mystery has been minimal.

Today we know next to nothing about the ultimate fate of perhaps the greatest hero of the Holocaust era. Only two years ago, Sweden’s prime minister announced that ”it cannot be said” that Wallenberg ”is dead.”

Indeed, with the release of a detailed Swedish Foreign Office study, Prime Minister Goran Persson concluded ”there is no evidence of what happened” to Wallenberg. The report noted that the Swedish government had failed to take opportunities, particularly in the latter half of the 1940s, to obtain Wallenberg’s release.

And in March of this year, a top-level Swedish investigatory body, the Eliasson Commission, added little to the prime minister’s remarks but was even sharper in chastising the Swedish Foreign Ministry for its initial ”palpable lack of interest” in the Wallenberg case. Also criticized was the American failure at the beginning to assure ”a high degree of responsibility” in providing for Wallenberg’s security.

The Kremlin may insist today that Wallenberg was executed in the Lubyanka prison in July 1947, but it has offered no real proof, no documentation and no evidence to validate that claim. As early as the fall of 1991, Russia’s top archivist bitterly and publicly complained that the KGB had deliberately classified various documents of the Wallenberg case as ”operational intelligence” and, therewith, closed them to public scrutiny.

The Eliasson Commission called upon the Kremlin to release ”all the relevant material” about the Wallenberg case. In the final analysis, it said, responsibility for ascertaining ”the entire truth” about Wallenberg rests ”with the leadership of Russia.” Geopolitics would suggest that only the United States can offer the leverage to move that leadership.

October 5 not only marks the anniversary of the law making Wallenberg an honorary American citizen; it also happens to be the date that the cornerstone of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was laid at 100 Wallenberg Place in Washington.

Many honors have been given, and will continue to be given, to preserve the memory of Wallenberg’s achievements. Next month, he will be made an honorary citizen of Budapest. Such honors are helpful in educating the world about Wallenberg’s selfless and courageous work.

But that is not enough. The United States must pressure Russia to open all of its Wallenberg archives so the fate of this remarkable honorary citizen, who worked closely with this country in a time of international crisis but was evidently left stranded when he needed help most, can finally be learned.

* California Rep. Tom Lantos is the senior Democrat on the House International Relations Committee.

We noted with satisfaction your April 22 article on the Wallenberg family, in particular your reference to Raoul Wallenberg, to whose memory and work this foundation pays tribute. We would like to point out that, in fact, Raoul Wallenberg disappeared on Jan. 17, 1945, after the fall of Budapest to the Red Army and has never been seen again.

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation was founded in 1997, bringing together the numerous associations working to establish his whereabouts.

Today the IRWF carries out an international campaign aimed both at clarifying the circumstances of his disappearance and promoting the values of solidarity and courage demonstrated by this ”Hero Without a Grave” during his heroic mission in Hungary, in which he was personally responsible for saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jews and other persecuted people.

Baruch Tenembaum
Founder
International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation
New York

Copyright © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

On January 13, 1945, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, accompanied only by his chauffeur, left his legation in Budapest for a meeting with officers of the advancing Soviet army, which was then in the process of ”liberating” the city from the pro-Nazi government. Wallenberg’s apparent purpose in seeking out the Soviets was to ensure the protection of Jews and their property in Budapest, and to make security arrangements for members of his legation. Wallenberg was not a career diplomat. He was a businessman with experience in Hungary who had, on the initiative of American officials, been appointed to work in Budapest as an employee of the War Refugee Board (WRB), an agency established by President Franklin Roosevelt for the purpose of rescuing Jews from the Nazis. To assist Wallenberg, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided him with a diplomatic passport and the rank of legation secretary at the Swedish legation. From July 9, 1944, the date of his arrival in Budapest, to the following December, Wallenberg saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to death camps, both by issuing them ”protective passports” (documents which gave the holder the protection of the Swedish legation) and in some cases by negotiating directly with the Nazis for their freedom in exchange for money.

• Raoul Wallenberg: Report of the Swedish-Russian Working Group
  Stockholm: Swedish Ministryfor Foreign Affairs, 206 pp.
• Report on the Activities of the Russian-Swedish Working Group for Determining the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg (1991-2000)
  Moscow: Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 37 pp.
• Reports by the Independent Consultants to the Swedish-Russian Working Group on the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg, January 12, 2001:
• Liquidatsia: The Question of Raoul Wallenberg’s Death or Disappearance in 1947
  by Susan Ellen Mesinai
  48 pp.
• Cell Occupancy Analysis of Korpus 2 of the Vladimir Prison: An Examination of the Consistency of Eyewitness Sightings of Raoul Wallenberg with Prisoner Registration Cards from the Prison Kartoteka
  by Marvin W. Makinen and Ari D. Kaplan
  63 pp.
• Swedish Aspects of the Raoul Wallenberg Case
  by Susanne Berger
  63 pp.