The medal shows a profile of Raoul Wallenberg embossed on a rough texture with the legend ”The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation” on the front side and the legends ”A Hero without a Grave”, -this expression was created by Prof. Yoav Tenembaum, who titled an article about the Swedish heroe under that phrase-, ”90th Anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s birthday, 4 August 1912 -?” and ”New York, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires” on the obverse side.

The medal was specially designed by the Minces Silversmith Studio.

It is presented with a certificate, which says:

To mark Raoul Wallenberg’s 90th birthday The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation has specially commissioned and minted a Commemorative Medal.

The Medal is presented to personalities coming from all walks of life and of all social, religious and racial backgrounds who have demonstrated through their work an unwavering commitment to upholding the humanitarian values which Raoul Wallenberg stands for.

Raoul Wallenberg’s extraordinary rescue actions on behalf of thousands of people, mainly Jews, whom he saved from a certain death at the hands of the Nazis and their allies in Budapest during the Second World War and his later kidnapping and disappearance by Soviet troops, have converted him in one of the truly outstanding heroes of modern times.

Organised by the local branch of the IRWF the Mass was celebrated by Father Horacio Moreno, president of Casa Argentina en Jerusalem, parent organisation of the IRWF.

During the service Father Moreno recalled the work of the Swedish diplomat and led the congregation – which included people saved by Wallenberg, Israeli, US, Swedish, German and European Union diplomats as well as representatives of the main Jewish organisations and temples of Argentina – in prayers in remembrance of Wallenberg.

As part of the service IRWF members Jose Ignacio Garcia Hamilton and Nicholas Tozer, – winners of the Foundation’ s 2002 Sousa Mendes Prize- read out the biography of the Swedish diplomat and the lessons during the Mass respectively.

Following the service Father Moreno and the congregation gathered at the Memorial Mural within the Cathedral. The Mural donated by the IRWF in 1997 is in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust and the terrorist attacks on the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Jewish Centre of Argentina.

New York, August 7, 2002 – The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation was invited by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to a meeting specially held on Sunday August 4, the day of the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

During the meeting, that took place at the Secretary’s General residence in New York, Baruch Tenembaum, founder of the IRWF presented a Commemorative Medal specially commissioned and coined to mark the anniversary. Mrs Nane Annan, wife of the world leader and niece of the Swedish diplomat also attended the meeting.

This is the third time Mr. Annan meets the international NGO whose mission is to convey through educational programs that highlight the values of courage and solidarity demonstrated by Wallenberg, as well as other saviors, during his six months rescue mission in Budapest between 1944 and 1945. Wallenberg saved tens of thousands of people, mostly Jewish, condemned to death by the Nazi regime. He later disappeared after being abducted by the Soviet Army on 17 January 1945. His whereabouts are still unknown.

On presenting the Medal, Tenembaum pointed out: ”As one of people Wallenberg rescued accurately pointed out, Raoul saved the lives of tens of thousands but, paradoxical as it may seem, tens of thousands could not save him’. Therefore, the Wallenberg Foundation is going to mobilise 100,000 people all around the globe in order to know what really happened to Wallenberg, a man that is alive and will continue to be alive forever”.

Mr. Tenembaum stressed that the IRWF is committed to continue with the educational programs that it is carrying out all around the world, bringing to future generations the message of one of the true heroes of our times. The IRWF is supported by more than fifty heads of state, scholars, Nobel Prize laureates and intellectuals from the entire globe.

The IRWF has branches in New York, Jerusalem and Buenos Aires.

In turn, the UN Secretary General recalled the example given by the Swedish diplomat as a beacon to be followed by future generations.

Finally, Mrs Annan, the daughter of Wallenberg’s sister, Mrs Nina Lagergren, showed Mr Tenembaum an album of Wallenberg photographs and a book containing hundreds of letters written by the diplomat, mostly to his mother, Maj Von Dardel. In his last letter to his mother, written on December 1944, Wallenberg send his greetings to his sister Nina ”and the little girl”.

That ”little girl” is precisely Mrs Annan, now a renowned international lawyer and painter, who dedicates most of her time to UN educational and child-care programs. Mrs Annan assured Mr Tenembaum that both she and her mother are delighted with the work carried out so far by the IRWF.

PREN.ORG (ETA-0035 09.08.2002 2002.08.newsin.base64 ETA Online News)

The most moderate calculations estimate that Wallenberg saved between 40 to 50 thousand lives (even though the figure that is most often mentioned is approximately one hundred thousand). Had Argentina from 1976-1983 had somebody with half the courage this Swedish diplomat showed, the tragedy of the disappeared, which marks Argentina forever – not only in the History books but also in its memory – would not have taken place.

A paradox of life or, maybe, a foreseen end for he who fought against one of the bloodiest dictatorships in history, Wallenberg finished himself disappearing at the hands of a totalitarian regime as cruel as the one headed by Adolf Hitler.

Courage, solidarity and respect for your neighbor; those are values that never die and for whose validity we should do something, no matter how small or big, everyday. Individual freedoms are like health: they must be taken care of while they exist, because when we lose them it happens to be too late.

• The diplomat who saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis
• Homages at the UN and in Argentina
• ”Thanks to Wallenberg, I am alive”

© Copyright 1996- // Clarín.com. All rights reserved. Director: Ernestina Herrera de Noble

Ladislao Ladanyi eyes fill with tears when points to the portrait of an aristocratic looking young man with his hair plastered down and dressed in a dark suit. ”This is my savior”, he announces with solemnity and he smiles gently. Ladislao adds, ”He means my life”, as if it was necessary, and introduces the man in the picture who saved him from death in 1944: He is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued around 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis and disappeared in 1945. Today he would be 90 years old.

Ladislao, an active 81 year-old man, comes and goes from a wardrobe in his Barrio Norte apartment, full of pictures and documents, where he stores his most intimate and painful memories. Finally, he returns with a yellowish paper, written in Swedish and German, that was his passport to life. It has a picture of a young Ladislao -at that time he used the surname Loewinger -, and the indication that the bearer ”is under the protection of the Embassy of Sweden in Budapest”. In the inferior angle the signature of Wallenberg, at that time First Secretary of the diplomatic branch at the Hungarian capital, devastated by the Nazi regime, can be seen.

Wallenberg had been born into one of the most prominent families in Sweden, of several generations of bankers and statesmen. He was just 32 years old when in 1944 he was asked to lead a high-risk mission to help the Jewish community in Budapest that was under threat of extermination. The young man, who was the manager of a firm involved in to the export and import of food, accepted the challenge.

Ladislao, who in 1940, had ran away from his native Berlin to Budapest with his family, escaping from Nazism remembers that ”pressures against the Jews of Hungary began little by little.” ”Laws against Jews began to appear little by little: we could not obtain work permits, we could not go to public places, we were excluded from society and from work”.

Soon, Hitler’s plans to annihilate all the Jewish population in the territories occupied by Germany started to become real in Budapest. Hungary, that had supported Germany in its war against the Soviet Union which began in 1941, had 700,000 Jews in its territory at the beginning of 1944. Hitler ordered the occupation of Hungary in March of that year, and soon started the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the terrifying concentration camps.

Ladislao, who was 19 years old at that time, started to wander call on embassies in search of a visa to leave the country because the situation ”was desperate”. ”But all of them closed their doors”, he assures. At the Argentine delegation, on the other hand, at least he was able to leave the papers. And he suspects that somehow from that place they somehow ended up in Wallenberg’s hands. Shortly after Ladislao and his parents were confined to live in the Jewish ghetto in Budapest, crammed in rooms with seven or eight people in ”horrible” conditions, he remembers. The mass deportations had started.

It was then that the document of salvation arrived. ”It was an invention of Wallenberg”, Ladislao says. It was the yellowish paper saying that he and his family were under the protection of the King of Sweden. They left the ghetto and went to live to in a building flying the Swedish flag.

When Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, in July 1944, the Germans had already deported more than 400,000 Jews. There were only 200,000 left in the capital and it was not a matter of wasting time. The young Swede used all the means, conventional and otherwise, to save lives. He surprised everyone with the design of a protective passport, with highly visible coats of arms of the Swedish royal house (neutral during the war), with no international value, but impressive in the eyes of the German bureaucracy.

He also created the so-called ”Swedish homes” that accommodated families like Ladislao’s and in a short time these buildings with Swedish flag protected more than 15,000 Jews. When conditions were totally desperate, Wallenberg issued a rustic version of his passport, consisting of a sheet of paper bearing his signature. In the middle of the chaos, that paper was, at times, the difference between life and death.

The diplomat did not hesitate to threaten or bribe Germans so that they liberated those who had no Swedish passport. When mass deportations by train stated, there are people who saw him on the roofs of the trains handing out piles of safe-conducts to the people inside the cars (see ”Thanks…).

By the time the Soviet troops arrived in Budapest in the middle of January 1945, Wallenberg is supposed to have rescued around 100,000 Jews from death. But he could not save himself. On January 17th of that year he was last seen, under Soviet escort, with his driver on a visit -in theory- to a USSR military base in southern Budapest. He never returned.

It is not known whether he is alive or dead but the Russians themselves said that he had passed away in 1947, in a Soviet prison. The reasons why he had been arrested remain a mystery. Maybe the Russians suspected that Wallenberg was an American spy, or that maybe they did not trust the Swedish contacts with the Germans.

Today some people call him ”Hero without a grave.” But for Ladislao, Wallenberg is more than that. In Buenos Aires, where he arrived in 1948 to meet up with his sister once again, the grandfather gives a thankful look at the portrait of the young man. ”He is my God”, he mumbles about the man who saved his life.

Also available:

• Homages at the UN and in Argentina
• ”Thanks to Wallenberg, I am alive”
• ”Courage and respect are values that never die”

© Copyright 1996- // Clarín.com. All rights reserved Director: Ernestina Herrera de Noble

To all the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic communities around the world.

Next August 4th, 2002 Raoul Wallenberg’s (August 4th, 1912 -?) 90th birthday will be celebrated. Wallenberg is the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of tens of thousands of people, most of them Jewish, condemned to death by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. He disappeared after having been abducted by the Soviet Red Army in January 1945.

It is an honor for us to inform that the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Primate of Argentina, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, has decided to remember Wallenberg’s person and actions during a Mass that will be celebrated at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, Argentina´s main Catholic church, on August 4th at 11:00 AM. After the Mass Wallenberg will be remembered before the Holocaust Memorial Mural, installed inside the cathedral.

We hereby would like to propose that, as part of the Raoul Wallenberg commemorative activities, the authorities of your church, temple or mosque carry out a ceremony in celebration of the life and work of the ”Hero without a Grave”.

The values manifested by Wallenberg, as well as by other thousands, who helped other people in one of the most tragic periods in history, are everlasting and make no distinction of any kind. They are universal, ageless and dear to the millenary teachings of the three main monotheist religions.

This homage will link us in the preservation of solidarity and respect for our neighbours, remembering Wallenberg who is an emblematic example for present and future generations.

In a world which has yet to overcome the scourge of war and persecution, the example set by Wallenberg in 1944 shines as a beacon of solidarity and courage. Wallenberg, a Swedish protestant descended into the hell of wartorn Budapest, succeeded in saving the lives of up to 100,000 people. The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, set up in New York, Buenos Aires and Jerusalem to remember the life and work of this ”hero without a grave”, has among its founders a man saved by Wallenberg, US Representative Tom Lantos.

Tomorrow the world will remember Raoul Wallenberg, and in doing so will honour the memory of all those people who throughout the ages have risked their lives to save fellow human beings.