PARIS (EJP)— A Paris street has been named after Raoul Wallenberg, almost sixty-two years after the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews during WWII disappeared in Budapest.
In 1966, Wallenberg was honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a ”Righteous Gentile” for saving over 35,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi deportation to the death camps.
The official French Jewish institutions were unrepresented at the Paris ceremony held Saturday morning, attended by Sweden’s ambassador to France.
Dingy
The ”Rue Raoul Wallenberg” in Paris’s 19th district, runs along a short stretch of dingy tenements leading into the ring road expressway at the very edge of the French capital.
The plaque on the site reads: ”Rue Raoul Wallenberg. A Swedish Diplomat born in 1912, disappeared in 1945 into the Soviet Union. A Just Among the Nations.”
Born in 1912, Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews at the end of WWII in Budapest by providing Swedish ”protection passports” which allowed them to be considered as Swedish citizens.
Some sources have said he saved the lives of up to 100,000 people.
A diplomat at the Swedish mission in Hungary, Wallenberg disappeared in January 1945 when he was about to meet with Soviet officials. He is said to have died in a Soviet prison or camp.
