We were There - The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation

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.
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