Who is Raoul Wallenberg?

Background

In July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg left the quiet of neutral Sweden and went into the heart of war torn Hungary. By December, he had saved over 100,000 lives.

Born in 1912 into one of Sweden’s most prominent and wealthiest banking families, Raoul Wallenberg came to the United States as a teenager to study architecture at the University of Michigan. After graduating, he bowed to family pressure and tried his hand at banking, but he never really liked the field. During the early years of World War II, Wallenberg worked for a food export business in Stockholm. His boss at the company was a Jewish man named Kalman Lauer. It was Lauer who recommended Wallenberg when the American war refugee board was looking for a Swedish citizen to take on the mission of helping the Jews of Budapest in 1944.

The Story of the Musical

Wallenberg arrived in Hungary in early July, and immediately began to use whatever methods he could to save the Jews. When the Swedish Legation had reached the maximum number of passports it was permitted to issue, Wallenberg created Swedish protective papers known as “schutzpasses,” which had no legal validity but which managed to fool the Nazis, and served to keep thousands of Jews protected from deportation to Auschwitz. He also kept hundreds and hundreds of Jews sheltered in Swedish “safe houses,” which he bought or rented with US funds. Wallenberg even went head to head with Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi colonel in charge of carrying out the Final Solution. On more than one occasion, Wallenberg literally pulled Jews off the cattle cars, claiming them as Swedish citizens. When the Nazis needed all the trains for the war effort , Eichmann began to march the Jews on foot to the concentration camps, but Wallenberg rescued many Jews from these so-called “death marches,” as well. At one point, Eichmann ordered Wallenberg‘s assassination, but the attempt failed. When the Nazis were about to bomb the Budapest ghetto, home to the city’s remaining 70,000 Jews, it was Wallenberg who persuaded the general in charge to call off the attack.

In January 1945, the Soviets, who had just entered Budapest, abducted and imprisoned Wallenberg, in all likelihood because his mission had been funded by the United States. He was never seen again in the free world. Though the Soviet government claimed that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in prison in 1947, many former Soviet prisoners who came out of the Gulag in the following decades reported that they had seen, spent time with, even befriended Wallenberg in various prisons and institutions. The last search report was in 1981. That same year, President Ronald Reagan made Wallenberg an honorary US citizen.

Wallenberg is credited with having saved over 100,000 lives. He is truly proof that one man can make a difference.