The Wallenberg Curse

[IndianaGreen]

The late Tom Lantos was among the Jews helped by Raoul Wallenberg.

The Wallenberg Curse

The Search for the Missing Holocaust Hero Began in 1945. The Unending Quest Tore His Family Apart

By JOSHUA PRAGER


Raoul Wallenberg in 1944 in Budapest

STOCKHOLM -- In neat script, blue ink on white letterhead, Fredrik von Dardel began writing to the stepson he had long been told to leave for dead: "Dear beloved Raoul."

It was March 24, 1956. He always wrote at his living-room table, his wife, Maria, looking on from a corner of the couch by the phone. On a chest, a spray of flowers she kept fresh stood beside a picture of her son, Raoul Wallenberg.

Mr. Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who safeguarded 20,000 Jews in Budapest in the waning months of World War II, vanished into the Soviet penal system in 1945. But the couple, then 71 and 65 years old, believed their son was alive and readied a letter for Sweden's prime minister to take to Moscow.

"We have been sustained by the hope of one day seeing you among us and again being able to kiss you and hold your hands and hear your beloved voice," his stepfather wrote in an old and elevated Swedish. "There's a room here waiting for you."

Mr. Wallenberg did not come home then, or ever. His end remains unclear. The world now knows the missing Swede as a symbol of humanitarianism -- an honorary citizen in four countries, commemorated with stamps in eight and monuments in 12, the subject of scores of films and books.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123207264405288683.html

[JDPriestly]

1. Thanks for posting this.

[MarjorieG]

2. My husband wrote a book on Wallenberg-The Conspiracy of Indifference.

You can look it up on Amazon. The US govt was playing politics with an 80s court case to not pursue forcing the Soviets to divulge.

[acmavm]

3. So, the Swiss robbed the Jewish people blind and the Swedish government

betrayed one of the most decent men of that time:

<snip>Swedish leaders also worried about offending Scandinavian principles of egalitarianism. "How could the socialist government be seen to intercede on behalf of a Wallenberg?" says Jan Lundvik, a retired Swedish ambassador who handled the Wallenberg case in recent decades.

On April 25, more than three months after Moscow had told Stockholm that Mr. Wallenberg was in its custody, Sweden responded. "It is possible that has been in some kind of accident," Swedish ambassador Staffan Söderblom told the Soviet deputy foreign minister, according to a memo in the Russian foreign ministry archives. The ambassador gave him a more brazen message in December: "It would be splendid if the mission were to be given a reply...that Wallenberg is dead."

On June 15, 1946, the ambassador reiterated this message to Joseph Stalin. The case, Stalin promised, "will be examined and solved."

<snip>

This is disgusting.

edit: the remark about the Swiss is because when I went to school, nothing even close to the truth was told about what really happened during the war. And of course, to this day, the perfidious behavior of many countries is still kept secret.

[IndianaGreen]

5. A lot of people profited from the plight of the Jews

and they were not all German, or even European.

[Cronopio]

6. Yep, victimization of the innocent is big business. Always has been.

The innocent spending their time and energy living their own lives instead of screwing other people lives over so it's a relatively low-overhead, high-short-term-profit enterprise.

The long-term cost is that the victimizers are left in a system of people that are just as soulless as they are. But most businesspeople aren't equipped for foresight.

[bertman]

4. Very sad. Perhaps not as exciting as Otto Schindler's story, but certainly as important.

Recommend.