Budapest, Hungary – Government ministers from Hungary, Sweden and Israel on Tuesday launched the Raoul Wallenberg Year, commemorating the centennial of the birth of the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.
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While serving as Swedish envoy in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, from July 1944, Wallenberg gave Jews Swedish travel documents and set up safe houses for them. He is also credited with dissuading German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city’s ghetto.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi, Swedish counterpart, Carl Bildt and Israeli Cabinet member Yossi Peled were joined at the inaugural event at the National Museum in Budapest on Tuesday by members of Wallenberg’s family and Holocaust survivors he saved.
Speakers stressed Wallenberg’s heroics and the importance of passing on the lessons of the Holocaust.
“He risked his life in a struggle against one of the evil ideologies that has haunted our continent,” Bildt said. “There is a duty never to forget, always to remember. We have to pass on the knowledge of what happened during the Holocaust to generations to come.”
The Nazis, who occupied Hungary in early 1944, launched mass deportations of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps such as Auschwitz with the collaboration of local authorities.
Martonyi said the Holocaust was the “tragedy of the whole Hungarian nation.”
“During the Holocaust, the Hungarian state was weighed in the balance and found wanting … It was unable to defend its citizens and, while under occupation, assisted their deaths,” he said.
Wallenberg disappeared after being arrested in Hungary by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. The Russians have said he was executed on July 17, 1947, but unverified witness accounts and newly uncovered evidence suggest he may have lived beyond that date.
“We can’t (even) take flowers to Wallenberg’s grave,” Martonyi added. “We are still waiting for the full historical revelation of his life and death.”
Wallenberg commemorations and celebrations of his efforts in Hungary include a memorial concert on April 15, the issue of a Wallenberg postal stamp on May 10, conferences, and a September memorial event at the Dohany Street Synagogue — the largest in Europe.
I don’t believe that most Hungarians consider the Holocaust “a tragedy of the whole Hungarian nation.” In fact, there are plenty who feel that Hitler y”s should have finished his job, G-d forbid.
On the other hand, if a fraction of the Hungarians would have helped the Jews, like Wallenberg did, instead of being on the German side, the Germans could not have deported even a fraction of the Jews that they did.
May Wallenberg’s memory live on, and may we live to see that day when such heroics would not be necessary, because all of mankind will learn to live side by side, in peace.