Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust

by Bierman, John

  With all the loose ends tied up, and King Gustav’s personal approval obtained for his appointment, Wallenberg prepared to leave for Budapest. He spent two full days at the Foreign Office going through recent dispatches from the Swedish legation. What he read must have chilled his blood and filled him with a sense of compelling urgency. As he told Lauer: ‘I cannot stay in Sweden beyond the beginning of July. Every day costs human lives. I will get myself ready to travel as soon as I can.’

  The reports coming out of Budapest at this time were summarized in a telegram dated 1 July from Minister Johnson to Secretary Hull.

  Information just received from Budapest concerning treatment of Jews is so terrible that it is hard to believe and there are no words to qualify its description. Of the total number of Jews in Hungary originally, not more than 400,000 now remain and these are mostly in Budapest. The others, of whom there were well over 600,000 (this is a conservative estimate),* have either been deported to Germany to uncertain destinations or killed. According to the evidence, these people are now being killed en masse by the Germans and large numbers are being taken to a place across the Hungarian frontier in Poland, where there is an establishment at which gas is used for killing people.

  This was obviously a reference to Auschwitz, and the Johnson cable went on to give details – all too well known now, but then new and horrifying beyond belief – of how the mass gassing was being carried out.

  Johnson also reported on Wallenberg’s forthcoming mission.

  The Hungarian Jews, in spite of all their difficulties, have collected to the equivalent of 2 million Swedish crowns to be used in aiding the Jews and this has been turned over to the Swedish legation in Budapest. Wallenberg…was highly praised by Boheman,† who said that if our War Refugee Board could formulate some form of directive for him, which the Foreign Office will be glad to transmit, it would be of great help.

  There is no doubt in my mind as to the sincerity of Wallenberg’s purpose because I have talked to him myself. I was told by Wallenberg that he wanted to be able to help effectively and save lives and that he was not interested in going to Budapest merely to write reports to be sent to the Foreign Office. He himself is half-Jewish, incidentally.‡

  On 6 July 1944 Wallenberg left for Budapest via Berlin. He made the first leg of the journey by air and was met at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport by Nina, by now the wife of Gunnar Lagergren, head of the Foreign Interests Section of the Swedish legation in the German capital.* Nina recalls that Raoul was carrying his clothes and other personal belongings in a rucksack and wearing a long leather coat and an ‘Anthony Eden’ hat.

  ‘As we drove to my home I told him the minister had booked his onward journey to Budapest by train for the day after next. Raoul was angry about this, saying there was no time to waste and he must go the very next day, on the first available train.

  ‘On the way home he told me about his mission and said he had in his rucksack a list of prominent Jews, Social Democrats, and other oppositionists in Budapest whom he was to contact. I had no idea at the time that his mission would be as dangerous as it turned out to be. I assumed he would carry it out according to the usual diplomatic methods, although knowing him as I did I should have known better. But I was seven months pregnant with my first child at the time, so I suppose I wasn’t concentrating much on anything else.’

  Wallenberg and Nina reached her temporary home – the gatehouse of a castle on the Wannsee, a lake near Potsdam – just as night was falling. He, Nina, and Gunnar Lagergren talked late into the night. They had not been long in bed before the British bombers came over, as they did every night at that period, and the trio went to a nearby air-raid shelter.

  Next morning, after a largely sleepless night, Wallenberg left for the station and his train to Budapest. It was packed with German troops returning from leave, and as he had not booked a seat Wallenberg had to spend the entire journey in the corridor sitting on his rucksack. In his pocket he carried a small revolver – ‘not because I intended ever to use it,’ as he told a legation colleague later, ‘but to give myself courage.’

  Chapter 4

  The passenger train that brought Raoul Wallenberg into Budapest on 9 July 1944 quite probably crossed paths en route with the train of twenty-nine sealed cattle cars transporting the last batch of Hungary’s provincial Jews to Auschwitz. With the departure of this train the previous day, Eichmann and his associates had completed what he proudly called ‘a deportation surpassing every preceding deportation in magnitude.’ In a dispatch to Berlin, Edmund Veesenmayer, Hitler’s proconsul in Budapest, reported with characteristic precision that 437,402 Jewish men, women, and children had been shipped out aboard 148 trains between 14 May and 8 July. Now, apart from several thousand able-bodied Jewish males serving in the labour battalions of the Hungarian Army, there remained only 230,000 terrified Jews trapped in the capital.

  Emboldened by his success in the provinces – made possible in part through the dedicated enthusiasm of his Hungarian partners – Eichmann had prepared an audacious plan to round up the entire Jewish population of Budapest in a stunning twenty-four-hour blitz, at some time between the middle and the end of July. That would surely impress Müller and Himmler sufficiently to win him promotion at last, and perhaps even a personal commendation from Hitler. ‘Technical details will only take a few more days in Budapest,’ he had said in a report to Berlin. If carried out, this grand scheme would have made Wallenberg’s mission futile. There would have been no Jews left by the time he could find his bearings.

  But the Hungarian regent, Horthy – who had received many appeals, was belaboured by the world’s press, and increasingly threatened by the advancing Red Army – plucked up his courage, addressed himself to his best interests, and instructed Prime Minister Döme Sztójay that there were to be no more deportations. Eichmann fell into a fury when he heard of this ‘treachery.’ ‘In all my long experience,’ he stormed, ‘such a thing has never happened to me…It cannot be tolerated.’

  But for the time being it had to be tolerated. Horthy had cannily ordered back to the provinces the 1600 Hungarian gendarmes who had been brought into the capital to help round up the Jews; without them Eichmann did not have nearly enough manpower at his disposal to deal with almost a quarter of a million deportees.

  Eichmann appealed to Berlin through Veesenmayer. The reply was delayed – no doubt because of the 20 July bomb plot on Hitler’s life. When it did come, from SS Reichsführer, Himmler, it was a crushing disappointment for Eichmann: Nazi Germany accepted the suspension of deportations. By this time Himmler had a game of his own to play, and the name of the game was mending fences with the advancing Anglo-Saxons in the west before Germany should be over-run by the advancing Bolsheviks in the east. He saw himself as the man to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies, and one way to improve his image was to relieve the pressure on the Jews.

  An outraged Eichmann was left no alternative but to console himself in contemplation of the great work he had accomplished so far and in anticipation of a change in circumstances which would eventually allow him to finish the job.

  He had begun that task within hours of the arrival of his Kommando in Budapest on 19 March. The morning after checking in, Eichmann had sent three of his assistants, Hermann Krumey, Dieter Wisliceny, and Otto Hunsche, to make contact with the Hungarian Jewish leaders. Fifteen frightened representatives of the Jewish community were told by Krumey that from then on ‘all the affairs of Hungarian Jewry are transferred to the competence of the SS.’ Jews were forbidden to leave Budapest or change domicile without permission; an eight-man Central Jewish Council must be set up immediately to receive the instructions of the Gestapo; for the same purpose a round-the-clock telephone service was to be established. To prevent panic, the Jewish press should carry articles calling for calm. Rabbis should carry the same message by word of mouth. Himmler had warned Eichmann to watch out for signs of another Warsaw-type uprising: the Jews must not be panicked int
o acts of desperation.

  Krumey was reassuring. The Jews had nothing to worry about, he said. There would be some economic restrictions, but no more than the exigencies of war required. Religious, social, and cultural life would be allowed to continue as before. The SS would keep the peace. Having been given other reassurances in this vein, the Jewish leaders left the meeting slightly less apprehensive than when they arrived.

  Once the Central Jewish Council had been set up, as ordered, Eichmann addressed them in person. His hour-long address was a curious mixture of threats and honeyed words combined with the usual unnerving display of knowledge of Jewish affairs.

  The Jews should notify him if anyone tried to harm them, said Eichmann, and he would punish those responsible, even if they were German soldiers. Those who tried to plunder Jewish wealth would also be severely dealt with. But the Jews should not try to mislead him or they would regret it. He had been handling Jewish affairs for ten years, so nobody could fool him. He knew Hebrew well, for example, perhaps better than they did themselves. His main object was to raise the output of the war factories, and Jewish labour was required for this. If they worked hard no harm would come to them. For the moment he wanted four hundred volunteers. If he did not get them he would take them by force. But, either way, they would be treated properly and paid the same as other workers. From now on, all Jews would have to wear a yellow star. However, said Eichmann, this and all the other measures he would announce soon would only last until the end of the war. Once that was over the Jews would find the Germans the good-natured fellows they were before.

  Whatever cautious optimism the Jewish leaders felt after this encounter was promptly shattered. Within days, orders were promulgated by which Jews were forbidden to leave their homes and had to give up their telephones, radios, and cars. Children had to surrender their bicycles. Bank accounts were frozen and food rations reduced. Jews were expelled from the civil service and the professions. Their shops, offices, and factories had to be turned over to Aryan management. The Jews were soon totally bewildered, utterly demoralized. Then the concentration process began in the provinces. The Jews were herded into local ghettos and makeshift concentration camps, the last stage before deportation to the work and death camps in Poland and Germany. The round-up was to be carried out, district by district, by the cock-plumed Hungarian Gendarmerie, with Eichmann’s men acting in supervisory and advisory roles. Even they were astonished at the cruelty of the gendarmes. With conscious or unconscious irony the concentration of the provincial Jews began on the first day of Passover, the holy day that commemorates the Israelites’ flight from Egyptian bondage.

  The horrors of the concentration and deportation of Hungary’s Jews have been copiously documented. But no account of mass suffering is quite so poignant as the diary of Eva Heyman, the thirteen-year-old child of a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family from Varad, close to the Hungarian-Rumanian border.

  31 March Today an order was issued that from now on Jews have to wear a yellow star-shaped patch…When Grandma heard this she started acting up again and we called the doctor. He gave her an injection. She is asleep now…Agi [Eva’s mother] wanted to telephone to the doctor but couldn’t. Then Grandpa told her that the telephones had been taken away from the Jews and said that he would go and get the doctor. Until now Agi used to speak to Budapest every evening and now…I can’t even talk to Aniko and Marica any more. They also take shops away from the Jews…I don’t know who will feed the children if the grown-ups aren’t allowed to work…

  1 April…God, today is April Fool’s Day. On whom should I play tricks? Who thinks about that at all now? Dear Diary, soon I’ll be going to Aniko’s house and I’m taking along…my canary in the cage. I’m afraid that Mandi will die if I leave her at home, because everybody’s mind is on other things now and I’m worried about Mandi. She’s such a darling bird. Whenever I come near her cage she notices me right away and starts singing.

  7 April Today they came for my bicycle. I almost caused a big drama…Now that it’s all over I’m so ashamed about how I behaved in front of the policemen. I threw myself on the ground, held on to the back wheel of my bicycle, and shouted all sorts of things at the policemen: ‘Shame on you for taking away a bicycle from a girl! That’s robbery…’ One of the policemen was very annoyed with me and said: ‘All we need is for a Jewgirl to put on such a comedy when her bicycle is being taken away. No Jewkid is entitled to keep a bicycle anymore.’…I think the other policeman felt sorry for me. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, colleague,’ he said. ‘Is your heart made of stone? How can you speak that way to such a beautiful girl?’ Then he stroked my hair and promised to take good care of my bicycle. He gave me a receipt and told me not to cry because when the war was over I would get my bicycle back.

  20 April Every day they keep issuing new laws against the Jews. Today, for example, they took all our appliances away from us: the sewing machine, the radio, the telephone, the vacuum cleaner, the electric fryer, and my camera…Agi said we should be happy they’re taking things and not people. She’s right about that. I may even have a Zeiss-Ikon camera to work with until I’m old enough to be a news photographer, but a mother or a grandfather can never be replaced. Poor Grandpa, now he can’t even go to his pharmacy anymore. He looks at Agi in such an odd, sad way and keeps caressing her all the time, as though he is saying good-bye to her. Agi even said to him: ‘Don’t cling to me as though we are saying good-bye, my sweet Papa, because my heart is breaking.’ Agi wants to go on having a father for ever. I can understand, because I also want all of us to stay alive.

  1 May Dear Diary, from now on I’m imagining everything as if it really is a dream. We started packing those things and exactly in the quantity that Agi read in the notice. I know it isn’t a dream, but I can’t believe a thing. We’re also allowed to take along bedding and right now we don’t know exactly when they’ll come to take us, so we can’t pack the bedding. I’m busy all day making coffee for Uncle Béla; Grandma drinks cognac. Nobody says a word. Dear Diary, I’ve never been so afraid.

  5 May Dear Diary, now you aren’t at home anymore, but in the ghetto. Three days we waited for them to come and get us…Dear Diary, I’m still too little a girl to write down what I felt while we waited to be taken into the ghetto. Between one order and the next, Agi would cry out that we deserve what we get because we are like animals, patiently waiting to be slaughtered…The two policemen who came for us weren’t unfriendly; they just took Agi’s and Grandma’s wedding rings away from them. Agi was shaking all over and couldn’t get the wedding ring off her finger. In the end Grandma took the ring off her finger. Then they checked our luggage and they wouldn’t allow us to take Grandpa’s valise because it is genuine pigskin. They didn’t allow anything made out of leather to be taken along. They said: ‘There’s a war on and the soldiers need the leather…’ One of the policemen saw a little gold chain around my neck, the one I got for my birthday, the one holding your key, Dear Diary. ‘Don’t you know yet,’ the policeman said, ‘that you aren’t allowed to keep anything made of gold? This isn’t private Jewish property anymore, but national property!’ Whenever something was being taken from us, Agi would always pretend not to notice at all, because she had an obsession about not letting the policemen think it bothered us that our things were being taken, but this time she begged the policeman to let me keep the little gold chain. She started sobbing and said: ‘Mr Inspector, please go and ask your colleagues and they will tell you that I have never begged for anything, but please let the child keep just this little gold chain. You see, she keeps the key to her diary on it.’ ‘Please,’ the policeman said, ‘that is impossible! In the ghetto you will be checked again. I, so help me God, don’t need this chain or any other object that is being taken from you. I don’t need any of it. But I don’t want any difficulties. I am a married man. My wife is going to have a baby.’ I gave him the chain…

  Dear Diary, the most terrible thing happened when we got to the gate
. There, I saw Grandpa cry for the first time in my life. From the gate arch you can see the garden, and the garden never looked so beautiful…I will never forget how Grandpa stood there looking at the garden, shaking from the crying. There were also tears in Uncle Béla’s eyes. And only now I noticed how Grandma had turned into such an old woman…She walked out of the gate as though she was drunk or sleepwalking…

  When it got dark we lay down on the mattress. I cuddled up with Marica and the two of us – believe it or not, Dear Diary – were happy. Strange as it seems, everybody…was here together, everybody in the world whom we loved…We chose Marica’s mother, Aunt Klari Keckskemeti, to be in charge of the inhabitants of our room. Everybody has to obey her. In the dark room she gave a speech and even though I was almost asleep I understood that we all have to take care that everything is kept clean, because that is very important, and that we all have to think of one another…

  10 May Dear Diary, we’re here five days, but word of honour it seems like five years. I don’t even know where to begin writing, because so many awful things have happened since I last wrote in you. First, the fence was finished and nobody can go out or come in…From today on, Dear Diary, we’re not in a ghetto but in a ghetto-camp, and on every house they’ve pasted a notice which tells exactly what we’re not allowed to do…Actually, everything is forbidden, but the most awful thing of all is that the punishment for everything is death. There is no difference between things; no standing in the corner, no spankings, no taking away food, no writing down the declensions of irregular verbs a hundred times the way it used to be in school. Not at all – the lightest and the heaviest punishment is death. It doesn’t actually say that this punishment also applies to children, but I think it does apply to us, too…