Khrushchev added that ‘many deeply tragic things had happened during the Stalin period, and he did not wish to expose himself to this interrogation, as there were a number of questions which had been replied to long ago.’ Erlander, however, stood his ground: ‘Swedish public opinion would certainly find it very difficult to understand why the Soviet government objected to further investigations.’ But all he was able to obtain from his guest was a grudging agreement not to prevent a further meeting between Professors Svartz and Miashnikov – which finally occurred more than a year later.
The next time Erlander raised the matter briefly, a couple of days later, Khrushchev adopted a slightly more conciliatory tone, and ‘declared himself to be sincerely sorry that the Soviet government did not have access to any material whereby this regrettable subject of contention between the Soviet Union and Sweden could be brought to a close.’
At the end of the Khrushchev visit, Erlander issued a statement saying the Wallenberg affair had been raised without any result having been obtained, and added, ‘We are deeply disappointed that the Soviet Union has not felt able to do more about the matter…We do not intend to give up our efforts.’
Little more than two months later Khrushchev fell from power, to be replaced by the partnership of Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev. The Wallenberg affair had now been a cause célèbre through two Soviet dictatorships. Perhaps, the Swedes thought, a change of regime might bring about a change of attitude. They should have known better.
Erlander waited until Kosygin had been in office as prime minister four months before resuming the diplomatic offensive in a personal letter of 11 February 1965: ‘As you certainly understand, I would not take up the matter if it had not been…of such great importance…and if I had not been convinced that an elucidation of this matter would remove disturbing factors in Soviet–Swedish relations.
‘I know that you agree with me on the importance of Swedish–Soviet relations being further developed and that in this respect we have a joint goal. In this spirit I take the liberty of addressing an appeal to you that you personally make arrangements for an investigation into all aspects of the matter in question…’
Kosygin told Ambassador Jarring, who delivered the letter, that he had read the Wallenberg file carefully and could not reach any conclusion other than that Wallenberg had died, as stated by Gromyko, in July 1947. So far as a meeting between Professors Svartz and Miashnikov was concerned, he would not oppose it although he saw little point in it.
The tenacious Erlander was not to be put off. On 13 May 1965 he warned Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Belokhvostikov that he would raise the matter in person when he paid an official visit to Moscow in June. ‘The Soviet government must realize that the Swedish government attached extraordinary importance to the affair and that Swedish public opinion demanded an account of it,’ said an official summary of the Erlander-Belokhvostikov meeting.
True to his word, Erlander raised the irritating matter at two intergovernmental negotiating sessions, on 11 and 17 June. He told his hosts that it appeared from their more recent statements that the ‘assumption’ of Wallenberg’s death in Gromyko’s note of February 1957 had now become a ‘certainty,’ and added that ‘it was important for the Swedish government to be given access to the investigations which had been made in recent years and which had obviously led to this change.’ In addition, the question of whether Professor Svartz’s testimony or that of Professor Miashnikov was correct ‘must be clarified.’
Kosygin replied, with evident asperity, that ‘there existed no further material and no personal file on Wallenberg; why, it was not known. Nor were there any Soviet witnesses. If Wallenberg were alive he would be found very soon; those who were in prisons and in hospitals were known. A chief of government could soon find a living man, but not a dead man. How could the Swedish government seriously believe that the Soviet authorities were keeping Wallenberg in the Soviet Union? Why should they keep him?’
Kosygin conceded that the affair was a difficult and complicated one for Sweden, but the Soviet government had done all it could ‘and had no more to add.’
Erlander ‘repeated with sharpness’ his demands for all the evidence. He expressed satisfaction that there would be a meeting between Professors Svartz and Miashnikov ‘but regretted that the replies to his other requests had been negative.’
Like Khrushchev’s visit to Stockholm the year before, that of Erlander to Moscow ended on a somewhat discordant note and, after the totally unproductive meeting between Nanna Svartz and Aleksandr Miashnikov the following month, Erlander decided the time had come to make the information at his disposal public. The Foreign Ministry was instructed to prepare a White Book containing the diplomatic exchanges and memoranda and the new evidence collected since the previous White Book of 1957. These were presented to the press and public on 16 September 1965, and predictably caused a sensation – especially the revelation about the Nanna Svartz affair and the evidence of Wallenberg’s having been seen in Vladimir Prison into the mid-1950s.
The White Book was accompanied by a personal statement from Erlander, which Western diplomats in the Swedish capital considered to be a surprisingly strong condemnation of the Russians. ‘The fate of Raoul Wallenberg has deeply engaged Swedish opinion,’ he said. ‘We have sought to convince the Soviet leadership of the extra-ordinary seriousness with which Swedish quarters look upon this question. An essential part of our negotiations with the Soviet leaders during this period has come to concern the Wallenberg case. Unfortunately the result has been negative…’ Despite this, Erlander promised that ‘as long as there is a possibility, this effort must continue.’
Erlander’s brave last words notwithstanding, many Swedes took the publication of the White Book as a tacit admission that no successful resolution of the Wallenberg affair was now likely. If it did not succeed as a final effort to put public pressure on the Soviets, the White Book might at least answer opposition charges that successive Social Democratic governments had not pursued the case vigorously enough.
Certainly, both press and public were impressed by the tenacity Erlander had exercised in the years since 1957, as revealed in the White Book. They were outraged by the peremptory – at times downright contemptuous – attitude of the Russians. It is fair to speculate that if the Swedish government had been as persistent and purposeful in the early years of Wallenberg’s captivity he might well have been returned long since.
Chapter 17
Following the dramatic disclosures of the 1965 Swedish government White Book, the Wallenberg affair went into a long period of hibernation. For many years it seemed that the White Book had been the last gasp – that there was nothing more to be said or done about the perplexing and tragic fate of Raoul Wallenberg. True, his family remained active, especially his indomitable mother, Maj, loyally supported by her husband, Fredrik von Dardel, who, in his quietly meticulous way, kept a compendious private archive of every conceivable document and photograph pertaining to his stepson.
With the flow of post-war prisoners corning out of Russia now dried up, the late 1960s and early 1970s produced little in the way of reliable new evidence. Stories still seeped out of Russia from time to time about a mysterious Swedish prisoner, usually in a remote Siberian camp, but by now the Wallenberg story had acquired some of the aura of a romantic if tragic legend among the millions of inhabitants of the Gulag. If the von Dardel family, prompted by wishful thinking, occasionally displayed a degree of gullibility, the official Swedish investigators remained hard-headed and thorough. They discarded most of the ‘evidence’ that came their way between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s; the Wallenberg affair began to fade away for lack of nourishment.
What seemed like a major lead turned up in 1973 when a Russian Jew named Efim (Haim) Moshinsky surfaced in Tel Aviv with an extraordinary tale. He claimed to be a former agent of SMERSH* and the KGB who had fallen afoul of the Soviet system and had himself ended up a prisoner. He said he first encountered
Wallenberg in Budapest in January 1945, after the Swede had been taken in by the NKVD.
According to Moshinsky, the NKVD believed Wallenberg knew the whereabouts of large amounts of gold and jewellery belonging to wealthy Jews whom he had saved. The NKVD wanted to get their hands on this loot and this, said Moshinsky, was why they arrested him. For good measure, they also suspected him of having cooperated with the Gestapo and, said Moshinsky, they subjected him to a brutal, nine-day interrogation – in which he, Moshinsky, did not take part – before taking him to the airport and flying him to Moscow.
Swedish investigators were immediately suspicious of this story as, in several respects, it did not tally with what was already known. There was no mention, for example, of Langfelder, who was certainly arrested with Wallenberg. Furthermore, neither Wallenberg nor Langfelder had ever mentioned to fellow-prisoners when they arrived in Russia that either of them had been ill-treated. Also, both had stated that they went to Russia by train, Langfelder adding the detail of their having been allowed off the train to eat in the restaurant Luther in the Rumanian town of Jassy.
Still, the Swedes allowed Moshinsky to continue his story. He said that he saw Wallenberg again in 1961–62 on Wrangel Island, a prison colony inside the Arctic Circle, where, according to both Moshinsky and other more reliable sources, a number of foreign prisoners were held, including a group of Italian military officers. Moshinsky was himself a prisoner on Wrangel Island and he said that although he recognized Wallenberg clearly, he was never able to get closer to him than six feet because of an electric fence which separated their two compounds. Moshinsky said he was unable to communicate with Wallenberg in any way. This part of Moshinsky’s story, too, does not tally with more substantial evidence – such as that of Nanna Svartz, according to whose account Wallenberg was in a Moscow hospital in 1961.
Other stories which cropped up during this period were not so easy to discount. In January 1970, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance, a young Hungarian visiting Stockholm saw an account of the Wallenberg affair in a Swedish newspaper. He telephoned Maj von Dardel, who invited him to her home. The Hungarian, whose name remains a secret, told her that in Budapest he had a girl friend whose father was a senior Hungarian government official. While the young man was at lunch one day with the girl’s family, her father mentioned that a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg, who had been active in Budapest during the war, was at that time in a Soviet camp in Siberia.
The young Hungarian told Mrs von Dardel that until then he had never heard of Wallenberg and that he had not thought of the incident since – until he saw Wallenberg’s name in the Swedish press that January day. His story was checked by Swedish officials as thoroughly as it was possible to do. They did at least ascertain that the Hungarian official and his daughter really existed.
What might have been confirmation of this story came from another informant, also unnamed, who said in 1974 that he had seen Wallenberg in the Vadivovo Camp, near the Siberian city of Irkutsk, in 1966–67, At that time, said the ex-prisoner, he was ‘an old man with white and very thin hair, who said he had been very ill.’ The other prisoners nicknamed him ‘Roniboni.’ Like so many reported sightings in recent years, this one could neither be accepted as authentic nor rejected as false.
The British ex-spy Greville Wynne* added another intriguing, if rather circumstantial, morsel of information. In March 1980, he recalled an incident which took place when he was in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison. Prisoners there were customarily taken up to the roof for solitary ‘exercise’ periods in small pens, not much bigger than their cells below. They were taken up in one of a number of small lifts, which Wynne described as ‘rusty iron cages.’ He went on to say:
One day in early 1963, I was up on the roof when I heard a cage coming into the next pen. As the gate opened I heard a voice call out ‘Taxi.’ Given the filthy condition of the lifts, this struck me as a piece of defiant humour, which I greatly appreciated. About five days after that, the same thing happened – the cage came up and the same voice called out ‘Taxi,’ and this time I heard some conversation between the prisoner and his guard. I could tell from the accent that this was another foreigner, so I called out, ‘Are you American?’
The voice answered ‘No, I’m Swedish.’
That was all I could learn, because at that moment my guard put his hand over my mouth and shoved me against the corner of the pen. Prisoners were not allowed to communicate with each other.
The significance of this story is that, with the exception of Wallenberg (assuming he was still alive), there was no known Swede in Soviet captivity. If there were a Swedish prisoner of whom the authorities in Stockholm were unaware, he must have been held on purely criminal charges, in which case he would not have been in the Lubianka – a jail exclusively for political prisoners, traitors and foreign spies.
Chapter 18
Gradually the Wallenberg case slipped from the headlines of the Swedish press and from the consciousness of the Swedish public. The committee that had worked so hard and effectively for so many years was eventually disbanded. Only the von Dardel family and a few fanatically loyal helpers, such as Rudolf Philipp, kept the flame alive. By the time the next substantial piece of evidence surfaced that flame had been all but extinguished.
The first element in this evidence was contained in a telephone call in November 1977 to Anna Bilder, a Russian Jew who had recently emigrated from the Soviet Union with her husband and thirteen-year-old daughter to the Israeli town of Jaffa. The caller, much to Anna Bilder’s astonishment and delight, was her father, Jan Kaplan. In the last: news she had had of him he was in a Soviet prison, serving a four-year sentence for ‘economic crimes’ connected with his own attempts to emigrate to Israel.
By Soviet standards, the Kaplan family had apparently lived in some style in Moscow, where Jan had been the administrator of an operatic studio. He was sixty-six and lived with his sixty-year-old wife, Evgenia, in an apartment on fashionable Gorki Street. He had been jailed in 1975 (two years after Anna and her family went to Israel) for currency offences and the illegal purchase of diamonds – economic crimes occasionally committed by would-be emigrants trying to get what wealth they possessed out of the Soviet Union. Kaplan had a heart condition and now he was phoning his daughter from Moscow with the good news that, as a result of a medical certificate signed by five Soviet doctors, he had been freed from prison.
Anna was delighted to hear of her father’s release but concerned about his health. To have been released after serving only eighteen months of a four-year sentence suggested to her that her father must be in very poor condition. But Kaplan brushed aside her anxious inquiries and assured her that prison conditions were not too rigorous. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘when I was in Butyrka Prison hospital in 1975 I met a Swede who told me he had been in Soviet prisons for thirty years, and he seemed reasonably healthy to me.’
The significance of this remark was completely lost on Anna Bilder. She had never heard of Raoul Wallenberg and had no reason to believe that there was anything especially unusual about a foreigner having been jailed in Russia for thirty years. While passing on the good news of Kaplan’s release to relatives in Israel, she happened to mention her father’s encounter with the Swede. They, too, failed to recognize the significance of his remark.
At about the same time, other Kaplan relatives, also living in Moscow, wrote to members of the family in Detroit, Michigan, about Jan’s release. ‘He doesn’t look at all in bad shape,’ said the letter. ‘He says that he met a Swede in the sick ward of Butyrka who had been a prisoner for thirty years then, but who doesn’t look sick at all.’ Like the members of the family in Israel, the relatives in Detroit also failed to realize the significance of the remark. It appears that Kaplan was doing all he could to get a message out, without its appearing too obvious to low-level state security officials who might be monitoring his mail and phone calls. But the message just was not getting through. It might nev
er have got through but for the intervention of another recent arrival in Israel from the Soviet Union, a Polish-born Jew named Abraham Kalinski.
Kalinski claims to have served almost fifteen years in Soviet prisons, from 1945 until late 1959. After his release he remained in the Soviet Union until 1975, when he was granted a visa to emigrate to Israel. He brought with him a second wife and small stepdaughter and settled with them in an apartment in the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya, close to the Lebanese border. Since Kalinski was largely instrumental in reviving the once-moribund Wallenberg affair, and since he is the only witness to surface in the West for many years with credible first-hand evidence, it: may be worthwhile to take a closer look at him and his testimony.
Kalinski was a somewhat enigmatic figure. He seemed well aware that some suspected his motives and was almost over-anxious to establish his credentials and his credibility. At the same time, he seemed almost willing to create an aura of mystery around himself and his activities. In Israel, during the 1970s many Soviet émigrés seemed to live in, even to thrive on, an atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue, accusing and in turn being accused by each other. Given that the KGB had, almost certainly, infiltrated a number of agents among the scores of thousands of Jewish émigrés to Israel and the West, these suspicions were perhaps understandable. However, among the Russian Jews in Israel they sometimes appeared obsessive.
Kalinski claimed to be a former Polish Army officer who, during the latter stages of World War II, was attached to the Soviet Defence Ministry in Moscow as a liaison officer. He claimed that at the time he was married to a well-known Soviet film director, who committed suicide. He said he was arrested and jailed by the Soviets in 1945 after being betrayed by a Russian spy in the American embassy in Moscow who intercepted a letter, which he had addressed to the US government and sent via the Moscow embassy, about: the Katyn Forest massacre.*
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 19