by Alan Lelchuk
SEARCHING
FOR
WALLENBERG
ALSO BY ALAN LELCHUK
American Mischief
Miriam at Thirty-Four
Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own Ending
Miriam in Her Forties
On Home Ground
Brooklyn Boy
Playing the Game
Ziff: A Life?
Copyright © 2015 by Alan Lelchuk
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.
This book is typeset in Minion Pro. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39-48-1992 (R1997).
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Lelchuk, Alan.
Searching for Wallenberg : a novel / Alan Lelchuk.
pages ; cm
Issued also as an ebook.
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-942134-15-2
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN (cloth) 978-1-942134-03-9
ISBN (paper) 978-1-942134-04-6
1. Wallenberg, Raoul, 1912-1947—Fiction. 2. Diplomats—Sweden—Fiction. 3. Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust—Hungary—Fiction. 4. Jews—Hungary—History—20th century—Fiction. 5. College teachers—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories. 7. Love stories. I. Title.
PS3562.E464 S43 2015
813/.54
Image of Holocaust Memorial on the Danube River © Can Stock Photo Inc. / Jule Berlin
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Printed in the United States of America
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Mandel Vilar Press
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To the memory of
Saul Bellow
I would like to acknowledge the generous help in Moscow of Nikita Petrov of Memorial House, and of Tatiana Lokis, my Russian translator and interpreter.
I would also like to thank the Wallenberg historian, Susanne Berger, for her gracious guidance.
The Making of Fiction, the Revising of History
A Prefatory Note
The world remembers Raoul Wallenberg as the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Budapest in 1944–45, and was then arrested by the Soviets in 1945, taken to Moscow where he disappeared until his apparent death in 1947. When I first began researching the life of Wallenberg, in Budapest 2001, while I was teaching there and lived near his impressive Buda statue, the most obvious items were the major mysteries still outstanding. There were several. First, how and when did he die, in Lybianka prison in Moscow in 1947? Or did he live on, in some Gulag camp or psychiatric hospital? Second, and just as significant, why did he languish in a Soviet prison for two whole years, from 1945–1947, without being exchanged by the Swedish government—as other political prisoners in Europe were—or rescued by his very wealthy, well-connected family in Stockholm? Even now, some 65 years after the events, these mysteries have remained into the 21st century. (Despite the two recent biographies.) Yet perhaps the deepest mystery was, who was Raoul Wallenberg? Who was the living man behind the legendary persona of noble diplomat and hero of Budapest Jews? The basic questions of his personal identity and motivation compelled me, as I studied the perplexing history.
Because of the above enduring mysteries, which existed as spaces or gaps to be meditated on and filled in, as plausibly as possible, I chose to look at my project from the perspective of fiction, and not history. (It helped that I was a novelist, yet I had been offered a chance to write it as history) This would enable the writer to imagine the scenes and characters with which to fill in those missing spaces. Especially since those mysteries had eluded the answers of historians and biographers for over half a century, it struck me that only within the realm of fiction would the writer have enough license and justification to imagine what might have really happened in the past. Hence the genre of the novel—the most flexible of the genres— seemed apt to suit the open-ended material. Yet, in order to give my poetic license and imagination a solid grounding, I knew I had to pursue the historical ground thoroughly. This meant homework by footwork, traveling to Stockholm, Budapest, Moscow, to interview witnesses and historians, read documents and archives, visit physical sites. In short, my grounding had to be firm enough for me to feel confident that I knew the material as well as any historian.
It turned out, surprisingly, that I was able to meet with several highly relevant figures still alive who had never before been visited or talked to. In Stockholm, I met Olof Selling, in his 70s, who had been in Officers training camp with young Raoul; this gentleman proved to be both frank and useful in revealing character traits already evident back then in the youthful Raoul, traits which would emerge in his mature life to help fill in the puzzle of his character. In Budapest I spoke with a survivor who knew Wallenberg as a 12 year old boy, a witness who explained how he and his fellow Jews saw and experienced, first hand, the Swedish savior. Also there I met with a Hungarian journalist who had specialized in the Wallenberg case, a gutsy lady who informed me of new, interesting information from the wartime years.
Most importantly in Moscow, I was lucky enough, by means of chance and timing, to meet with and interview the original KGB interrogator of Wallenberg in Lybianka Prison in 1945-47. Thanks to this octogenerian’s son, who answered the front door of his father’s apartment in central Moscow when my translator and I knocked unexpectedly on a Sunday afternoon—after he had told me not to come over—I was fortunate to meet and talk with the reluctant Daniel Pagliansky, becoming the first and only Westerner ever to talk with this intentionally obscure and truculent agent. (This meeting was witnessed by Daniel’s son, Georgy, and by my interpreter.) One week later, Pagliansky died at age 88.
So while I was trying to learn the history, I was also making some history.
What might I do with these actual events? I had several choices, but the one I decided upon was to write those real meetings into the fiction as they had occurred, at the same time that I felt more able to invent freely from those meetings, and project imaginatively onto other scenes with the same characters, though at a different historical time or place. For example, I recorded the actual meeting (from my notes) I had with the KGB officer, in Moscow in 2006, and then, based on that actual meeting, try to imagine the scene of the original interrogation, back in 1947. In SFW I indicate clearly which meeting is real, which scene is invented, so that the reader can judge for himself the value and credibility of each. My final hybrid creation is a mingling of the three: the experienced real, the historical, and the fictionalized; thus my reasoning for thinking of the work as a kind of docu-novel. To some extent the genre has been approached before, in works like Compulsion, In Cold Blood or The Executioner’s Song, but in those books there was much more emphasis on simple re-enactments of past events, rather than what I was attempting—seeking to imagine and fill in gaps and mysteries in history by means of fictional scenes based on (my) actual meetings, which themselves are scenes in the novel. Far from playing tricks with the reader, my aim was to permit the reader more freedom and more authority to judge for him/herself the imagined realities and projected scenes by the author.
Since I had little interest in writing a conventional historical novel, I had also to figure out an overall scheme for my novel. To begin with, I brought in a chief co-protagonist—Manny Gellerman, a professor of history who grows interested in the topic of what happened to Wallenberg via a graduate student. By means of his p
rofessional curiosity, and his adventurous soul. Gellerman becomes part detective, part historian, gradually throwing in all his cards on a gamble that might lead him to a deeper understanding of the vanished mysterious Swede. The search leads him on unorthodox paths, which, in the end, allows him to travel as a kind of private alter ego to the lost Wallenberg, forming a comrade-ship marked by unusual intimacy and Secret-Sharer dialogues.
Any fictional work is of course judged by the qualities of invention and prose, and SFW is no different. This novel may present itself, however, with a larger burden upon the writer’s historical judgment and the basis for that judgment. Here I accept full responsibility for those judgments, and do not fall back on a novelist’s license of free imagination. My judgments on the history— or the missing history, the mysterious history— is fair game for the reader, be he an historian or a literary critic, a Wallenberg case follower or cult-fan. I can only hope that my rather unorthodox mapping of the old terrain is both compelling and revealing at the same time.
As the great English historian Thomas B. Macaulay wrote, in 1828, “History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy.” I would assume he meant here the realm of fiction, as we know it. I concur.
ALAN LELCHUK
Canaan, New Hampshire
September 2014
Where there’s a man,
there’s a problem.
STALIN
SEARCHING
FOR
WALLENBERG
CHAPTER 1
The university was like a national park, with protected land, preserved forests, a clean river, and, in place of RVs, redbrick and white clapboard buildings with pampered undergraduates instead of wild animals. Indeed, periodic safaris of new recruits and innocent parents were ushered through, persuaded to look agog at the newest sports fields or the high-tech library and science buildings. Important new buildings, not faculty, were on exhibition.
Gellerman surveyed the park from his third-floor office overlooking the Dartmouth Green, waiting for his grad student Angela to show up to report on her progress since her winter trip to Budapest. During the months since she began the project, Manny had done much reading up on her—or his?—new subject. He’d read three or four books, multiple articles, a slew of online information, and he had found it more and more intriguing. And bewildering. Was her thesis and his newfound interest setting up a new serious project for Gellerman?
He got up and went to the bookshelf, and pulled down his previous two books. The first, Turning-Point, concerned the dropping of the A-bomb. He had come down strongly on the side of the revisionist historians, such as Sherwin and Alperoff, who had argued that there was no pressing need to have dropped those bombs on civilian centers, and that the motives had much to do with displaying political and military power to the Russians. The second, on Vietnam, The Spoils of Defeat, was an examination of the dire consequences of ideological fervor, showing how Cold War policies had cost America thousands of unnecessary deaths and misguided policies. He looked again at the date of Spoils and winced, realizing that it came out over twenty years ago! Now, in his mid-sixties, Manny felt somewhat deflated. He set the two books down on his cluttered desk, and reflected that his Fulbright trip to Budapest and Prague, several years back, had been an attempt to start up the engines for a new work on the fall of Communism in those parts and the vacuum of American policy. However, he had not written much, and had lost his initial thrust. But now, this Raoul W. had beckoned … a thin gleam on the horizon …
He heard the knock on the door, and there was Angela, in winter regalia: yellow down jacket, ski ticket hanging off the zipper, and blue sweater brightened by a smart scarf. “Hey Professor G.!” She sat down, fiddling with her attaché.
“Hi, Angie, how was your trip? Some progress on the thesis?” He added, “And did you get some skiing in?”
“Both,” she beamed, and took a sheaf of papers out of her Lands’ End case. “I think I hit it rich, sir! Really! Like you may not believe it, Professor.”
He accepted the sheaf of forty-odd pages, and quietly observed this bright angel of a young student. Some of the best future researchers of our land would be these athletic Ivy League detectives, who left their skis temporarily for the archives, made major discoveries, and returned to the slopes.
“I’m listening, Angela. What won’t I believe?”
“Well, Professor, I followed your ‘rumor’ lead, and I think I uncovered Hungarian members of his family, alive still, in Budapest. Can you believe it?”
Manny came around to the front of the desk and sat on it. “Go on, I’m all ears.”
“Well, it turns out that Mr. Wallenberg was very connected to a Budapest woman, and maybe even married her, and had a child with her as well. And that child, now in her fifties or so, and her daughter are, like, alive and well in Budapest! I met and talked with them, briefly, and totally believe their story!”
Manny suppressed a large grin, and gave instead a small smile. “On what evidence are you basing your ‘belief’? What records do you have in hand, or was it just the woman’s words?”
“Yes, sir, the woman’s words! And a promised journal!” Her face gleamed with triumph. “I tried to search for records in the city office, but that was inconclusive, in part because I have no Hungarian.”
Manny nodded in appreciation of her attempted search. Would it have been that difficult to dig up a Hungarian translator? he wondered privately.
“So she talked freely with you?”
“Well, once she saw that I was serious, and doing my research for scholarly work, yes, she talked a bit.”
Manny nodded. “Where did you ski?”
“In the Swiss Alps, on the way back. Nothing like it, ’cause the days are so mild and the snow so wonderful!”
Manny took the sheaf of papers and said he would read it, very soon.
“You should meet her yourself, Professor G. I gave her your name and your e-mail as well, which she had asked for, for corroboration. But I guess she was too shy to write you.”
“I guess so.”
“But she did check out the Dartmouth website, I know. So maybe that was enough for her, huh?”
“Could be.” He paused. “So, if Wallenberg fathered this child, when did it happen? And how much did he see her, before he got caught by the Soviets?”
She sipped from her water bottle. “Good question. Not much, not much at all. But then, as I understand it—and this part was a bit cloudy—she was sneaked in somehow to Lybianka once, and he was sneaked in for a visit to see her and their child, in Budapest. A bribed few visits, of course, and highly controlled.”
Gellerman scratched at his trim beard, smiled, and turned back to his seat.
“Highly unusual, what you describe, Angela. Almost, if not altogether, impossible. The Soviet Union was a closed, very closed society.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I didn’t go all over that too much in my thesis. But for sure, you should chat with her yourself—I mean, to corroborate my research.”
“And … instinct?”
“Yeah, sure. My instinct.” She jumped up. “I really look forward to hearing what you think of it. But it’s still a rough draft sort of, please remember.”
Manny nodded. “I will remember, thanks.”
The student left and, true to form, Manny removed his shoes, kicked his legs up onto the desk, and settled into his favorite reading-and-thinking cockpit. What a crazy, unbelievable tale! Well, he hoped she had a sense of humor. After all, much of what occurred in Communist society was so bizarre, so outlandish, that only big grim jokes could get at it. That’s why Milan Kundera’s and George Conrad’s early fiction, the Czech films of the sixties, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, were so richly revelatory. Not to mention Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All those novelists filled out history—and documented it?—better than the historians …
A few hours later,
when he had finished the quick reading and checked his e-mails, there appeared, almost on cue, a missive from a stranger in Budapest. Only it wasn’t from the expected party, but from a professor:
Dear Professor Gellerman,
I write for Zsuzsanna Frank Wallenberg, who wishes to confirm that one student of yours, Angela Robinson, visited her last 10 days ago, and took some notes, for a thesis she writes with you. Is this student’s information factual? We will be happy to hear from you.
Yours sincerely,
Prof. Zoltan Gerevich
How very interesting, thought Manny, and answered:
Dear Prof. Gerevich,
Yes, I can assure you that Angela Robinson is my student, and she is writing her thesis with me. And if your friend—or client?—Zsuzsanna Frank Wallenberg, wishes to write me directly, for any reason, I will be pleased to hear from her.
Just as he was about to hit the send button, Gellerman added: “I would be happy to visit ZFW myself sometime, in Budapest, if she welcomes me.”
Gellerman sent the message on, but wondered, Was this his entry into History, or rather, and more probable, his entry into a private Fantasyland?
Teaching his seminar the next Tuesday, from 4 to 7 p.m., Manny felt at home, relaxed, purposeful, as he greeted his fourteen students seated around a long oval table in the modern Rockefeller building. His seminar was History through Literature, and he had already taught such novels as History by Elsa Morante, Man’s Fate by André Malraux, The Joke by Milan Kundera, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, and presently was doing The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow. At home in the classroom, Manny always reminded himself of how the university existed right here, in this quiet room, with the students, the professor, and the text, far away from administrators, bureaucrats, new buildings, sporting fields, and public relations propaganda. Here, in this sacred sanctuary, each book presented a different problem about how history had entered fiction and, conversely, how fiction had shaped the history. The course was a new one for Gellerman, and he felt energized.