The man who saved Budapest's Jews.(Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews From the Holocaust)(Book review)

• Published in: American Conservative Vol. 15; no. 5; pp. 51 - 53
• Main Author: Steigerwald, Lucy
• Format: Book Review Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Arlington The American Conservative LLC 01.09.2016; American Conservative LLC
• Subjects: Biographies; Carlberg, Ingrid; Entrepreneurs; Holocaust; Jewish people; Nonfiction; Wallenberg, Raoul; Hungary
• ISSN: 1540-966X

The book's second section, in which [Ingrid Carlberg] recounts the sixmonth rescue effort, is its most thrilling but also the most familiar to students of [Raoul Wallenberg]. Carlberg isn't as interested in the most cinematic of Wallenberg's exploits as other biographers have been. (One popular story has him standing on top of a train car handing passports, or even food, to Jews; another, more doubtful one has him dining with Adolf Eichmann.) But she sprinkles in short, first-person highlights from her research, her travels to Budapest and Moscow, and her interactions with important people such as Wallenberg's little sister to liven up the larger historical picture. Instead, he was arrested in 1945 by the Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH on Stalin's orders. Though there is no evidence that Wallenberg knew about it, numerous spies flitted on the edge of his circles in Stockholm and Budapest, and the Refugee Board had connections to the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. Wallenberg dealt with anyone in Budapest who could further the cause-be they Arrow Cross, dissident Hungarian, Nazi, or Soviet. More than a few of the 350 people who eventually worked under him in Budapest had hidden loyalties. A Russian interpreter who had worked at the office and turned out to be a Soviet spy may have been the rat who reported Wallenberg. Most likely, Wallenberg simply had no idea how suspicious the paranoid Josef Stalin found a man funded by American and Jewish money-someone willing to shake anyone's hand, as long as it furthered the goal of saving the Jews under his protection. (Stalin would have his own anti-Jewish purges later.) And Wallenberg had family associations in banking, in backroom diplomacy, and in investments that had, for a while, sold ball bearings to the Germans. So much circumstantial evidence existed to make him seem a spy that his arrest feels inevitable. Carlberg mostly deflates the hopes raised by unreliable sources who claimed to have proof that Wallenberg was alive in the gulags or in a mental hospital well into the '70s or '80s. She does agree, however, that some doubt lingers over the Soviets' official date of death: July 17,1947. Wallenberg's driver and his cellmate were interrogated on the same night as an unnamed "prisoner number 7" six days after Wallenberg supposedly died. All three were then moved from the interrogation room together. Carlberg writes that "those responsible for the archives of the Russian security service (FSB) assume that this prisoner number seven was, ?in all likelihood,' Raoul Wallenberg, thereby indicating that he may not have died on July 17."