Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story Of The Man Who Saved The Jews Of Budapest by Kati Marton

I became familiar with the name Raoul Wallenberg after studying various modules at university covering The Holocaust. The Swede is one of the few individuals upheld by history who able to save many Jewish lives from the Nazi persecution. 

On a recent visit to Budapest I went to the House of Terror, a building previously used to detain and interrogate people during the Soviet regime in Hungary. The building has now been converted into an excellent museum which provides a detailed history on the years in Hungary following the Second World War. 

Each room of the museum provides an insight to different parts of the regime, and its victims and perpetrators, with a sheet of information to read as you walk through the exhibitions. While reading I was shocked to learn that Raoul Wallenberg was named as one of the victims of the Soviet regime. 

Wanting to learn more about I brought Kati Marton’s biography of the Swedish diplomat at the museum shop. 

“Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story of The Man Who Saved The Jews Of Budapest” is a well written and researched account of Wallenberg’s family history and work in Budapest, and gives a speculative insight into the years of his imprisonment and isolation using testimony from fellow inmates.

The biography has been revised in the years 1982, 1995, and 2011, following revelations of new information concerning Wallenberg’s unlawful imprisonment.

Starting out with a detailed biography of the family name Wallenberg, who are revered family in Swedish society, Marton describes the birth and early upbringing of Raoul.

Born after his father’s death, Raoul was mentored by his grandfather. The foreign ambassador hoped to endow his young grandson with important life experiences to help him forge a successful career in the future. 

Marton provides an interesting account of Wallenberg’s time in American during his youth. When choosing to send his young protégée off on the “American Experience”, a Wallenberg family tradition, his grandfather shun the destinations of Ivy League universities and chose the University of Michigan, wishing to expose Raoul to a wider sphere.

In between semester dates, Raoul worked various odd jobs while hitchhiking up and down the West Coast. Here Marton relates a story of a run-in with danger which seems to foreshadow Wallenberg’s ability in handling fearful situations in the coming years. 

While hitchhiking back from the World Fair Wallenberg was robbed at gunpoint. The group of men stole his earnings from the World’s Fair and left the somewhat bemused son of multimillionaires by the roadside. 

“In the future I’ll be a bit smarter” he wrote to his grandfather “I don’t think I used good psychology…”

By providing an early picture of Walleberg’s life, Marton evokes an image of a young ambitious man who had the skills in diplomacy to deal with unpleasant and dangerous situations many would be afraid of even approaching.

In 1944 Wallenberg was recruited by the War Refugee Department and assigned to their legation in Budapest with the task of saving as many of the Jewish community as possible. During his time as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg routinely around the clock to save the lives of 100,000 Jewish inhabitants during the Nazi occupation. 

The work he carried out had never been attempted before and in many cases Wallenberg was alone and had to rely on his own initiative.

By wining and dining important contacts, exploiting the Swedish immunity in the war, and in many cases by the use of sheer fortitude and luck, Wallenberg was able to save many families from the clutches of Nazi persecution.  

A key aspect to Wallenberg’s campaign was the issuing and forging of protective Swedish passports. If a link was established between a Jewish person and a Swede then Wallenberg could issue papers asserting the person’s immunity. Letters were written to names found in the Swedish directory urging strangers to relate some evidence of familiarity to Hungarian Jews they had never met. 

As a consequence the protected Jew did not have to wear the yellow star badge as required by many.

Wallenberg’s idea of protective housing for Jewish communities also played a major role. 

Wallenberg established rented houses, villas and apartments in Pest as diplomatic buildings by flying the Swedish flag, and at the end of the war tens of thousands were sheltered in these buildings.

However, throughout the campaign and particularly towards the end of the war these protective measures were ignored and the presence of Wallenberg himself was the only thing which could save the condemned.  

An evocative picture is given of Wallenberg shouting at Nazi officers to give back “his people” at the station of the deportation train.  At many times Wallenberg was called to intervene and save groups from firing squads at the last minute.

The question as to why such a prolific campaigner for human justice could suffer a fate is sensitively approached by Kari Marton. 

The writer gives extensive information referring to the ongoing campaigning by Wallenberg’s mother for answers and testimony provided by former prisoners of the Soviet regime.

The hypnosis provided by Marton is that Wallenberg was arrested and detained indefinitely for being a spy because the Soviets could not understand why a man who was a Christian and a Capitalist would risk his own life to save Jews.

Kari Marton’s biography is an informative and eye grabbing account of the injustices suffered by the Hungarian nation during and after the war, as well as a provoking picture of one of the few hero’s in history’s darkest chapter. 

At times Marton, by providing a linear historical narrative as the backdrop to Wallenberg’s work, does ignore the complexities of historical arguments surrounding events of the Second World War. Also the opening rhetoric of Wallenberg as a hero before the relation of events can at times be considered overly sentimental.  

However after reading eyewitnesses’ accounts of the bravery and self-confidence Wallenberg projected when he was alone and when so many lives depended of him, the only conclusion that can be draw is that his actions were nothing but “incredible”.