As long as we’re celebrating great figures in the fight against tyranny, today is a good day to honor one of my heroes, Raoul Wallenberg; this would be his 91st birthday, had he lived. For those not familiar with Wallenberg, he was a Swedish humanitarian sent to Hungary during WW II to rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and is one of those honored at Yad Vashem. He wasn’t officially an ambassador—he was appointed as the secretary to the Swedish legation to Hungary in 1944—but he effectively was, for he had been authorized by no less than the king of Sweden to operate completely independently of the ambassador. His purpose in Budapest was to rescue the Jews of Hungary from the Holocaust. Between his arrival that July and the arrival of the Soviets, who arrested him and sent him off to Moscow, never to be seen again, he saved at least 20,000 Jews and perhaps as many as 100,000. Wallenberg had the courage not to go with the flow in Europe at that time, but to seek to change it at the risk of his life; he had the courage to carry out the desire of his government to save as many Jews as possible from Hitler’s “Final Solution.” That his courage and faithfulness led to his death is no surprise; that he lost his life not at the hands of the Nazis but at the hands of Hungary’s Soviet “liberators” is one of history’s bitter ironies.
