In the freezing cold of January 1945, a young Jewish girl, around 12 years old, stood on the bank of the Danube River that crosses Budapest, moments before joining the others who had been shot and fell into the water. Her family had already been taken away, and the only reason she was still standing was her mothers composure and resourcefulness: The mother had told the Arrow Cross (the local fascist party) that the little girl running after them was not her daughter but some deranged child who would not leave her alone. In a moment of grace, so says that same little girl known today as Dr. Naomi Gur, a truck drove by and from it emerged a handsome young man who asked to examine her papers and questioned her. He insisted to the Arrow Cross man that the ID, which actually belonged to her aunt, was in fact hers. He waited for a momentary distraction and whisked the girl, along with several other Jews, into the truck and drove off quickly. This year marks 100 years since the birth of Raoul Wallenberg, a descendant of a well-known family of Swedish bankers, military men and statesmen. In 1936, Wallenberg spent some time in Haifa learning the trade of international commerce. There he became acquainted with the pre-state settlers and the refugees who fled Germany. In July of 1944, just as the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz from Hungary was coming to a close, Wallenberg came to Budapest, carrying a diplomatic passport, to continue the work of the Swedish legation there. By then, the legation had handed out hundreds of Swedish protective passports (which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation and thus prevented their deportation). Wallenberg increased the number of protective passports to the thousands, and enacted other measures, especially after October of that year, when the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross seized Hungary and Adolf Eichmann began organizing death marches for the 200,000 Jews who remained in Budapest. With money he managed to obtain from American Jews through special authorization (the allies had strictly forbidden the transfer of anything that could help the Germans in countries they occupied), and together with other missions including those of the Swiss and the Red Cross and with the help of Zionist youth groups, Wallenberg established an extraterritorial ghetto that housed some 15,000 people, ensuring their safety and supplying their basic needs. He chased the death marches in his car and pulled stragglers to safety, as he did at train stations and along the banks of the Danube. He was apparently involved in efforts to sabotage the German plot to blow up the ghetto he had built as well as the one they themselves had built before the Soviets invaded, which housed 100,000 people at the time. When the Soviets invaded, their suspicion was aroused by the sheer number of protective passports he had issued and his protection of Jews, which they suspected was a facade to cover up his pro-German espionage (Wallenbergs family maintained commercial ties with Germany before the war) and he was arrested. He was transferred to the Soviet Union and his fate after that remains unknown. This brave man, who risked his life for people he did not know and owed nothing to, became a legend and a symbol of resourcefulness and self-sacrifice. Monuments, schools and foundations have been erected in his name around the world, stamps have been issued bearing his image, movies were made and books were written, all of them begging the question: What makes a man behave this way and not another way? What would we have done in the same situation? This year, as Wallenberg would have turned 100, the world also marked 70 years since the Wannsee Conference (a gathering of the top Nazi echelon to discuss practical methods of exterminating the Jews in Europe and outside it), 50 years since the Eichmann trial, and the seventh International Holocaust Remembrance Day (which was enacted by the United Nations in 2005). The year of Raoul Wallenberg, initiated by the Swedish government, took a back seat to some of these other events around the world. But the message of compassion that his story relates is the clearest message of all. In October 1943, when it became known that Sweden had provided shelter to some 7,000 Danish Jews, Israeli poet Nathan Alterman published his poem The Swedish Tongue, in which he praised the Swedish language for not resorting to linguistic acrobatics like the tongues of other nations who found excuses to prevent the entry of Jews and simply said entrance allowed. A year later, Raoul Wallenberg epitomized that Swedish motto. The author is a professor at Tel Aviv Universitys School of Jewish Studies.
