Tuesday Treasures

Tom the backroads traveller hosts this weekly meme.


August 2018 - Montreal QC

Hidden behind Christ Church Cathedral.

The best known Righteous Gentile honoured by Jews around the world is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and businessman who rescued around 60,000 Hungarian Jews during World War 2. He was considered a rich playboy and got the job because no one else wanted it.
In July 1944 the Swedish Foreign Ministry, at the request of Jewish and refugee organizations in the USA, sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest as an attache to the embassy there.
When Wallenberg reached the Swedish legation in Budapest in July 1944, the campaign against the Jews of Hungary had already been underway for several months. Between May and July 1944, Eichmann and his associates had successfully deported over 400,000 Jews by freight train. Of those deported all but 15,000 were sent directly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in southern Poland. By the time of Wallenberg’s arrival there were only 230,000 Jews remaining in Hungary.
Wallenberg immediately began issuing Swedish ‘protective passports’ with the less well-known diplomats Carl-Ivan Danielsson (1880-1963) and Per Anger (1913-2002). He also set up a series of safe houses placing flags of neutral countries on houses where Jews could seek asylum. He even followed deportation trains, distributing food and clothing and actually pulling some people off the cars along the way.
When the Soviet army entered Budapest in January 1945, the authorities arrested Wallenberg for espionage and sent him to Moscow. In the early 1950s the Soviet Union announced that he had in fact died of a heart attack in 1947. Several reports later suggested that Wallenberg was still alive, but none was ever confirmed.
It is commonly believed that Wallenberg was executed by the Soviets, who suspected him of spying for the USA.