Standing up for what’s just and right

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross

This month sees one of the more poignant milestones in our calendar. Jan. 17 marks the date in 1945 on which Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was arrested by the Red Army and never heard from again.

I’m fairly sure we all know the broad strokes of the story of Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg, the Swedish patrician who sidestepped his country’s neutrality during World War II to go to Hungary in 1944 and interfere with the Nazi deportation of that country’s Jews.

Hungary’s internal politics were skewed, with a bizarre equilibrium between fascists and communists creating a stasis that largely protected the country’s Jewish population from systemic persecution. Th at changed after Germany’s occupation of Hungary in April of 1944: the S.S. immediately began processing Hungarian Jews for transit to death camps in Poland. Almost 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported by early July.

But, by that July, German troops were needed elsewhere to counter Allied advances following the Normandy invasion the previous month. Moreover, Hungary’s sudden turnaround in agreeing to deport its Jews had brought the country under international moral indictment. Facing diplomatic pressure from the King of Sweden and Pope Pius XII and renewed military threats from Roosevelt and Churchill, Hungarian premier Miklós Horthy persuaded the German authorities to suspend Jewish deportations for a while.

That was the window of opportunity into which Raoul Wallenberg stepped when he arrived in Budapest as an agent of the Red Cross attached to the Swedish legation. Well funded with money from Jewish and other relief organizations, Wallenberg would stalk the loading platform at the train station, handing out diplomatic passes to scores of Jews being loaded for transshipment. Claiming they were all Swedish citizens, he loaded them into vans painted yellow and blue, and housed them in buildings identified as “Swedish Embassy Annex” until safe transportation out of the country could be arranged for them. And, as the Red Army closed in, he offered to testify in war-crimes trials on behalf of Adolf Eichmann if the Nazi tactician could prevent Hungarian fascists’ plan to blow up the Jewish ghetto. Which is where our heroic story ends. On Jan. 17 of 1945, Soviet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky brought in Raoul Wallenberg on charges of espionage. That was the last anyone heard of the Swedish diplomat.

My San Francisco Bay-area neighbor, Annette Lantos, and her husband, our Congressman Tom Lantos, were among the Hungarian Jews rescued by Raoul Wallenberg. When Annette’s postcardwriting campaign persuaded President Carter to broach the question of Wallenberg with the Russian ambassador, the Soviets responded that their government could not be expected to comment about anyone not a citizen of the United States. Rep. Lantos and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan responded by pushing through a 1981 act of Congress making Raoul Wallenberg an honorary American citizen. That was a symbolic gesture worthy of Wallenberg himself.

Back in the 1970s, there were some grass-roots efforts to declare Jan. 17, the day of his arrest, as “Raoul Wallenberg Day,” a celebration of moral courage in defying injustice. That idea never went anywhere in this country (although in Canada, Wallenberg Day on Jan. 17 has been a national observance since 2001).

With or without an officially sanctioned observance, Raoul Wallenberg is a reminder that there are always those with the personal strength and moral courage to stand up and affirm that which is just and right when morally weak people are sidetracked by political rancor and economic anxiety and intergroup stridency. In today’s America, that is a good thing to stop and think about — and not just on Jan. 17.

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross serves at Jewish Congregation of Marco Island.