Raoul Wallenberg Day Celebrated Across Canada

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Raoul Wallenberg Day Celebrated Across Canada

By Kajsa Norman

“Today, we pay tribute to Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who risked his life to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from persecution and certain death during the Holocaust,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a public statement on January 17, Raoul Wallenberg Day.

“As a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, Mr. Wallenberg led one of the most daring and successful rescue efforts of the Nazi era,” Trudeau continued. “I encourage all Canadians to reflect on Raoul Wallenberg’s remarkable story, and ask themselves how we can embrace his values in our personal lives, in order to build a more equal, safer, and fairer world.”

The United Nations has called Wallenberg “the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century,” and his story is the ultimate example of how one person, guided by bravery and compassion, can make a huge difference and transform the course of history.

“To me there is no other choice. I’ve accepted this assignment and I could never return to Stockholm without the knowledge that I have done everything in human power to save as many Jews as possible.”

This was Raoul Wallenberg’s response to his colleague Per Anger at the Swedish legation in Budapest on January 10, 1945. Anger, who would years later become Sweden’s ambassador to Canada, had urged Wallenberg to leave Hungary and seek safety.

Since the summer of 1944, Wallenberg had worked tirelessly at the Swedish legation in Budapest to save thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing each of them a “Schutz-Pass” – special passports, printed locally, identifying the bearer as a Swedish subject.

“It is amazing in how many cases these fictitious documents, claiming the bearer to be a Swedish subject, influenced the brutal murderous Nazis,” says Holocaust survivor George Preger, former chair of the Swedish Canadian Chamber of Commerce who in 1985 accepted the first honorary Canadian citizenship on behalf of Raoul Wallenberg.

Wallenberg also created a network of safe houses operated under the protection of the Swedish state where Jews fleeing persecution could seek refuge. Over the course of six months, he saved more Jews from the horrors of the concentration camps than any other individual, organization, or government. Through his methods, Wallenberg foreshadowed what would become the foundational principles of international human rights and humanitarian law, becoming a role model for what we now call protective diplomacy.

For this he paid with his life. On January 17, Wallenberg went to meet with representatives of the Soviet forces east of Budapest. He was arrested and eventually brought to Moscow never to be heard from again. The circumstances surrounding his death remain unknown to this day.

“It is essential that we never forget such moral courage and it’s equally important that we draw inspiration from it in the world we live in today. We have only recently witnessed how fragile our democracies are,” said the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ann Linde, in her speech at the virtual Wallenberg Day commemorative event organized on January 17 by the Embassy of Sweden and the Swedish Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

The event was recorded and is available here: https://youtu.be/ wv83tnlSf-s.