A life-sized statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, is to be erected in Budapest, the city where he saved up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis and where he was seized by Stalin’s agents as a suspected spy.
Following a decision of the Budapest Municipal Council, reported in the Hungarian Communist daily Nepszabadsag, it will be unveiled next month in the capital’s fashionable Number Two District on the Buda side of the Danube River. The event will form part of the program of the European Executive meeting of the World Jewish Congress, from May 16-19 in Budapest.
Imre Varga, one of Hungary’s leading sculptors and a member of its Communist Party’s Central Committee, has produced the youthful likeness of Wallenberg whose fate, more than four decades after his abduction, still arouses worldwide speculation and overcasts relations between the Soviet Union and his native Sweden.
The city already has a small street named after Wallenberg on the opposite bank of the Danube where many Jews were sheltered from the Nazis in Swedish protected buildings. But the new statue will have additional significance.
Four years after the war a monument in Wallenberg’s honor was erected in Budapest’s Saint Stephen Park by a grateful Jewish community. Standing 18 feet high, it consisted of a naked man wrestling with a snake. Its plinth bore a medallion of Wallenberg’s head and a glowing tribute to his actions.
However, the night before its official dedication on April 17, 1949, it was removed, only to turn up later in another part of Hungary, stripped of the references to Wallenberg.
In recent years, the Hungarians have become acutely conscious of the similarities between this episode and Wallenberg’s own disappearance.
This in turn will be powerfully symbolized by the new bronze statue of Wallenberg which will stand facing a block of pink Swedish granite on which the sculptor has depicted the original monument to him and the original testimonial to his actions.
Wallenberg, then aged 32, arrived in Budapest in July 1944 on a mission to save as many Jews as possible from being deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. Together with other diplomatic representatives, such as the Swiss Consul Carl Lutz, he issued protective passports to Hungarian Jews and flew his country’s flag on buildings in which the Jews were sheltered. On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg was taken under Soviet “protection” and has never been seen subsequently outside the Soviet Union. According to a Soviet statement issued in 1957, he died of heart failure in the Lubyanka Prison on July 17, 1947. The Swedes have never believed this and continue to press for his release — he would now be 74 — or a more convincing explanation of his fate.
As recently as last July, the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm informed the Swedish government that Wallenberg is dead. It did so following inquiries by Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson during a visit to Moscow a few months earlier.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
