Homage to Wallenberg

In a simple ceremony on a Jerusalem hillside next week, the Jewish people will pay homage to Raoul Wallen berg, the Swedish diplomat who helped save 100,000 Budapest Jews from the Nazis.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, will on Dec. If plant a tree bearing his name in the "Avenue of Righteous Gentiles," commemorating those who stretched out a helping hand in the Jewish people’s blackest hour. Unlike previous recipients of this honor, Wallenberg will not be present. A victim of Stalin’s all-embracing paranoia, he was seized as a spy by the Russians at the time of Budapest’s liberation.

The Soviet Union says he died in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1947. Sweden is not convinced and his family hopes that Wallenberg, who would now be 67, may have survived, as a number of former prisoners have testified.

REAWAKENING PUBLIC CONCERN

The Jerusalem ceremony follows a tireless campaign by the family to reawaken public concern about the case. They want it to be treated like those of Anatoly Shcharansky and other Soviet prisoners, whose relatives at least have the assurance of knowing they are alive.

In less than a year, the campaign has achieved startling success. For the first time, the United States, which prompted Wallenberg’s wartime mission to rescue Budapest Jewry, has publicly joined efforts to get at the truth.

President Carter recently confirmed that the U.S. raised the Wallenberg case with the Russians at the summit meeting with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in Vienna last summer. The Russians adamantly maintained that Wallenberg is dead. Carter and leading U.S. Senators have since lodged fresh inquiries with Brezhnev.

The first shot in the campaign was fired in May when Mrs. Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg’s half-sister, gave a press conference in London hosted at the House of Commons by MP Greville Janner. She and her other brother, nuclear physicist Guy von Dardel, then flew to Israel where Premier Menachem Begin appealed to Carter to raise the issue with Brezhnev at the Vienna summit. Subsequently, Mrs. Lagergren visited Washington and this week Prof. von Dardel is on a private visit to Moscow.

BASIS FOR CONTINUING INQUIRIES

The inquiries are prompted not only by the alleged sightings of Wallenberg, of which the latest was in 1975, but by the sketchiness of the Russian account of his death and by the fact that it took the Russians over 12 years to admit that he had been in their hands in the first place.

Among those engaged in the campaign is Por Anger, who has just retired as Sweden’s Ambassador to Canada. A colleague of Wallenberg in Budapest during the war, Anger recently published his memoirs. He criticizes previous Swedish governments for hot securing Wallenberg’s release in the early 1950s and accuses them of sacrificing him on the "altar of neutrality." As long as there is no proof to the contrary, Anger maintains that Wallenberg is still alive.

A sensational reminder of Wallenberg’s war work emerged only a few weeks ago when a Canadian woman, reading a report about it in the Toronto Star, identified herself as a baby who had been born secretly in Wallenberg’s flat at the end of 1944. Until reading the article, Mrs. Yvonne Singer, now a mother of two, had never been told of the circumstances of her birth or about Wallenberg, who was her godfather and had suggested one of her names.