A Soviet diplomat has, for the first time, attended a ceremony honoring Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War II and disappeared into the Soviet Gulag.
Piotr Bogdanov, Moscow’s ambassador to Belgium, was one of the many dignitaries at the solemn ceremony organized jointly by the Belgian committee for Raoul Wallenberg and Foreign Minister Leo Tindemans.
It was held Thursday night at Egmont Palace, a government house. The royal family lent its imprimatur by the presence of Prince Philippe, son of Crown Prince Albert.
The Soviets have studiously ignored Wallenberg since his arrest early in 1945, when the Red Army entered Budapest.
After first denying any knowledge of him, the Kremlin’s official line has been that Wallenberg died of a heart attack in a prison near Moscow in 1947, at the age of 35.
But persistent reports have surfaced over the years that he has been seen alive.
His half brother, Guy von Dardel, told the gathering that “the presence of the Soviet ambassador is a significant gesture that shows that (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) policy gives us hope for a change of the Soviet attitude toward the Wallenberg case.”
SOVIETS NOW INVESTIGATING
Tindemans noted that in Vienna, during the recent East-West Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, several Western representatives asked for an in-depth investigation of Wallenberg’s fate.
“The Soviet ambassador at the conference replied that new inquiries were on their way and that the Soviet authorities would not hesitate to deliver more precise information as soon as it could be obtained,” Tindemans said.
At a news conference here earlier, Simone Lucki, a lawyer who chairs the Belgian Wallenberg committee, urged the Soviet authorities to free him and to clear up the mystery of his disappearance.
“The testimony of several people and precise facts collected over the years have shown that Wallenberg is, in all likelihood, alive today at the age of 76,” she said.
Wallenberg is credited with saving more than 100,000 Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps by supplying them with Swedish documents and sheltering them at the Swedish legation in Budapest.
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