Asher Hanukaiev, a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union, claims he met and spoke with missing Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in a Sverdlovsk prison more than 10 years ago. He said Wallenberg told him he was arrested because he had helped save Jews.
Wallenberg was sent to Budapest during World War II on a special diplomatic mission. He is credited with saving the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews by giving them shelter at the Swedish Embassy and by other means that enabled them to avoid deportation and almost certain death in Nazi concentration camps.
Wallenberg was arrested when the Red Army entered Budapest in 1945 and has not been heard from since. The Soviet authorities claim he died in prison more than 30 years ago and strenuously deny that he may still be alive. But over the years, former inmates of Soviet prisons claimed to have seen him.
Hanukaiev, visiting friends in Beersheba last week, told them he spent four days with Wallenberg in a Sverdlovsk prison cell in March, 1972. He said “Wallenberg lay then on a stretcher and he told me he had stomach trouble,” according to a report in a Beersheba newspaper today.
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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.
