A Ukrainian woman who spent time in a Soviet prison camp has told the European Parliament she met another inmate in 1956 who may have been Raoul Wallenberg.
Wallenberg is the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II before mysteriously disappearing in the Soviet Gulag in 1945. A string of reports of sightings over the years have kept alive the hope among some that he may still be alive.
The testimony of Natalia Schinkarenko, if true, would contradict claims by Soviet authorities, seemingly corroborated by files discovered in recent years, that Wallenberg died in 1947 in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison.
Schinkarenko, who is now 64, was detained in a prison camp near the formerly closed city of Gorky for “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
In this camp, she said she met a man named “Raoulis Wallenbergis” during a visit by prisoners from another camp.
“The gray-haired man appeared to be ill,” she told reporters at a news conference here. “He was playing piano in a choir and was singing in German,” she said with great emotion. “After the ‘show’ ended, another member of the choir told me that the man was from Sweden and had worked at the embassy,” she said.
Schinkarenko produced a photograph of the choir which has been scrutinized by specialists who find disturbing resemblances between Wallenbergis and Wallenberg.
The Ukrainian made the link between the two men several years later after reading articles on the Wallenberg case.
The news conference was organized by the Belgian Committee for Raoul Wallenberg, led by Simone Lucki, and the European People’s Party, a group affiliated with the Christian Democrats in the European Parliament.
Lucki, a Brussels lawyer, has been working tirelessly for years to prove that Wallenberg is still alive, despite Soviet information to the contrary.
Last December, the European Parliament passed a resolution urging the Russian government to authorize examination of all files in connection with the Wallenberg case.
Meanwhile, Brussels University, with the support of Belgium’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, has proposed that Wallenberg be granted the 1993 Nobel peace prize.
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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.
