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Wallenberg Nominated for Nobel Prize

January 14, 1983
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Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis and who disappeared from Budapest in 1945 when Soviet forces liberated that city from Nazi occupation, has been nominated as a candidate for the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize.

Anterik Wikstroem, a member of Sweden’s Parliament and former Minister of Culture, who nominated Wallenberg, said the missing diplomat deserved the prize for his humanitarian work. Soviet authorities claim Wallenberg died of a heart attack in a Moscow jail in 1947. Sweden, however, has taken seriously accounts from former prisoners who claim to have seen him that he may still be alive somewhere in the USSR.

Two weeks ago a recent immigrant to Israel said he had spent four days with Wallenberg in a Soviet prison in Sverdlovsk in 1972. The immigrant, Asher Kanukaiev, said he saw the former diplomat in the prison hospital where they were both undergoing treatment. He said Wallenberg told him that he was being treated for stomach troubles.

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