Jeane Kirkpatrick, American Ambassador to the United Nations, has called on the Soviet Union to provide information on the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of nearly 100,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps in World War II.
Kirkpatrick made the appeal last week at a ceremony in New York marking the 39th anniversary of Wallenberg’s arrest by Soviet forces in Budapest. The event was sponsored by the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States in affiliation with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The Committee believes that Wallenberg, now 71, is alive in a Soviet prison despite statements by the Soviet Union that he died in 1947.
Kirkpatrick declared that Wallenberg was not arrested by “accident” because the Russians “knew full well who he was and what he was doing.” The real Soviet attitude toward the Swedish diplomat, Kirkpatrick said, was demonstrated in Budapest in 1948, four years after his arrest, when a status honoring Wallenberg was removed from Budapest “because he stood for freedom.”
The envoy read a statement issued by Secretary of State George Shultz in which he declared that the Kremlin has a “moral obligation to put to rest, once and for all, the questions that continue to arise about Raoul Wallenberg …. We call on the Soviet government to provide a full accounting of the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.”
The Secretary of State, speaking at the Stockholm East-West Conference on Security in Europe, noted reports from survivors of Soviet prison camps that the Swede is still alive in a camp or prison. Congress made him an honorary U.S. citizen in 1981.
Calling Wallenberg a “hero of our time,” Kirkpatrick said he was a “symbolic figure whose work and fate dramatizes the central problem of our age, which is the problem of totalitarianism.”
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.
