'The mystery must be resolved': what befell Swede who saved Hungarian Jews?
Seventy-five years
after the amateur Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg embarked on his desperate
mission to rescue Budapest’s Jews, his descendants still do not know how, when
or why he died. This week, they are
travelling to Stockholm to demand the government finally does a bit more to
help them find out. “I want specific
answers to specific questions,” said Marie von Dardel-Dupuy, the niece of the
young architect and businessman whose humanitarian operation
is thought to have saved the lives of as many as 30,000 Hungarian Jews as the
second world war neared its end.
Von Dardel-Dupuy, who
lives in Switzerland,
told the Guardian: “He was a great man who wasn’t afraid to do the impossible.
He deserves for us to know what happened to him. His story is unfinished - the
mystery must be resolved. There are still so many closed doors, and we must
have help in opening them.”
Raoul Wallenberg
disappeared in 1945 after being summoned to
Soviet military occupation
headquarters in Budapest. Photograph: EPA
No formal, official
announcement has ever been made about the fate of Wallenberg, who has become an
honorary citizen of four countries and the subject of countless books and films
since vanishing in early 1945 into the the Soviet prison system, where he is
presumed to have died.Together with
historians, the diplomat’s closest family have for decades wrestled with
Soviet, and subsequently Russian, authorities, who they are now certain have
withheld crucial information and, at times, actively misled researchers....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/raoul-wallenberg-family-of-diplomat-who-saved-hungarian-jews