Volume 28, Number 17 · November 5, 1981
A Good Man
By Leonard Schapiro
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust
by John Bierman
Viking, 218 pp., $12.95
The horrifying story of the sufferings of Hungarian Jewry at the hands of the Germans has most recently been studied in detail in a monumental work, Randolph Braham's The Politics of Genocide.[1] When the Germans occupied Hungary, there were 246,803 Jews in Budapest (over 800,000 in the entire country), including 62,350 converts to Christianity, or descendants of converts—whom, of course, the Germans did not distinguish from Jews. Of this total, 100,803 were killed in one way or another. That the figure was not higher was in part due to the fact that deportation of Jews to the murder camps was halted by defeat in the war, and in part to the efforts of both Jews and non-Jews and of the latter particularly of the Swiss and Swedish governments. When the threat to the Jews became apparent, the US government appealed to the neutrals to do what they could to save the Jews of Hungary. The Swiss consulate in Budapest played a valiant role in issuing passports to Jews, especially children. But it was the dramatic activity by the Swedish special diplomatic envoy, Raoul Wallenberg, that has caught the imagination of the free world, and remained a legend ever since.
Review, 2769 words
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