LOST HERO: The Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg

by Frederick E. & Thurston Clarke Werbell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1981

Wallenberg is dead. Despite the misleading title and subtitle, Clarke and Swedish-born rabbi Werbell have no doubts about this: they place the death (probably by torture) circa the mid-Sixties in a Soviet mental asylum; they recount 1981 confirmations of the fact by two of Wallenberg's most resolute and long-standing Swedish searchers; and they argue that no sightings of Wallenberg in Soviet prisons predate the mid-Sixties. So, while John Bierman's Righteous Gentile (p. 844) concentrated on the Wallenberg ""mystery,"" this complementary study focuses instead on Wallenberg's achievement: not only his rescue 30,000 Hungarian Jews (who became ad hoc Swedish Jews) from the depradations of Eichmann and the native Arrow Cross fascists--but also his saving, thereby, of ""humanity's reputation."" And the result, though occasionally overdramatized, is a vivid, spacious recreation of his day-to-day Budapest heroics in 1944. The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Holocaust, Wallenberg was as realistic (never too fastidious to bribe the Nazis with money if there was no other way to save people) as he was quick-thinking: palling Jews from sealed freight cars and loudly bluffing out the validity of those fake ""Swedish-citizen"" passes. Not glossed-over, either, are the possible reasons for Wallenberg's arrest by the conquering Russians: that he was caught carrying jewels in the gas tank of his car (the possessions, it is claimed here, of Jews whom Wallenberg saved, and which he promised to sell for them back in Sweden), or that there had been a cell of anti-Soviet spies in the Swedish legation. And blame for the endless incarceration is spread around: the longer that Sweden, the US, and Israel put off pressuring the Russians for an accounting of what they'd done to Wallenberg, the harder it became for them to admit they'd had him that long. On balance, then, a rather riskier book than Bierman's quiet gathering of evidence--but a more dramatic one too, very stirring and very sad.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1981

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1981

Categories: NONFICTION