Nazi Hunter (31 page)

Wallenberg didn’t even dignify Eichmann’s attack with a cool answer. Instead, he presented Eichmann with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of cigarettes, for, while Raoul’s
research had shown that Eichmann was incorruptible and treacherous, he had also recognized that the vocational school dropout and middle-class hardware heir from Linz would be awed by an aristocrat
treating him as an equal.

After they’d shared a couple of shots of Scotch, Eichmann calmed down and admitted: ‘You know, Wallenberg, I have nothing against you personally; actually, I rather like you.’
He even offered to allow a trainload of ‘your protected Jews’ to travel to Sweden if Raoul would raise a ransom for them. Wallenberg hesitated because he smelled the kind of rat that
might allow Eichmann to deport the rest of Budapest’s Jews while the neutral nations were applauding his token generosity.

Eichmann’s good humour was short-lived. A few days later, an International Red Cross official who had been encouraged by Raoul’s example to speak up to Eichmann drew this withering
response: ‘I am going to kill that Jew dog Wallenberg.’

Soon after this was reported back to Raoul, a sympathetic Hungarian policeman warned him that he had orders to kill him. A little later in November, a German armoured truck rammed the
Swedish second secretary’s car at high speed, but Wallenberg was using another vehicle. He also took to sleeping at different addresses from night to night.

‘You see, I am back again,’ Eichmann had greeted the Jewish Council of Budapest in mid-October after Horthy fell. ‘You forgot that Hungary is still in the shadow of the Reich.
My arms are long and I can reach the Jews of Budapest as well.’ He vowed that they would ‘be driven out on foot this time.’

On 8 November 1944, after the Allied armies finally cut off the rail routes to Auschwitz, Eichmann ordered a death march to the Austrian border for as many Jews as could be rounded up in
Budapest. Nazi Germany’s official excuse for this newest atrocity was that its vast underground aircraft and armament works in Austria were running short of forced labourers, but no trains
were available to transport replacements. Since any surviving able-bodied Hungarian Jewish males and females were already in labour service companies, most of the death marchers proved to be
children, mothers and middle-aged women, and older folk of no use to the Third Reich’s manpower needs. The pretence that these people were being sent to work in Austria was merely the
paperwork of extermination, which continued to take lives long after the machinery of Auschwitz and other death camps had been dismanded.

Though it was a bitterly cold November on the Hungarian plain, some 30,000 men, women, and children were rounded up in Budapest and sent off in groups of a thousand to walk to the border, 150
miles away, without any food, shelter, or medical care. Women in high heels and men who had been working without jackets when they were grabbed were paraded down the boulevards and across the
Danube bridges as ‘the Jews lent to Hitler to help Hungary win the war.’ Whipped forward by Hungarian guards, those who faltered were shot on the spot. Bertha Schwartz, seventy-four,
reached towards a guard for support and was killed before her hand ever touched him.

In several hundred hours of audio-visual history – ‘Testimony to the Truth’, unrehearsed videotaped interviews with survivors – the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles
has gathered many accounts of that death march. Susan Tabor, later a librarian at Hebrew Union College in New York City, has recalled what happened soon after it began for her and her mother:

‘When we reached the outskirts of the city, we were herded into a brick factory. There were holes in the floor, which could not be seen in the darkness. Some people
fell and were trampled over because the guards hurried us mercilessly into the building. Once we were all in, there was hardly room on the floor for everyone to sit. There was no light, no water,
no food, no doctors, no first aid, no sanitary facilities, no one was allowed outside. Armed Nazis walked around stepping on people, abusing them, cursing and shooting. We were beaten because our
spirit was broken.’

Elaborating in 1985 upon her experience, Susan Tabor explained: ‘We didn’t talk to each other. We were treated like animals and we felt like animals. One Nazi couldn’t stand
the screams of a woman who had a broken foot and couldn’t move, so he stamped on her head. Her brains came out. We still didn’t talk to each other.’

Before dawn the next day, when those who survived the night were supposed to set out for the border, there was the blare and glare of loudspeakers and lights and then, amidst all the black
uniforms and jackboots, a man in civilian clothes materialized in the doorway. It was Wallenberg, whom she remembers as ‘a frail-looking man with a sensitive face. We just stared at him, not
even realizing that he was talking to us, not even comprehending what he was saying. He was telling us he had negotiated with the Nazis for the release of those of us with
Schutzpässe
. When the Germans weren’t looking, he slipped extra passes to some women. He also gave us food and medical supplies.’

Even more than that, says Susan Tabor, ‘he gave us hope. He gave us back our dignity, our humanity. Can you fathom the impact of what his being there meant to us? Someone cared, someone
thought we were human beings worth saving. Someone who had no obligation to us fought for us! He saved our lives just by caring about us. We began to care about ourselves.’

Unblessed with
Schutzpässe
, Susan and her mother were nonetheless so emboldened by Wallenberg’s visit that, a few hours later, they quietly gave their Yellow Star coats to a
couple of shivering friends and slipped away from the death march: ‘We didn’t know if we were going to be shot in the back or not. Nazi soldiers were all around. No one stopped us and
we just kept walking’ – back to Budapest, where Christian friends hid them until the war was over.

Though Wallenberg freed a few hundred, many thousands of others
had to make the death march to the border crossing at Hegyeshalom – and almost a
quarter of them died en route. At Issaszeg, seven men too sick to walk were shot and their wives were ordered to dig their graves. Then the widows, too, were shot. A Red Cross officer –
bearing food and medicine for the marchers, but not always allowed to deliver his vital cargo – has described the view from the open road to Hegyeshalom:

‘Endless columns of deported persons were marched along: ragged and starving people, mortally tired, among them old and wizened creatures who could hardly crawl. Gendarmes were driving
them with the butt-end of their rifles, with sticks and with whips. They had to cover thirty kilometres [nearly nineteen miles] a day until they came to a “resting place”. This
generally was the market-place of a town. They were driven into the square and spent the nights in the open, huddled together and shivering with cold in the chill of a November or December night.
On the morning following the “rest”, we saw the number of corpses that would never again rise from the frosty ground of the market square.’

On 16 November 1944, the head of the
Waffen
SS, General Hans Jüttner, drove from Vienna to Budapest with Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, to consider alternative
deportation routes. Halfway to the Hungarian capital, Eichmann’s alternative came to them with what Jüttner described in 1948 testimony as a ‘truly terrifying impression’:
columns of women, spaced twenty-five or thirty kilometres apart. ‘Between the individual columns, we met stragglers who had been unable to march on and lay in the road ditch. It was
immediately apparent that they would never be able to march as far as the frontier.’

Upon arrival in Budapest, General Jüttner
³²
pulled rank on Eichmann and ordered the death march to stop immediately. The next day, 7500
Jews on the road were brought back to Budapest. Four days later, with his VIP visitors gone, Eichmann gave orders to resume the death march.

Around that time, the US State Department cabled Iver Olsen, the WRB representative in Stockholm, to ‘
PLEASE TRANSMIT TO THE
SWEDISH GOVERNMENT THIS
GOVERNMENT
’
S SINCERE APPRECIATION OF THE HUMANITARIAN ACTIVITIES OF THE SWEDISH GOVERNMENT AND OF THE COURAGE AND INGENUITY DISPLAYED BY MR WALLENBERG IN RENDERING
ASSISTANCE TO THE PERSECUTED JEWS IN HUNGARY
.’ While Raoul hadn’t directly influenced the four-day suspension of the death march, Eichmann somehow held him and Charles Lutz, the
Swiss Consul, ‘responsible for this outrage’ through their ‘abuse’ of safe-conduct passes, he told Dr Kastner of the Jewish community on 21 November. Lutz had gone so far as
to list 957 ‘protected’ Jews on a single Swiss passport he’d issued.

With the resumption of the death march, Wallenberg set up checkpoints along the route where his men and others from neutral nations could hinder deportations of people holding protective papers.
Then he drove with two Hungarian Jewish aides – his chauffeur, Langfelder, and Jonny Moser, his very Aryan-looking errand boy – and a Swedish Embassy colleague, Per Anger, to the
village of Gönyü, a ‘resting place’ where a thousand Jews were lodged in two barns and hundreds more on moored barges. There they rescued more Jews with Swedish papers and
unloaded sacks of food for them. As they worked, they heard the screams of those who could stand no more agony and were leaping to death in the icy river. What they didn’t know was that, in
the morning, those unfit to walk were pushed into the Danube by SS and Arrow Cross men.

Back on the road, Per Anger recalls passing ‘masses of unfortunates, more dead than alive. Ashen-faced, they staggered forward under proddings and blows from the soldiers’ rifle
butts. The road was edged with bodies. We had the car full of food, which we succeeded in passing out despite such help being prohibited’ but it did not go very far. At Hegyeshalom, we saw
how those who arrived were turned over to an SS unit under Eichmann, who counted them like cattle. “Four hundred eighty-nine – check!” The Hungarian officer received a receipt
that said everything was in order.’

Several cattle cars had been loaded with a hundred Jews each. Other boxcars waited with open doors as new hundreds were counted and assembled on the platform. Most were ticketed for Strasshof,
the nearest Austrian concentration camp.

Wallenberg’s pleas were ignored by Eichmann, who withdrew frostily, and were heard perfunctorily by his deputy, Wisliceny, who
had already shown ‘mercy’
by rejecting a few handfuls of dying marchers as too weak to travel. When the Hungarians refused to accept them, they were turned loose and told to walk back to Budapest. Not one of them survived
the return death march.

With time running out, Wallenberg left Wisliceny and ran towards the deportees on the platform. Shouting that those with Swedish passes should join him, he was stopped by Arrow Cross bayonets
prodding his chest. Retreating, Raoul ran around to the other side of the train and climbed atop the sealed boxcars to shout through the slats: ‘Are there any Swedish-protected Jews in there
who’ve lost their papers?’ To answering cries, Wallenberg shoved blank
Schutzpässe
through the openings and at any hands or fingers that appeared at his feet.

As he ran from freight car to freight car, leaping from roof to roof like a lithe movie hero, the Arrow Cross fired a volley over his head. He climbed down, but returned a few minutes later with
a squad of Hungarian soldiers and a gendarme officer he’d bribed with rum and cigarettes.

By then, Wisliceny had withdrawn from the never-ending confrontation and the Arrow Cross allowed Wallenberg to set up his tables and open up his large leather-bound Register of Protected Swedish
Jews. Reciting the most common Jewish names, he gave out ‘replacement’
Schutzpässe
to those who stepped forward; he vouched personally for those he pretended to recognize.
All the while, Jonny Moser circulated among the Jews murmuring ‘Raise your hands!’

He saved 300 of the 3000 Jews assembled at Hegyeshalom on 23 November 1944. To a listless grandmother, he apologized softly: ‘I am sorry. I want to save you all, but they will let me take
only a few. So please forgive me, but I must take the young ones first because I want to save a nation.’

Six days later, when Eichmann found freight cars to ferry the remaining Jews directly from Budapest instead of littering the road with their corpses, Raoul saved another 300
Jews at the Josefvaros Station even after a young SS officer pointed a revolver at his stomach. Hearing about this confrontation, Eichmann dispatched a trusted aide, Captain Theodor Dannecker
– who had been in charge of deporting the Jews of France, Italy, and Bulgaria to the death
camps as well as the attempt to kill Raoul in a convenient auto
‘accident’ – to the station to chase Wallenberg away. Dannecker did so at pistol point – and another 17,000 Jewish ‘workers’ were sent to die in ‘labour
camps’ in Western Hungary.
³³

Wallenberg and Eichmann – life and death sparring with each other while wrestling with the clock, or, as Wiesenthal puts it, ‘two enemies with the same enemy: time’ – had
one last face-to-face encounter in December 1944, with the sound and sight of Soviet artillery fire, already on the outskirts of Budapest, as backdrop.

Hearing that Eichmann had said ‘I know the war is lost, but I’m still going to win my war’, Wallenberg had invited him to his apartment for dinner in one last effort to
dissuade him. Then, in his flurry of activity and changes of address for safety from Eichmann, Dannecker, and others, Raoul forgot about the event.

He happened to be at home, but was taken aback when Eichmann and an aide, both in full uniform, appeared at his door. After serving his guest a drink, he ducked into another room and phoned Lars
Berg, a Swedish Embassy attaché who had a cook and some food on hand. Dinner, Raoul then informed his guest with debonair aplomb, would be at Berg’s on Gellért Hill.

During an elegant meal on fine china with rare wines, they talked about everything but war. Over coffee and brandies in the sitting-room, however, Wallenberg extinguished the lights and treated
his guest to a picture-window view of the Red rockets’ glare and the rolling thunder of an artillery barrage. ‘Look how close the Bolsheviks are,’ he told Eichmann. ‘Your
war is almost over. Nazism is doomed, finished, and so are those who cling to this hatred until the very last. It’s the end of the Nazis, the end of Hitler, the end of Eichmann.’