Nazi Hunter (32 page)

Several of the people in that room quavered, but Eichmann didn’t flinch at Raoul’s attack. ‘All right, I agree with you,’ Eichmann admitted calmly. ‘I’ve
never believed in all of Hitler’s ideology, but it has, after all, given me a good career, a good life. You’re right, Wallenberg. Soon, very soon, this comfortable life will end. No
more airplanes bringing women and wine from France. The Russians will take my horses, my dogs, and my palace on Rose Hill. They’d probably shoot me on the spot. For me there’s no
escape, no
liberation. There are, however, some consolations. If I continue to eliminate our enemies until the end, it may delay our defeat – even for just a few days.
And then, when I finally do walk to the gallows, at least I’ll know I’ve completed my mission.’

This was a rare burst of eloquence for the socially ill-at-ease Eichmann, particularly among hostile neutrals, but Simon Wiesenthal feels it was quite honest, for ‘there was no question
Eichmann knew the war was lost, but he wanted it to be won on one front: the liquidation of the Jews.’

After Wallenberg persisted with ‘Why don’t you call off your people? Why not leave now while you still can?’, Eichmann pulled himself together and declared stiffly,
‘Budapest will be held as though it were Berlin.’ Saying his farewells, he thanked his hosts for ‘an exceptionally charming and interesting evening’, and then added to
Wallenberg: ‘Now don’t think we’re friends. We’re not. I plan to do everything I can to keep you from saving your Jews. Your diplomatic passport won’t protect you from
everything. Even a neutral diplomat can meet with an accident.’

When Wallenberg nodded and mentioned his car’s ramming, Eichmann practically promised him another. Neither man could have imagined the accident of history that awaited Wallenberg less than
a month later.

Eichmann fled Budapest a few nights later when the Hungarian government fled to Sopron on the border of what used to be Austria. For a few terrible weeks, Budapest belonged to
the rampaging Arrow Cross hoodlums plus such freelance fanatics as Mrs Wilmos Salzer, a society lady who liked to burn naked Jewesses with candles . . . Kurt Rettman, a former telephone company
official who believed in shooting Jews on sight . . . and Father Andras Kun, a Minorite monk clad in black cape and carrying giant crucifix in one hand, snub-nosed revolver in the other, and
hate-literature in his robes. All three practised what they preached – and so did their followers. As his executioners aimed their rifles at Jews they had tortured within an inch of their
lives, Father Kun would give the command: ‘In the holy name of Jesus, fire!’

The Swedish mission declined to follow the fascist government to Sopron, but, amidst the anarchy that reigned in besieged Budapest, diplomacy was obsolete in early 1945. Raoul Wallenberg roamed
Rettman’s torture chamber to pluck out those for whom he could find rescuing words or lies. He would descend at dawn upon Danube embankments where Father Kun’s
teenage Sunday-schoolers waited for their mentor to come and bless them before pushing the ‘Christ-killers’ – already packaged in bundles of three – into the river.
Ironically, to bully them into untying their prey, Raoul’s best bribes no longer were rum and cigarettes, but Swedish
Schutzpässe
which might help these killers elude justice
when the Allies won. Though some say these documents, found on wanted men when they were apprehended, eventually compromised Wallenberg in Red Army eyes, he nevertheless dispensed them freely, for
a life saved now meant more to him than a criminal caught later.

The German troops doomed to defend Budapest to the last had no time to spare for the Final Solution. When their commandant ordered the central ghetto liquidated, Wallenberg informed him:
‘If you go ahead with this, I will personally see that you are hanged as a war criminal.’ The general rescinded his order. Seventy thousand lives were saved.

Playing for high stakes sometimes made Wallenberg exultant. ‘I
like
this dangerous game!’ he told an aide. ‘I
love
this dangerous game!’ Only once was
it too much for him to bear. Arriving too late at a ‘safe’ house that had been emptied of its Jews, he found it guarded by a frightened fourteen-year-old who told him in gestures that
all the inhabitants had been marched into the Danube and were dead. Then the boy made one more gesture. Having given information to the enemy, he held out his hand for a tip. Instead, Raoul burst
into tears.

The last time Wallenberg’s diplomatic colleague Per Anger saw him was on Wednesday, 10 January 1945, when Anger pleaded with Raoul to stay with all the other Swedes in the more secure
diplomatic quarter of Buda while the battle of Budapest raged through Pest. Wallenberg, however, insisted on staying in Pest, where the last of his surviving Jews were fighting for their lives
against time and the Arrow Cross.

As they drove through Pest, Anger remembers that ‘again and again we had to hit the brakes of the car, for the streets were blocked by dead bodies, horses, toppled trees, and shattered
buildings. But Wallenberg never hesitated at the danger.’

Anger asked him if he ever grew frightened.

‘Sure, it gets a little scary sometimes,’ Wallenberg conceded, ‘but for me there’s no choice. I’ve taken on this assignment and I’d
never be able to go back to Stockholm without knowing inside myself I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.’

When Wallenberg confessed to fear, Anger thought to himself: ‘Only a man who can admit that is genuinely courageous.’

In its reign of terror’s final days, the Arrow Cross – seeking to settle the score with Wallenberg by taking his life for all those he’d saved – raided his safest
‘safe house’, on Jókai Street, in the middle of the night and tore it apart looking for him. Failing to find him, they carted away all 280 Jews living there and, in the custody
of the perverted Mrs Salzer and the fanatical Father Kun, 180 of them perished within a week. One who barely survived the raid was Alice Breuer, the Jewish doctor who had been rescued from a
transport to Auschwitz by Wallenberg the previous summer. That had been many lives ago – for her entire family had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. Now she and a handful of
other surviving ‘Swedes’ stood on a bank of the Danube – facing the river with a firing squad behind them so they could fall right into their watery grave. Instead of shots,
however, a voice rang out: ‘These are Swedish citizens! Release them immediately and return their belongings to them!’

For Alice Breuer, it was the Second Coming of the messiah who had already saved her once: ‘For an instant, I thought: “
God has come to save us
.” Then I recognized
Raoul Wallenberg. To our astonishment, the executioners obeyed him. He seemed very tall indeed – and strong. He radiated power and dignity. There was truly a kind of divine aura about him on
that night.’

Today, Dr Breuer lives in Stockholm, where Raoul Wallenberg doesn’t.

With the fascists still hunting him, Wallenberg and his driver, Langfelder, caught what sleep they could at an International Red Cross house on Benczur street in Pest. There, on Saturday
morning, 13 January 1945, Wallenberg met his first Soviet ‘liberators’. He and Langfelder and the other transients had taken refuge in the basement kitchen while the heaviest fighting
raged outside. The Russians were advancing not only in the streets, but through ancient cisterns and corridors that connected the cellars of Pest. In the early hours, fifteen Russian soldiers
pounded a hole through the kitchen wall and entered in a cloud of plaster and dust.

Wallenberg immediately produced papers in Russian certifying that he was a Swedish diplomat and asked to see their commanding officer. Within hours, and sporadically
throughout the next three days, he was interrogated by both the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and the Red Army.

Between sessions with the Russians, Wallenberg moved freely through the liberated areas of Pest, resisting pleas from his friends to take sanctuary while the fighting still raged around him. He
was scheming to meet Marshal Rodion Malinovski, the Red Army commander who, while reconnoitring Pest, had spotted so many foreign flags that he’d wondered aloud whether he was liberating a
Swiss or Swedish city instead of a Hungarian one.

What Wallenberg wanted, first and foremost, was to warn Malinovski that the last of the SS still planned to liquidate the central ghetto of Budapest. But he also wanted to discuss a postwar
Wallenberg Institute for Support and Reconstruction of all of Hungary, not just its Jewry. Repatriation, restitution, and return of property as well as reunion of families, creation of employment,
medical care, and rebuilding of homes and cities were among his most ambitious goals. Having already drafted the blueprint and a first fund-raising appeal, he was impatient to begin. And
naïve.

Anybody who has been ‘liberated’, willingly or unwillingly, by the Red Army will recognize that Wallenberg presented a profile sure to excite Soviet paranoia: wealthy; capitalist;
philanthropic; an arrogant neutral ready to take bold risks; not just a friend of the Jews, but more and more willing to admit that he was an agent of both the American government and a Jewish
agency. What’s more, Iver Olsen, the American who hired Wallenberg for the War Refugee Board, happened to be affiliated with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime forerunner of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That this was known to the Russians, if not to Raoul, made it all the more incriminating.

Simon Wiesenthal, however, says that ‘what happened to Wallenberg had nothing to do with the Jews or the OSS. The Soviets were suspicious of him right away because he
spoke Russian to them. In those days, a foreigner who spoke Russian was immediately a spy because the Russians themselves didn’t know other languages. In Russia at that time, the only use for
a foreign language was in espionage. The second thing was that Wallenberg
had with him various hard currencies – dollars, Swedish crowns, British pounds – just
like all spies were supposed to.’

* * *

Late on Tuesday, 16 January 1945, which proved to be his last night in Budapest, Wallenberg loaded his car with food packets and, in the fuel tank, he and his chauffeur,
Langfelder, and another Jewish aide, György Szöllös, hid what Szöllös said was ‘a great quantity of gold and jewels that Wallenberg was taking with him’ on what
he hoped would be an imminent visit to Marshal Malinovski. While it is presumed that this wealth had been entrusted or donated to Wallenberg by Hungarian Jews fleeing for their lives, this aspect
has been neglected by most chroniclers of the Wallenberg case – as if it could tarnish Wallenberg’s heroism!

Taking it into consideration, however, is important in trying to comprehend his incomprehensible fate, for we can only guess what the Russians thought he was up to. It is quite possible that,
upon discovering the gold and jewels in his fuel tank, the Russians mistook Wallenberg for a black-marketeer. And it has only recently become significant that the Soviet unit which took Raoul into
custody, the 18 th Army, had as its chief political officer a newly promoted Major General, Leonid I. Brezhnev.

In interviews with Szöllös and others in Budapest right after the war, Hungarian historian Jenö Lévai made no effort to explain why Wallenberg took along this treasure, but
in their 1982 book,
Lost Hero
, Swedish-born Rabbi Frederick E. Werbell and writer Thurston Clarke theorize that he planned to use it to bribe the Russians to liberate the ghetto as swiftly
as possible and spare the ravaged Jews the looting and raping by Soviet troops going on elsewhere in the city: ‘He had had great success bribing the Germans and their Hungarian allies; why,
he must have reasoned, should the Soviets and
their
Hungarian allies be any different?’ Other theories range from buying Soviet support for the Wallenberg Institute’s postwar
recovery plan to a well-founded fear that anything he left behind in Budapest would be pillaged by Russian soldiers.

Wiesenthal has a simpler explanation of why Wallenberg went so well heeled: ‘At that time, when the world was coming to an end for the Axis,
nobody would accept their paper money – Hungarian pengös, German marks – because everybody knew that, in a few weeks, you might as well eat the money for all the food
it would buy.’

On the morning after he loaded up his car, Raoul Wallenberg visited the Hungarian Jew in charge of the Swiss safe house (formerly the US Embassy) and told him he was leaving
for Russian headquarters in Debrecen, 125 miles to the east. Raoul remarked: ‘I seem to have formed a good relationship with the Russian military.’ Then he and his driver, Langfelder,
visited the Benczur Street refuge and told the Jewish leader there: ‘I need to pick up all my possessions because I’m leaving today for Debrecen. Please thank everybody for their
hospitality and I’ll call on you as soon as I return.’ He estimated that he might be gone as long as eight days.

When his host pleaded with him to defer his departure, for there were still snipers and house-to-house fighting, Raoul pointed through the window. Outside, near where his own car and driver
stood, were two Red Army soldiers astride motorcycles. They wore full battle dress and were armed to the teeth. In the sidecar of one motorcycle sat a squat Soviet officer, Major Dimitri
Demchinkov, wearing an olive-drab greatcoat.

‘They have been ordered especially for me, but I don’t know whether I’m going as their guest or their prisoner,’ Raoul said, almost proudly.

Flanked by his Soviet military escort, Wallenberg paid his last call in Budapest at the Swedish Hospital. En route, his Studebaker collided with a Soviet troop transport. Furious, the Russian
truck-driver was ready to kill Langfelder until Major Demchinkov pulled rank, warned him he had hit a diplomatic vehicle, and ordered him off. Outside the hospital, there was a second accident:
Wallenberg slipped and fell on the icy pavement. He seemed hurt, but, as he picked himself up, he deflected his friends’ concern by pointing to three men emerging from the hospital and taking
their first timid steps towards freedom. Each still wore a yellow star on his overcoat, but Wallenberg smiled and spoke his last recorded utterance as a free man: ‘I am happy to see that my
work has not been completely in vain.’