Nazi Hunter (36 page)

‘Who is the man?’ Simon asked.

‘Wallenberg.’

‘When did you talk to him?’

‘Summer of 1948.’

‘One year after he died,’ said Wiesenthal, probing guardedly.

‘According to the Russians,’ said Meltzer.

Hearing that, Wiesenthal jumped into his car and drove out to see Meltzer, who lived on the Engerthstrasse at the far end of Vienna’s ‘Matzoh Island’, where the Wiesenthals had
lived briefly during the First World War. ‘I was so excited,’ Wiesenthal recalls, ‘that I drove too fast and got a ticket.’ He brought along an assortment of photos:
Wallenberg alone, other individuals, Wallenberg in groups, other groups without Wallenberg. Every time Raoul appeared, Meltzer identified him correctly. Then Wiesenthal sat back and listened to his
story, which he likes to recount with a certain degree of glee:

‘Meltzer was a Jewish Austrian communist who in the 1930s went to the Soviet Union to help build a socialist paradise. He got there just in time for Stalin’s trials against
foreigners, making them out to be spies, while back in Austria, things were going from bad to worse – meaning Hitler. As a wise Jew trapped in a situation he couldn’t
escape from, he decided not to wait for Stalin to make a trial for him, too: “Before they will send me to Siberia, I will go voluntarily. Once I am in Siberia, they can no
longer send me to Siberia.”

‘So he went to the NKVD and said: “I am a doctor. I am also an idealist. I know that in Siberia there are some places without doctors. I wish to go there.”’

Lying low in Siberia with all the aplomb of the Good Soldier Schweik, Meltzer survived the Second World War with a minimum of discomfort, considering his situation. When the war ended, he was
chief medical officer for all of Stalin’s concentration camps in northern Siberia. In the summer of 1948, he visited a labour camp in the Urals at Khal’mer Yu, which apparently was
Wallenberg’s second stop in Siberia after a year in Vorkuta, seventy miles north of the Arctic Circle. There Wallenberg had apparently been stripped of all diplomatic privileges in the
prisoner hierarchy. His rations reduced, he was sent to work as a slave labourer in the coal mines. The fate that Eichmann would have wished Wallenberg was enforced by Eichmann’s enemies, who
were fast becoming his successors.

Wallenberg’s defiant response was to thrive on hard labour, which led to his reassignment to Khal’mer Yu, farther north than Vorkuta. Dr Meltzer met him when workers were needed to
build a dam, and he took twenty doctors north with him to examine the manpower pool at Khal’mer Yu. Meltzer told Wiesenthal:

‘All the men were waiting there on long lines and we had everybody’s dossier. When I looked at this one dossier and saw the name Wallenberg, that isn’t such an unusual name in
Russia, where many people, particularly Jews, have Germanic-sounding names. Nor did I look up when I read the first name Raoul, but, knowing that the Russian letter
R
comes out
P
in Cyrillic, I thought it was a mistake and said to the prisoner: “Your first name is Paul, isn’t it?”’

‘No, it’s Raoul,’ the man assured Meltzer. ‘I am Scandinavian.’

Meltzer glanced up to see a swarthy man of medium height with sharp features and an intense stare, none of which looked very Viking to him. So he said: ‘But that’s not a Scandinavian
name.’

‘Yes, it can be,’ Raoul replied. ‘Do you know the explorer Amundsen?’

‘The one who discovered the South Pole?’

‘Yes, he was Norwegian and his first name was Roald. I am Swedish and my first name is Raoul.’

That was the extent of their conversation. Meltzer examined Wallenberg and found that, while ‘he had a strong heart’ (a year after his ‘death by heart attack’ in
Lubyanka), his lungs had not yet recovered from his months in the mines. Meltzer deferred him from heavy labour for three months. Wallenberg seems to have stayed in Khal’mer Yu until early
1951, when he was transferred to a camp for political prisoners at Verkhneural’sk in the southern Urals. After two years there, he left Siberia for Vladimir.

Meltzer, the wandering Jew who had volunteered for Siberia, was repatriated to Austria in 1951. He moved to Israel and died there not long after his disclosures to Wiesenthal. But he had
provided Wiesenthal, the world, the Swedish Foreign Ministry (which questioned him in Vienna), and the von Dardel family with the first written official Soviet evidence that Wallenberg was alive
and reasonably well in Khal’mer Yu a year after his official demise in Moscow. ‘We had proved our point,’ says Simon. ‘Gromyko had lied and Wallenberg could still be
alive.’

In early 1979, responding to Simon’s public appeal for information about Wallenberg, the Soviet dissident Yuri Belov, freed from hard labour and deported from his native land, passed
through Vienna and paid a call on Wiesenthal. Belov told Simon that, back in 1963 in a Soviet prison camp, he’d been working on a sanitary detail with a Hungarian prisoner. ‘The
Hungarian took Belov to see an American communist who was dying of cancer in the prison hospital,’ Wiesenthal recounts. ‘The American had fled the [Senator Joseph] McCarthy era [of
1950s Red-hunts] in the US to escape possible jail and, soon after he settled in the workers’ paradise, he tried to organize a strike, so they threw him into the Lubyanka Prison and from
there they sent him to the gulag. Like every foreign prisoner, Belov’s partner inquired after his own countrymen in case he could tell their families something if he ever went home, but the
American said “No, I didn’t meet any Hungarians, but there was a diplomat in Lubyanka who’d been working in Hungary. I don’t remember his name, but he was Scandinavian
– Swedish, I think. He made a hunger strike in one of the camps, so they brought him back to Butyrka Prison in Moscow and put him in the mental hospital.”’

Wiesenthal asked Belov when the American had said he’d seen the Swede in Moscow. The answer was 1961. As he had with Meltzer, Wiesenthal took Belov to the Swedish
Embassy to swear a deposition. Belov spent the next decade working for the International Society for Human Rights in Frankfurt cataloguing and protesting the misuses of psychiatry and other
political persecution in the Soviet Union.

Meltzer and Belov are two key witnesses Wiesenthal has produced to unlock the chain of lies surrounding Wallenberg’s undying existence, but he has also screened out many pretenders who
come out of Russia hoping to use the name Wallenberg as a ticket to a toehold in the West. Though one or two may have been Soviet ‘disinformation’ artists – providing false clues
which, when debunked, could discredit the whole Wallenberg quest – most were just, in Wiesenthal’s words, ‘crooks and confidence men without any confidence that they can survive
on their own. Seventy years of revolution in Russia didn’t improve the people any. They are materialists who worship capitalism so much that they think if they say names like Rockefeller or
Wallenberg some of their money will rub off on them. Sometimes I am flying especially to Israel to meet such people with their stories. But as soon as I ask them “Where were you with
Wallenberg?”, they say to me “No, this is my secret. My life with Wallenberg will be in a book I am already writing, so I cannot tell you this. Later I let you write the preface.”
So I cut the interview short and go spend a couple of days with my daughter and her family, who live in Israel.’

In a slave-labour camp in the Urals near Sverdlovsk in 1972, two prisoners met and one of them said: ‘My name is Asher Hanukajev.’

‘I am Raoul Wallenberg,’ he says the other said.

‘Is Wallenberg a Jewish name?’ Hanukajev says he asked.

‘No, I’m a Swedish diplomat. I was kidnapped by the Russians from Hungary in 1945.’

Hanukajev says he spent four days with Wallenberg, who ‘told me why he’d been kidnapped: for freeing 35,000 Jews from German occupation.’ Hanukajev, who still had six years to
serve on a twenty-six-year sentence, remembers Wallenberg’s farewell to him: ‘God help you to get out sooner. Probably they will never let me go.’

Another former Soviet prisoner, Victor Hermann, says that, in 1977, he heard Wallenberg was in ‘an intermediate prison’ in the
central Russian city of
Gorki
³⁴
before being ‘sent north’ and that other prisoners had seen him as late as 1979. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the
last hours of the seventies, détente crashed to a halt. Emigration slowed to a trickle and so did ‘sightings’ of Wallenberg. ‘Now they mention places so far east in the
Soviet Union,’ Simon says, ‘that they are impossible to check. In the late 1970s and well into the eighties, there were reports he was in a camp near Irkutsk for special people who
should not come into contact with ordinary political prisoners. But these are not prisoners they release, so nobody can come out and say “I saw this man there.” All they can say is that
it is very VIP there, so it is the kind of place where they might hide Wallenberg.’ Other reports have placed ‘an old Swede’ as far apart as the Chinese border (in the
Blagoveshensk Special Psychiatric Hospital, used for brainwashing home-grown dissidents) and wandering the streets of downtown Leningrad.

A 1985 Simon Wiesenthal Centre
Trbute to the Lost Hero of the Holocaust
offered one hopeful hearing of Raoul – perhaps! In 1963, Greville Wynne, a British agent imprisoned in
Lubyanka for eighteen months, was delivered to his daily airing and exercise in a solitary pen atop the prison. As Wynne reached the roof in a tiny, filthy, cage-like elevator, he heard another
cage arriving at the next pen. When its gate opened, a voice called out ‘Taxi!’

Wynne chuckled at this defiant humour. Five days later, it happened again.

‘Are you American?’ he called out.

‘No, I’m Swedish!’ the voice answered in English before guards subdued both men.

More ominously and precisely, one later report placed Wallenberg in the early 1960s on Wrangel Island, a remote, icy outpost inside the Arctic Circle some 270 miles
north-west of the Alaskan coast. This account – based on the testimony of a former KGB and NKVD agent named Efim Moshinsky, who spent two years on Wrangel Island and later emigrated to Israel
– had Wallenberg banished to the island prison-camp’s hospital, where Soviet Navy and space scientists were said to perform medical experiments on foreign prisoners the Kremlin had
already declared dead. Injected with experimental drugs, exposed to prolonged radiation, fed possibly contaminated foods, immersed under water for long periods, and breathing varying amounts of
oxygen, the victims’ premature official obituaries quickly became self-fulfilling prophecies.

Given half a chance, Dr Mengele could have picked up his practice there with scarcely any loss of momentum. Such a fate for a liberator like Raoul, however, might have given Kafka pause when
writing
In the Penal Colony
. And it is almost unbearable to think that, in the gulag, too, there could have been a whole category of living, dying non-persons like Wallenberg.

Moshinsky said Wallenberg shared a two-room wood hut with another thorn in the Soviet side, a Russian anti-communist leader named Aleksandr Trushnovich. If Moshinsky is to be believed (and, over
the years, circumstances have tended to confirm rather than refute his report), then he lends credence to
Lost Hero
authors Werbell’s and Clarke’s thesis – shared,
incidentally, by ex-Prime Minister Erlander – that, for one reason or another, Wallenberg’s health worsened on Wrangel Island and he was eventually transferred back to either Vladimir
or a special Moscow prison hospital, where he died in 1964 or 1965.

Across Western Europe, Wiesenthal went on organizing Wallenberg Congresses in Austria, Holland, and West Germany. He held hearings every January, the anniversary of
Raoul’s disappearance, and August, the month of Raoul’s birth: there is very good propaganda value, he admits, in reminding the world that Wallenberg is now ‘a man nearing ninety,
a man almost my age, who is still in the concentration camps of the Second World War.’ He prodded Sweden to join the US, England, and Switzerland in bringing the Wallenberg case before
European Security Conferences in Madrid and Vienna as a Basket
Three (Reunification of Families) issue of the 1975 Helsinki Treaty, which was reviewed periodically for
compliance. He exhorted Sweden to boycott 1980’s summer Olympic Games in Moscow unless the Kremlin told the truth about Wallenberg.

As it turned out, sixty-two nations stayed away from Moscow, but Sweden wasn’t one of them – and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, not Raoul, was their reason.

Prodded by Wiesenthal and Wallenberg’s siblings, the Swedish government
did
, in recent years, offer to exchange a captured communist spy or two for Raoul, but the Russians simply
smiled and said the Swedes would be fools to exchange anyone for someone who was cremated in 1947. Most Swedish diplomats, too, saw a worrisome precedent: if the Russians wanted to retrieve one of
their agents, they could frame a Swede in Moscow and then exchange him (as happened as recently as 1986, when an American journalist in Moscow, Nicholas Daniloff, was ensnared by the KGB after a
Soviet spy was caught receiving secret data on a New York subway platform). But Wallenberg’s colleague Per Anger said of the new Swedish willingness to barter: ‘If only this had
happened years ago, then perhaps Raoul would be a free man now.’

In the late 1970s, very late in Leonid Brezhnev’s life, Wiesenthal, at Henry Kissinger’s suggestion, had persuaded Armand Hammer – the American petroleum magnate who once knew
Lenin and therefore was trusted by all his successors – to intervene with the Soviet President and party chief. ‘One day, Hammer was talking to Brezhnev,’ Wiesenthal reports,
‘and Brezhnev answered that he had never heard the name Wallenberg, but added that “I will inform you.” Later, he told Hammer: “Gromyko already gave the
answer.”’ At that time, neither Wiesenthal nor Hammer knew that it was Major-General Brezhnev of the 18th Soviet Army in Hungary who had ordered Raoul’s arrest in 1945.

Around the same time, a report surfaced in Israel from the dentist daughter of a former Moscow music conservatory administrator who had been jailed for eighteen months as a black-marketeer after
he’d applied for an exit visa to Israel. Upon his release from Lubyanka in 1977, Jan Kaplan placed an international call to Dr Anna Kaplan Bilder in Jaffa to tell her he was out. ‘How
did you manage to live through all that time?’ she asked her father solicitously.