Nazi Hunter (37 page)

‘Oh, you can survive for a long time in there,’ he responded.
‘Why, when I was in the Butyrka prison hospital in 1975, I met a Swede who told me
he’d been in prison for thirty years and he seemed reasonably healthy to me.’

Almost immediately, Anna Bilder was invited to the Swedish Embassy in Tel Aviv for an interview. Her father’s remarks had coincided with intelligence received from a young Russian Jew who
had gone to a May Day party at the Moscow home of a senior KGB officer. ‘Much vodka was drunk,’ the young man recalled, ‘and the younger men at the party began to speak of
dissidents and the rough time they must have in prison. The KGB officer burst out and said: “Don’t you believe it! Things aren’t as tough nowadays as they used to be. You can live
a long time in jail now. Why, I have a Swede under my charge in Lubyanka who’s been inside for thirty years!”’ Only when he emigrated to Israel did the young Russian Jew hear the
name of Wallenberg and the story of his disappearance. When he did, he went to the Swedish Embassy and filed a report.

On the basis of its new information, Sweden announced in early 1979 that it was formally re-opening the Wallenberg case and sent a note to the Russians requesting an investigation. The reply
from Moscow to this belated inquiry was:

There was a more ominous response – in Moscow. On 3 February 1979, the Kaplan home was searched by Soviet criminal investigators and Jan Kaplan was re-arrested. In
Israel, his daughter learned this from three anonymous phone calls (one in Hebrew and two in Russian) which warned her, for her father’s sake, not to speak of Wallenberg again. As of 1986
Kaplan was still in prison.

* * *

Wiesenthal’s greatest service to Wallenberg has been to focus public attention on him. Around 1972, he tried to persuade the novelist Leon Uris to write one of his
fact-filled fiction epics about Raoul. But Uris said he was busy with a book about Masada, the one-time fortress of King Herod where 960 Jewish men, women, and children
committed mass suicide in AD 73 rather than face total slaughter by 15,000 Roman soldiers.

‘Masada has waited 2000 years. Wallenberg cannot wait that long,’ Wiesenthal told Uris in vain.

In 1977, a Californian mother named Annette Lantos read a small item in the back pages of the
New York Times
saying that Simon Wiesenthal was sure Raoul Wallenberg had been alive into
the 1960s and may have been sighted as recently as 1975.

To Annette Lantos, this was a voice from the dead – the deaths Wallenberg had spared her and her husband, Tom, and the death they thought Raoul had died in 1945 at Nazi hands in the battle
of Budapest, as they and all other Hungarians had been told by their Soviet ‘liberators’ and
their
Hungarian puppets. Since 1972, under the auspices of the Jewish Community
Relations Council – which sent Holocaust survivors into schools, clubs, and churches – Annette had been lecturing on the impact of one man, ‘the
late
Raoul
Wallenberg’.

When Annette Tillemann was twelve, her father had been dragged from a shelter by Arrow Cross men and killed in the street. But she and her mother had been saved by Wallenberg and, after
surviving the war, they emigrated to Canada still thanking the ‘memory’ of Raoul. In 1950, Annette married Tom Lantos, who had escaped from a forced labour camp and hidden in
Budapest’s ghetto under Swedish protection – only to flee Hungary in 1947 after protesting communism’s takeover. Tom became an economics professor at the University of California
and a widely known television commentator on world affairs.

That such personally involved and well-informed people as the Lantoses should not have known Raoul might still be among the living not only tells much about official Western unconcern and
Eastern disinformation, but also shows Wiesenthal’s educational impact worldwide. ‘Not only the Wallenberg case, but just his name, had been all but forgotten,’ Annette recalls.
‘At that time, it seemed that no one but his mother cared whether he lived or died. After reading the story from Wiesenthal, I was determined that from then on the rescue of Raoul Wallenberg
would have to be my number-one priority.’

She formed Concerned Citizens for Wallenberg in 1977; later, it became the Free Wallenberg Association. In October 1979, US
President Jimmy Carter promised her the support
of the US government in obtaining Wallenberg’s release. Though Carter lost his bid for re-election the following year, Annette’s husband Tom ran for Congress in the same race and
withstood the Ronald Reagan Republican landslide to win election as the Democratic representative from San Mateo County. In Washington, one of his first acts was to introduce a bill making Raoul
Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States. It passed the House of Representatives by 396 to 2 and the Senate unanimously in the autumn of 1981.

Signing the bill into law at a White House ceremony a few days later, with Wiesenthal and the Lantoses on the platform, President Reagan said that in bestowing honorary US citizenship, ‘I
think we’re the ones that are being honoured. Raoul Wallenberg is the Swedish saviour of almost 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children. What he did, what he accomplished was of biblical
proportions . . . Wherever he is, his humanity burns like a torch.’ The President noted that ‘Sir Winston Churchill, another man of force and fortitude, is the only other person who has
received honorary US citizenship.’

In his concluding remarks, Reagan said eloquently:

‘I heard someone say that a man has made at least a start in understanding the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows he will never sit. Raoul Wallenberg is
just such a man. He nurtured the lives of those he never knew at the risk of his own. And then just recently, I was told that in a special area behind the [Yad Vashem] Holocaust Memorial in Israel,
Hungarian Jews now living in Sweden planted 10,000 trees in Raoul’s honour.’

Turning to Raoul’s half-sister and half-brother, who had come from Sweden, the President of the United States said:

‘Mrs Lagergren, Mr von Dardel, we’re going to do everything in our power so that your brother can sit beneath the shade of those trees and enjoy the respect and love that so many
held for him.’

In January of 1981, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Raoul’s disappearance, Simon Wiesenthal convened a formal hearing in Stockholm to review testimony on the
Wallenberg case. He was joined on the panel by Gideon Hausner, chief prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem; Elie Wiesel, conscience and chronicler of
the Holocaust (the
name of which he coined); and retired Swedish Supreme Court Justice Ingrid Gärde-Widemar.

Held in co-operation with the International Sakharov Committee of Copenhagen, the Wallenberg hearing attracted such witnesses as British Member of Parliament Greville Janner and French Nobel
Laureate André Lwoff, chairmen of Raoul Wallenberg Committees in their own countries, as well as Annette Lantos and Elizabeth (Mrs Daniel P.) Moynihan, secretary of the US Senators’
Free Wallenberg Committee. Virtually all witnesses spoke of Raoul in the present tense.

Red herrings abound. During the Wallenberg hearing, Wiesenthal introduced excerpts from the diaries of General Gennadi Kuprianov, a Soviet war hero imprisoned by Stalin from 1948 to 1956.
General Kuprianov had encountered Wallenberg thrice during his eight years in the gulag: in 1953, 1955, and early 1956. Years later, he mentioned his meetings with Wallenberg to another
ex-prisoner, who later emigrated to Israel and told a Russian émigré newspaper about Kuprianov and Wallenberg. Summoned to KGB headquarters in Leningrad early in 1979, the
rehabilitated retired general was warned by a colonel not to spread rumours that an officially dead person was still alive.

Four months later, Kuprianov received another ominous green summons from the KGB. This time, the colonel told him that to ‘help refute American-Israeli provocations . . . you must go home
now and compose your denial of these false reports.’

‘But I cannot deny the truth,’ Kuprianov insisted. ‘I cannot say “No, I haven’t met the Swede” when I met him on three different occasions.’

He was told to come back the next day with his denial. That night, the old general told his wife and his former secretary, who had stayed a family friend, that ‘I don’t know if
I’ll be able to stand that questioning.’

He went back to the KGB next morning, empty-handed. He never returned. Five days later, his wife received a call from the KGB: ‘Your husband is ill. You may visit him in the police
hospital.’ When she went there, she was directed to the morgue. Like Raoul Wallenberg her husband had been pronounced dead of ‘heart failure’.

Kuprianov’s ex-secretary – whom Wiesenthal would identify only as ‘I.L.’ – had an exit visa at that time and came to Vienna with key
pages
from Kuprianov’s diaries, which she had copied before the KGB seized them. Wiesenthal said he had authenticated the documents, but sceptics seized upon Wiesenthal’s refusal to identify
‘I.L.’ and other discrepancies to condemn his hearings. Wiesenthal explained that, while ‘I.L.’ was now living in the US, she still had relatives in Leningrad she wished to
protect. And indeed, in 1986, when I pressed Simon for more details about the Kuprianov affair, he told me to ‘forget about Kuprianov; it didn’t go anywhere.’

Despite dissent, the Stockholm session overwhelmingly adopted a Wiesenthal resolution pronouncing Wallenberg alive until proven otherwise. ‘The family and the world have a right – in
fact, a duty – to call for further investigation and clarification,’ he insists. ‘Until the Russians can give a better accounting than they have in the past, there is no sense
debating whether he is dead or alive.’

In 1983, Wiesenthal was instrumental in reviving Albert Einstein’s 1948 ploy of nominating Raoul Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since Nobels aren’t awarded posthumously, the
prize would reaffirm not only the value of Raoul’s work, but a predominantly Swedish panel’s faith that he is still alive somewhere. Thus far – and, it is likely, forever –
the Nobel Prize has eluded both Wallenberg and Wiesenthal.

On 17 January 1985, Simon Wiesenthal sent Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme a cable:

Wiesenthal says he received a warm reply from Palme, though his secretary at the Jewish Documentation Centre has been unable to lay hands on it. Not long after Palme’s
assassination on a Stockholm street in early 1986, his successor Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, on an official visit to Moscow, raised the Wallenberg question with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail
S. Gorbachev, explaining ‘why the
fate of Raoul Wallenberg is still important to the Swedish Government as well as to Swedish and international public opinion, and why
earlier Soviet statements in his regard could not be considered satisfactory.’

Gorbachev promised to look into the matter and Carlsson wrote to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre: ‘You may rest assured that Raoul Wallenberg’s fate is very alive in my mind and that the
Swedish Government will never relent in its effort on his behalf.’

Once Gorbachev had kicked Andrei Gromyko upstairs to the Soviet presidency in 1985, after twenty-eight years as foreign minister, an editorial crusade by the influential
New York Times
columnist A. M. Rosenthal targeted Gromyko as the ‘Kremlin’s living link’ to Raoul Wallenberg:

In 1988, when Gromyko relinquished the presidency to party chief Gorbachev, Abe Rosenthal renewed the campaign by hinting that Gorbachev could gather strength by baring the
sins of his predecessors.

In late 1989, a few months after Andrei Gromyko took his secrets to the grave, Wallenberg’s half-sister and half-brother were invited to Moscow by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, whose
spokesman, Gennadi I. Gerasimov, apologized to them for ‘a tragic mistake. Your brother was swept up in the maelstrom of repression.’ The KGB gave them a small box of Raoul’s
belongings: his Swedish diplomatic passport, some old bills, and a few notebooks. The KGB’s deputy chairman, Vladimir Perezhkov, expressed his personal admiration for Raoul’s bold deeds
in Hungary and added that he had even ‘become a hero in this country.’ But the Russians stuck to the story that the hero died in Lubyanka in 1947. Four days later, the KGB produced the
card registering Raoul as a
prisoner in Moscow on 6 February 1945; it had just been discovered ‘by chance’.

‘We simply don’t believe them,’ said Nina Lagergren. ‘We are convinced our brother is still alive in a prison here.’

She and Guy van Dardel visited the prison hospital at Vladimir, where Per Anger, now chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, told them several witnesses had placed their half-brother in
1980. And they appeared on a popular television talk show in Moscow, where viewers were asked to call in ‘if you have seen anyone you believe is Raoul Wallenberg.’ Fifty callers
responded.