[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E925-E926]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


 COMMENDING LORD BRAINE OF WHEATLEY FOR CHAMPIONING THE CASE OF RAOUL 
                WALLENBERG IN THE BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS

                                 ______


                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 2, 1995
  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, as we recall the 50th anniversary of the 
Allied victory over fascism in the Second World War, we cannot forget 
the individual heroes of the holocaust. The Congress of the United 
States, always at the forefront of the battle for liberty and human 
rights, bestowed honorary American citizenship upon Raoul Wallenberg in 
recognition of his triumphant battle to save as many as 100,000 
innocent lives from certain death at the hands of the Nazis.
  There are many others around the world who have also dedicated their 
lives to pursuing the truth behind Wallenberg's disappearance into the 
gulag and to teaching the world about his heroic deeds. On this day, I 
wish to commend The Right Honorable Lord Braine of Wheatley for opening 
debate in the House of Lords about the lost hero of the Holocaust, 
Raoul Wallenberg. Throughout his 45 years in Parliament, Lord Braine 
has championed the case of human rights. I ask my colleagues to join me 
in commending Lord Braine's lifelong efforts, and I offer an excerpt 
from his opening speech to the parliament on the 50th anniversary of 
Wallenberg's disappearance.
     Text of Proceedings From the House of Lords, January 17, 1995

       Lord Braine of Wheatley. My Lords, the most terrible, 
     heartbreaking story of man's gross inhumanity to man occurred 
     during the lifetime of many of us. It was the murder of the 
     majority of Europe's Jews by the Nazis. These innocent 
     people, young and old, were slaughtered--not because they 
     posed the remotest threat to the power of the Nazis, but 
     simply because of their religion. It was genocide on a 
     massive scale.
       The victims were worked to death, tortured, shot and gassed 
     to death and their bodies burnt in huge incinerators. All of 
     that took place in organised mass killings month after month 
     during the Second World War. If there is a more monstrous 
     story of sustained evil in human history, I have not heard of 
     it.
       In that ocean of cruelty and hate in wartime Hungary, one 
     great heroic figure stands out--a brave young Swedish 
     diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg. Indeed, he became one of the 
     greatest heroes of all time. In the closing months of the 
     Second World War, he responded to the appeals of the world 
     Jewish
      community and left neutral Sweden to do what he could to 
     save what remained of Hungarian Jewry.
       So it was that in July 1994, Wallenberg went to what Simon 
     Wiesenthal has referred to as ``the slaughterhouse that was 
     Budapest.'' By that time some five million European Jews had 
     already been cruelly murdered. The Nazis, aware that they 
     were now losing the war, were obsessed with wiping out those 
     who remained and were within their reach. Four months 
     earlier, they had invaded Hungary with the declared purpose 
     of exterminating that last remaining Jewish community in 
     Europe. Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann was given the task 
     of liquidating the Hungarian Jewish community. It is ironic 
     that the Hungarian Jews, who had survived the longest in 
     Nazi-occupied Europe, were now the quickest to be destroyed. 
     In a two month period, from 15th May to 8th July 1944, 
     430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in sealed 
     cattle trucks.
       Raoul Wallenberg became the head of a special department of 
     the Swedish Legation in Budapest, charged with the task of 
     helping the Jews wherever possible. He began by designing a 
     Swedish protective passport to help them to resist both the 
     Germans and Hungarians. Wallenberg had previously learned 
     that both the German and Hungarian bureaucracies had a 
     weakness for symbolism. So he had his passports attractively 
     printed in blue and yellow (Sweden's national colours), 
     displaying Sweden's coat of arms and the appropriate 
     authorisations. I have such a passport, although I have not 
     brought it with me today. It is a work of art. Wallenberg's 
     passports had no validity whatsoever under international law, 
     but they served their purpose, commanding the respect of 
     those they were designed to influence. At first, he had 
     permission to issue only 1,500 passports. But he managed to 
     persuade the Hungarian authorities to let him issue 1,000 
     more and, by one means or another, managed to get the quota 
     raised again.
       Altogether Wallenberg was to save the lives of 100,000 
     Hungarian Jewish men, women and children. At the risk of his 
     own life, he distributed Swedish passports by the thousands, 
     even following the death marches to the Austrian border, 
     physically pulling people off the trains bound for Nazi 
     concentration camps, confronting at every turn the Nazis and 
     the death squads. He also successfully protected refugees in 
     scores of houses that he bought or rented in Budapest, 
     marking them with the neutral flag of Sweden.
       As the Soviet armies encircled Budapest in late 1944, 
     Wallenberg fearlessly continued his work. On 13th January 
     1945, a Russian soldier saw a man standing alone outside a 
     building with a large Swedish flag flying above its main 
     entrance. It was Wallenberg. Speaking in fluent Russian, 
     Wallenberg told an astonished Soviet sergeant that he was the 
     Swedish charge' d'affaires for those parts of
      Hungary liberated by the Red Army. He was invited to visit 
     the Soviet military headquarters at Debrecen, east of 
     Budapest.
       On his way out of the capital on 17th January with a Soviet 
     escort, Wallenberg and his chauffeur, Vilmos Langfelder, 
     stopped at various ``Swedish Houses,'' where he bade farewell 
     to his friends. He cheerfully told one colleague, Dr. Erno 
     Peto, that he was not sure whether he would be the guest of 
     the Soviets or their prisoner, but he thought he 
     [[Page E926]] would be back within a week. Alas, he never 
     returned.
       According to reliable witnesses, Wallenberg and his driver 
     were arrested and taken to Moscow, where they were thrown 
     into prison. At first, the Soviet authorities maintained that 
     Wallenberg had been taken into custody by the Red Army and 
     that he was under their protection. However, nothing more was 
     heard of him until 1947, when Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei 
     Vyshinsky, in answer to repeated Swedish inquiries, stated 
     that he was not in the Soviet Union and his whereabouts were 
     unknown to them.
       That was a blatant lie. Soviet prisoners of war, chiefly 
     German, who were released in the early 1950s confirmed that 
     Wallenberg had indeed been captured and imprisoned in Moscow, 
     first in the dreaded Lubyanka and then in Lefortovskyaya 
     prison. The Swedish Government intensified their inquiries, 
     only to be told by the Soviet authorities that they had 
     nothing to add to what they had said on the subject back in 
     1947.
       Again, during a visit to Moscow in 1956, the Swedish Prime 
     Minister raised the matter with the Soviet leadership. He 
     produced irrefutable evidence that Wallenberg had been 
     imprisoned by the Soviets. The Soviet answer to this was not 
     given until the following year--in the form of a note from 
     the Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to the Swedish 
     Ambassador in Moscow. In that note--to which the Soviet 
     Government have unfailingly referred every time there have 
     been inquiries from the West--it was stated that, as a result 
     of a thorough investigation by the Soviet authorities, it had 
     been discovered that a prisoner named ``Walenberg''--with one 
     ``l'', which is the Lithuanian spelling of the name--had in 
     fact died from a heart attack in 1947 in Lubyanka. It was 
     also asserted that all the documents pertaining to his case 
     had disappeared and that there was only a handwritten report 
     about his death made by the head of the prison hospital 
     service, one A.L. Smoltsov, who had since died. It seems that 
     Smoltsov had informed the Minister for State Security, 
     Abakumov, who himself was later to be executed in the purges 
     of the Security Police, that Wallenberg was dead. Abakumov, 
     of course, was a convenient person to blame for having misled 
     the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the first place. There was lie 
     after lie, deception after deception.
       I must tell noble Lords that the Swedish Government have 
     never accepted--and as far as I am aware, no Western 
     government has accepted--the Soviet line that Wallenberg died 
     in 1947. Why should I say that? The answer is that there is 
     abundant evidence that he was alive after that date.
       Further evidence did come to light in later years 
     indicating that Wallenberg was alive but imprisoned in the 
     Soviet Union. Indeed the great Russian historian Solzhenitsyn 
     has testified that he met a Swede fitting Wallenberg's 
     description during his own imprisonment.
       Is it possible then that Raoul Wallenberg could still be 
     alive? Well, it is not impossible. If he were alive today, he 
     would be just two years older than myself. Spartan conditions 
     have on occasions--many a doctor can testify to this--proved 
     beneficial to a long life. Incredible though it may sound, 
     during his research for the BBC's brilliant ``Man Alive'' 
     documentary on Wallenberg, John Bierman met a Russian Jew, 
     Leonid Berger, who was allowed to emigrate in 1978 after 
     spending no fewer that 35 years in Soviet jails.
       It is my duty to draw your Lordships' attention to rumours 
     being circulated that the family of Raoul Wallenberg now 
     accepts that he is no longer alive. There is no truth in 
     this. Indeed, contact has been made with United States 
     Congressman Tom Lantos, who was himself rescued from death by 
     Wallenberg and is the only survivor of the Holocaust to be 
     elected to the United States Congress. The Congressman's 
     office contacted Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg's half-sister, 
     and she has categorically denied that any member of the 
     Wallenberg family concedes that he is dead. I am happy to 
     take this opportunity of paying a tribute to Congressman 
     Lantos, who has kept Wallenberg's name alive both inside and 
     outside the United States Congress and was also responsible 
     for him being granted honorary American citizenship.
       It is now generally accepted that during his stay in 
     Hungary, Wallenberg saved 100,000 lives. We should never, 
     never, never, never forget this. May I humbly suggest that we 
     should honour this brave man by following the example already 
     provided by our American friends and allies by making him an 
     honorary British citizen? In an almost poetic sense, honorary 
     citizenship is uniquely appropriate to Wallenberg quite 
     simply because he used the privilege of Swedish citizenship 
     to save thousands of innocent lives. Indeed, conferring 
     citizenship--the instrument Wallenberg exercised with so much 
     courage, generosity and imagination--accounts not only for 
     the fact that thousands who were granted Swedish citizenship 
     by him are still alive today and have children and 
     grandchildren, but also for the fact that, following his 
     example, other countries
      which were neutrals in the war--Portugal, Spain, 
     Switzerland, and the Vatican--granted citizenship as a 
     means of saving Jewish lives.
       Why then even after all these years should we in Britain 
     honour Wallenberg's name in this way? The answer is that, 
     with no thought for his own safety, in what has been called 
     ``the slaughterhouse that was Budapest'', he accomplished the 
     impossible. Sometimes alone, sometimes with others, he 
     thwarted the designs of the most murderous regime the 
     civilised world has ever seen. He bribed the unspeakable 
     Nazis; he charmed them on occasions; he lied to them; he 
     certainly threatened and bullied them; and used every other 
     means he could devise to save the lives of the Budapest Jews. 
     He was a Swedish diplomat. He had some authority. He even 
     entered the deportation trains himself to pull of innocent 
     human beings who would otherwise have gone to a cruel death. 
     He worked incessantly, at great personal risk with utter 
     disregard for his own safety, and through the sheer force of 
     his example inspired hundreds of others to assist him.
       At the end, when the Red Army entered Budapest, and what 
     little remained of Nazi rule collapsed into anarchy, 
     Wallenberg worked on tirelessly. He told a Swedish diplomat 
     who urged him to seek cover in the Swedish Legation:
       ``For me there is no choice . . . I'd never be able to go 
     back to Stockholm without knowing inside myself that I'd done 
     all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.''
       So it is that we remember Wallenberg because he has become 
     more than a hero of our times. He symbolises the central 
     conflict of our age, the determination to remain human, 
     caring and free in the face of unspeakable tyranny. What 
     Wallenberg represented in Budapest was nothing less than the 
     conscience of the civilised world. By abducting and 
     imprisoning him, the Soviet authorities did more than violate 
     the long-standing rules of diplomacy accepted by civilised 
     nations and their govenrments, they demonstrated contempt for 
     everything his dedication and bravery in Budapest had 
     achieved.
       Yet even the Soviet Union of those days did not succeed in 
     suppressing his achievements. Just as the Nazis could not 
     keep him from his mission, so the Soviets failed to 
     obliterate his legacy.
       All mankind owes a great debt to this man, not only for the 
     100,000 lives he saved, but also for the example he gave us 
     as to how one man with courage to care, even in history's 
     darkest hour, can become a beacon of light and can make a 
     difference.
       There are two very good reasons for remembering this 
     courageous man. First, because as the author of Milan Kundera 
     observes, ``The struggle of man against power is the struggle 
     of memory against forgetting.'' Secondly, to paraphrase 
     Abraham Lincoln, the world may little note nor long remember 
     what we say here, but surely it will always remember what 
     Raoul Wallenberg did to salvage the dignity of the human 
     spirit from what was a hell on earth. It is a great honour to 
     pay tribute to him this afternoon.
     

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