http://www.nj.com/news/times/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1159675735118060.xml&coll=5
Hero outsmarted the Nazis
He saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews but could not save himself
Sunday, October 01, 2006
BY JEFF TRENTLY
The
first thing you need to know about the man who saved 100,000 souls is this: He was
a liar and a cheat.
Lying
was not simply his passion; it was his vocation, his charm.
Good
enough to fool the forces that would seek, 62 years ago, to rule the world.
His
name was Raoul Wallenberg and he outsmarted the Nazis.
"The
only thing he could do was lying and cheating and that's how we saved
people," says one woman who helped him save 100,000 Hungarian Jews from
the death camps.
Bribery,
threats of blackmail and bluffs. Those were his tools of trade.
A
Swedish diplomat from a wealthy family, he used his influence and money to
issue 30,000 false passports -- called "schutz- passes" -- to
Hungarian Jews near the end of World War II.
He
bullied his way into train stations where Jews were being loaded onto unheated
cattle cars, then called out common names, lying, persuading the Nazis these
were Swedish citizens.
He
was not like others. They could not be like him.
In
the end, after the war, he was arrested by the Soviet Red Army as they entered
"The
story of what he did is inspiring. His disappearance is intriguing. It's one of
the biggest mysteries of the past century," says Ari Kaplan, a Lawrence
High School graduate who devoted much of the past decade to hunting down
Wallenberg's fate.
The
man they called "the angel of
This
week, 25 years later, the angel's memory stays.
Nearly
5,000 miles from
In
the end, he was not a simple man or straightforward. He had secrets, and knew
how to keep them well.
Even
now.
Where
is Raoul Wallenberg?
A
powerful legacy
Vera Goodkin does not have the answer.
She
does not know why Raoul Wallenberg saved her when she was a little girl in
She
does not know why he gave up a millionaire's life to outwit the Nazis.
But
she is grateful he did.
"I
knew this was the man who saved my life. He was the kind Mr. Wallenberg,"
she says.
Goodkin,
a professor emeritus at
"I
wouldn't have survived without him," she says. "I would have been
gone the moment I hit a death camp. I was not fit for the hard labor they
wanted."
But
Goodkin -- the woman who owes her life to Wallenberg -- owes him her memories
too.
"You
still dream of it," she says. "Dream as if you were a child. Dream as
in context."
In
her dreams, she is still a little girl. Still in prison, still afraid. The
memories of her life are the things of nightmares.
This
is what she survived:
"We
were in the dungeons," she says of one prison. "A true medieval
fortress complete with moat. It was dark and damp. I looked around -- stone
walls, stone floor, stone ceiling. There were polka- dots on the wall and I saw
them move. They were well-nourished bedbugs."
At
another prison, she stood in a courtyard all night long with other Jews,
crowded like sardines, until the sun came up and the Nazis took the men away.
"From that moment on we lost touch with my father," she says.
Wallenberg's
men were her only way out. They convinced the prison commander "I guess
they bamboozled him a bit," Goodkin says -- to release the children.
"My
mother gently pushed me into the arms of one of these men and passed out,"
she says.
From
then on, Goodkin was convinced she was an orphan.
"You
age very quickly when life is that miserable," she says.
In
"The
first time I saw him, he truly looked like the angel of Buda pest. He was so
kind with the children. Playful. Handsome. Young. We just adored him," she
says.
"I
didn't know what his place in history was going to be."
Or
in her life.
Wallenberg
saved Goodkin one more time: Near the war's end, he reunited her with her
parents, who both survived the Nazis.
"All
the time I thought my parents were gone," Goodkin says. "I hung on to
them like sticky rice be cause I thought they were going to disappear again."
She
was more fortunate than most, Goodkin says; Wallenberg's fate cannot leave her.
"It
never does."
Shared
risks
Agnes Adachi could not leave Raoul Wallenberg.
"For
62 years I am doing what he told me," she says. "I was his first
helper."
Adachi
is 88 and lives in
Aggie,
he called her, back when she helped him save the Jews.
Adachi
once, boldly, followed Wallenberg's lead in a risky move to save Hungarian Jews
marked for murder.
Adolf
Eichmann decided an efficient way to kill Jews was to take them to the shore of
the icy
"Who
of you can swim?" Wallenberg asked his aides when he heard of the plot.
"I
was the best swimmer around," Adachi says.
She
volunteered.
Adachi,
Wallenberg and another man jumped into the icy water when they heard the
gunshots and pulled as many people out of the river as they could.
They
saved about 80 people. Adachi was hospitalized for pneumonia.
Such
was her devotion to the man she called her brother.
"How
can I not do what he wants me to do?" she asks, even today. "It was
the feeling for many of us -- if he can do it, we can do it."
"People
call me a hero but I don't feel like one," she says later. "We have
to help people and he al ways helped people. He helped everyone every
time."
Late
at night, alone, Adachi looks to the pictures of Wallenberg that fill her home.
"I
am crazy," she laughs. "I'm always talking to them."
"He's
alive," she says later, the hope perhaps mingled with a faith in humanity
that burned since the moment she met him.
"He's
alive now."
Too
much time
Marvin Makinen believes Wallenberg cannot be alive.
"I
think it's not reasonable to expect that anymore," he says.
Makinen
is a professor at the
He
believes the Soviets lied about Wallenberg's death in 1947, that he survived
years of prison isolation and eventually died in a psychiatric hospital,
perhaps living into his 80s.
Makinen
knows life in a Soviet prison firsthand from his own eight years as a prisoner.
Makinen
was a student in
Life
in a Soviet prison is harsh, Makinen says. He was kept in an isolation cell;
food was minimal and not very nourishing.
"They
did not physically abuse me," he says, but he came out of prison weighing
105 pounds.
"Prison
is considered a harsher sentence than labor camp," he says.
Years
later, in investigating the Wallenberg case, Makinen returned to the same
prison at
Along
with data base guru Ari Kaplan, Makinen linked their testimony to prisoner
identification cards and came up with five prisoners for whom they could not
establish identities.
Makinen
and Kaplan believe Wallenberg is one of those five.
"It's
difficult to grasp the injustice of it," says Kaplan, who made a dozen
trips to
But
the question remains: Why could Wallenberg save so many people and be unable to
save him self?
For
Kaplan, the question is turned around.
"Why
aren't there more people like him?"
The
Raoul Wallenberg Commemorative Committee of New Jersey, the Julius and Dorothy
Koppelman Holocaust Center at Rider University and the New Jersey Commission on
Holocaust Education are sponsoring a Wallenberg tribute 7 p.m. Tuesday at Rider
University. Speakers include Vera Goodkin and Marvin Makinen.