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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
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
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.
