William Penn, 1956 (39. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1956-08-15 / 8. szám

PAGE 4 August 15, 1956 William Penn Journal of the William Penn Fraternal Association OFFICE OF PUBLICATION 7907 West Jefferson Ave. Detroit 17, Michigan PUBLISHED SEMIMONTHLY BY THE William Penn Fraternal Association Managing Editor. COLOMAN REVESZ Editors: JOHN SABO and ALBERT J. STELKOVICS Editor’s Office: 436—442 FOURTH AVENUE PITTSBURGH 19, PA. Telephone: COurt 1-3454 or 1-3455 All articles and changes of address should be sent to the WILLIAM PENN FRATERNAL ASSOCIATION 436—442 FOURTH AVENUE, PITTSBURGH 19, PA. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: United States and Canada ..................................... $1.00 a year Foreign Countries .................................................... $1.50 a year Entered as Second Class Matter at the Post Office at Detroit, Michigan under the Act of March 3, 1879. CONGRESSIONAL RECORD June 18,1956 The Mystery of a War Hero EXTENSION OF REMARKS of HON. ABRAHAM J. MULTER of New York in the House of Representatives Monday, May 21, 1956 Mr. MULTER. Mr. Speaker, I commend the following item to the attention of our colleagues. It ap­peared in the May 1956 issue of the ADL Bulletin: The Mystery of A War Hero (By Joseph L. Lichten) Twelve years ago, a 32-year-old businessman departed his native Sweden on a wartime mission. On July 9, 1944, he arrived in Nazi-con­trolled Budapest. He bore creden­tials as an attaché of the Swedish embassy. But diplomacy was not his business. His name was Raoul Wallenberg. His task was incredible and gi­gantic; as brazen as it was coura­geous. He had been selected to res­cue as many of Hungary’s hapless Jews (there were 300,000 in Budapest alone) as his ingenuity and his im­munity as the citizen of a neutral nation could manage. Raoul Wallenberg had come in haste. The free world was aware that for several months the Nazi move­ment in Hungary had been planning systematic genocide, the same in­human plan of forced deportations and mass liquidations that had de­­troyed the Jewish community of Po­land. The horrors and tortures that had befallen Jews in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and Cracow were now to descend on Hungary. Each week the list of deportees ran into the hundreds. Many of the victims never reached the concentra­tion camps they were marked for; they died of hunger or dysentery, or frantically killed themselves, on the way. Appeals to Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian regent, that he force a halt to the butchery had little effect. The pleas of the Pope, of Sweden’s King Gustav and other neutral lead­ers, were spurned. A warning from President Franklin D. Roosevelt was ignored. Mass roundups were routine incidents in Hungary on the day Raoul Wallenberg arrived there. Wallenberg was a Christian gen­tleman, scion of a distinguished Swedish family. His father was a well-known banker; his grandfather had been an ambassador to Turkey and Japan. Raoul had studied ar­chitecture in the United States. But he returned to Sweden after his schooling to establish himself suc­cessfully in the export-import field. He knew little about Jews, less about Jewish affairs. Before the war he had visited Palestine, more as a tourist, however, than as an observer of political or social developments. The rescue of Hungary’s Jews had been planned by Swedish and Amer­ican authorities in Stockholm. Wal­lenberg had been asked to lead the undertaking; he accepted promptly. He was a bachelor and — to repeat — a Christian in the finest tradition. Raoul Wallenberg proved his met­tle at once. To combat the mass de­portation he began rescue operations on an equally wholesale, and com­pletely unheard of, scale. He started by recruiting an embassy staff. But what a staff! It swelled to 660 per­sons and their families — most of whom were Jews who, for various reasons, had been accorded priority status in his rescue plan. The priority non-Jews whom Wallenberg similarly gathered into his fold were leaders of Hungary’s anti-Nazi underground. As members of a legation, the new “Swedish officials” found im­mediate safety in their diplomatic status. The success of this happy fraud prompted Wallenberg to play it to the hilt. Within weeks he was issuing Swedish passports to any­body and everybody who could, in the remotest way, show some prior contact with Sweden. These pass­ports saved hundreds more. But thousands were being deport­ed. So Wallenberg next challenged the Nazi tormentors by designing a “protective passport” which he had printed in Sweden’s colors and which bore the embassy’s seal and sig­nature. This document bluntly af­firmed that its holder was under the protection of the King of Sweden — a broad hint to Hungarian officials that a passport owner was not to be molested in any way! Hungarian Nazis, frustrated and angry, nonetheless respected the hint. They were fearful to do other­wise. By that time, the war was go­ing badly for Hitler and Wallenberg had a disturbing habit of reminding them of a day of reckoning. The protective passport trick was used widely. Soon the Swedish Red Cross in Budapest began distribut­ing them, as did the embassies of several neutral nations and the Pa­pal Nuncio. Finally, several under­ground groups went to work circu­lating forged copies. Within weeks the number of protective passports mounted of tens of thousands. The Nazis tried hard to invalidate the forgeries. The Gestapo visited Wallenberg regularly, bringing him obvious forgeries to examine. Wal­lenberg studied them carefully. But his answer was always the same. “They’re authentic,” he insisted. Wallenberg carried his rescue ope­rations inside the councils of the enemy. He planted agents, with both the Hungarian police and the Ge­stapo. In that way he sometimes got his hands on a copy of the daily list of Jews placed under arrest. Prompt­ly, Wallenberg prepared protective passports for them, personally bring­ing the documents to deportation headquarters. There he forced the authorities to give up a large part, if not all, of the imprisoned group. Wallenberg acted with utter fear­lessness in his confrontations with the Nazis. His personal heroism was reflected in the persistent ways in which he harassed their rule. But always he maintained the correct, dignified demeanor of the diplomat. Nazi transport commanders, assigned to deliver truckloads of Jews to near­by concentration camps, often were dismayed to find that Wallenberg had attached himself to their motor caravans. He rode in a Red Cross truck which bore food, medicine and clothing for the Jewish victims. With Swiss legation workers and Roman Catholic nuns to assist him on these mercy errands. Wallenberg became a common sight on the dusty roads, leading out of Budapest. The Nazis were afraid to harm him in public. But they marked him for murder and Wallenberg found himself in all sorts of freak acci­dents. He was threatened, shot at, run down by army tanks and trucks. He always escaped—to persist with his urgent mission. When Hungary’s pro-Nazi Szalasi government, eager to facilitate the mass deportations, tried thwarting Wallenberg and the underground by ordering a 10-day blockade of Jews, Wallenberg quietly fought back by organizing a Jewish commando­­group. The commandos successfully infiltrated the blockade to bring food and supplies to the embattled Jewish families. Later, with the assistance of the Swedish Red Cross and un­derground Zionist groups, Wallen­berg established several children’s centers which he insisted were Red Cross operations protected by Swe­den’s international immunity. In that way he saved at least 8,000 children from certain death. Again, when Budapest Jews were ordered to enter a newly created ghetto, Wallenberg popped up with 32 large houses which he rented and placed under Swedish immunity. He filled the houses with thousands of Jews. Other neutral embassies fol­lowed his example, creating among themselves an international ghetto, probably the only one in history. By December, 6 months after Wal­lenberg’s arrival in the city, Rus­sian troops had begun their siege of Budapest. In frenzied retaliation, the Arrow Cross movement, Hungary’s Nazi gang, planned a mass murder of the remaining Jews. Wallenberg learned of it and quickly intervened by reminding the Wehrmacht chief, General Schmidthueber, of the death penalty that would befall a German commander who allowed a pogrom of this sort. The general understood perfectly; he ordered his troops to prevent any possible massacre. On January 13, 1945, 4 days be­fore Soviet troops were to seize full control of Budapest, Wallenberg, de­cided to seek out their military chiefs for assistance in rescuing Jews still trapped in the ghetto. He was refer­red to a Major Demchenko and, to his surprise, was placed under guard. Wallenberg reappeared at his office 4 days later, in the wake of the li­berating troops. Three Russian sol­diers accompanied him. “I am going to see Marshal Malinovsky (the So­viet commander),” Wallenberg in­formed his coworkers. He added, somewhat ruefully, “I don’t know whether I am going as a prisoner or as a guest.” Raoul Wallenberg left the office, the three armed soldiers with him. He has not been heard of since. If Wallenberg is still alive he is probably unaware that the thousands of families he rescued and protected, in their gratitude, built a monument in his honor; that a pavillion of Bu­dapest’s Jewish Central Hospital is now called Wallenberg Building; that a busy avenue similarly bears his name. Nor is it likely that Wallen­berg knows of the petition signed by 1,600,000 Swedish citizens de­manding an explanation of his fate, or that Sweden’s Prime Minister, on a recent visit to the Kremlin, kept posing an embarrassing question to his Soviet hosts: “What happenned to Raoul Wallenberg?” The Communists are uncommuni­cative about it. Shortly after Wallen­berg’s sudden disappearance, Russian officials reported that he was “un­der protection of the Russian army,” Since then, however, they refuse to acknowledge that they ever heard of him. In 1946, a report filtered through the Iron Curtain that Wallenberg was in a Ukrainian prison camp. Later he was reported a prisoner in the most dreaded MYD camp in Moscow. And last year, several German pri­soners of war, returning from Rus­sia, recalled a “Raoul Wilborg, a Swedish Red Cross officer,” as an intern at a camp in Tayshed in cen­tral Asia. “This Wilborg,” they said, “was a tuberculoisis case.” None of these rumors has been corroborated. To all inquiries, the Soviet shrug and say nothing. Thus, the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, one of war’s noblest heroes, is yet to be answered for. LEDGER ASSETS—MAY 31, 1956 Real Estate — Home Office and District Office Less Reserve ..........................................................................% 367,083.31 Mortgage Loan Account ................................................................ 1,965,804.43 Branch Real Estate Account ........................................................ 38.275.64 Loans and Liens ................... 739,062.11 Bond Account ................... 21,351,025.71 Stock Account ................................................................................... 139,718.04 Cash Account ................................................................................... 76,045.40 Savings Account ............................................................................... 83,654.67 Stock Account — Magyar Home ....... 12,450.00 Accounts Receivable ................................. 350.00 Airlines Account ............................... 425.00 Petty Cash ........................................................................................... 1,000.00 Total Ledger Assets ...............................................................$ 24,774.894.31 JULIUS E. SOMOGYI JOHN SABO National Treasurer National Auditor

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