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RAOUL WALLENBERG

The Raoul Wallenberg Calendar: Q&A with Brian Palmer

With the centenary of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg's birth on Saturday, The Local catches up with Brian Palmer, a researcher at Uppsala University who has created a calendar to commemorate individuals of exceptional civic courage.

Published: 4 August 2012 09:52 CEST

The Raoul Wallenberg Calendar: Q&A with Brian Palmer

The birthday of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, missing since 1945, is celebrated worldwide and for a whole year his courage and deeds during WWII, rescuing tens of thousands of Jews from the holocaust, will be remembered.

Brian Palmer, a social anthropologist and a lecturer on civic courage at Uppsala University is one of many people finding a unique way of honouring Wallenberg’s legacy.

Together with author Ola Larsmo and Marie Grefberg, of the Forum for Living History (Forum för levande historia) in Sweden, Palmer has produced a calendar commemorating 365 people who’ve shown exceptional civic courage.

“We hope that the calendar will make people think about the meaning of civic courage and inspire people to ponder what’s worth doing and how we use our lives,” Palmer told The Local.

The calendar, which is for 2013, will be translated to English and South Korean, and about 130,000 copies will be given to Swedish high-school students, to be used as inspiration for their course-work.

Three publishing houses will print and sell a Swedish edition, an English-language edition, a South Korean edition, and an illustrated global edition in five languages, with profits going to human-rights endeavors.

On January 1st, national broadcaster Sveriges Radio/Radioteatern will start airing a five-minute piece about each day’s individual during every day of 2013. The Swedish film institute (Svenska Filminstitutet) will arrange film showings based on the calendar.

The Local: What is the Raoul Wallenberg calendar?

Brian Palmer: We decided to make a calendar to honour Wallenberg but also other exceptionally courageous and self-sacrificing people who’ve shown themselves in moments of grace and goodness.

TL: Who is Raoul Wallenberg to you?

BP: He’s someone who found his calling in life and someone who used what was inside him, his bravery, his generosity and his cleverness. Wallenberg is also a reminder that what we do in a short period – only a few months in his case- can define our whole life.

TL: What is civic courage in one sentence?

BP: One can define civic courage as altruistic courage; a readiness to take risks to protect and help people outside of one’s own family and friends, or to protect a common ideal such as democracy.

TL: Do we have people like Wallenberg today?

BP: We do. There’s a tradition in Sweden of bravery and engagement in the international community with many courageous individuals trying to do something about the injustice in the world. For example, in the occupied territories of Palestine the largest number of international solidarity volunteers are often Swedish.

TL: What about the other 364 people in the calendar? Why are they important?

BP: We can take the example of Anastasia Baburova, a young Ukrainian journalist who wrote about right-wing extremist groups for Novaya Gazeta in Moscow.

She continued her work despite threats. Three years ago, after protesting against a Russian military man who had raped and killed a Chechen woman, Anastasia was shot dead, 25 years old. She seemed to believe that some things in life were even more important than her own safety and security.

The psychologist William James wrote a century ago that when we meet people who express altruistic courage we touch life’s ultimate mystery, why we exist and what it means to love other people. Anastasia raised these kinds of questions.

TL: This year is officially the “Wallenberg year” – why is this important?

BP: It’s about being reminded about the beauty of a human being who was ready to give so much to others. Reading accounts of Wallenberg; facing Nazis and taking gigantic risks to protect people – his life is a reminder that amidst our cruel world it’s possible for our species to shine this magnificently.

TL: Do you believe that Sweden has properly honoured the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg?

BP: Wallenberg remains a part of our tradition, and for me it would be appropriate if on airplanes landing in Stockholm one would hear the pilot say. “We’ll shortly be landing at the Raoul Wallenberg International Airport”. It would be a very clear marking to the international community that we honour one of our bravest countrymen.

The calendar will be sold in bookshops and supermarkets across Sweden as well as being available for purchase on the web.

To buy the English and South Korean pocket calendar, as well as the international wall calendar, links will be published here.

Salomon Rogberg

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Why I decided to sue the Russian FSB in a quest for the truth about Raoul Wallenberg

A monument in memory of Raoul Wallenberg in his hometown of Lidingö. Photo: Mark Earthy/TT

In spite of repeated requests for clarification, Russia continues to withhold key information about an unidentified “Prisoner no.7”, who was questioned in Lubyanka Prison together with Raoul Wallenberg's driver Vilmos Langfelder on July 23rd, 1947 for more than 16 hours. It remains unclear what Swedish officials may have known about the issue and why this and other important information was not shared with an official Working Group that investigated the Wallenberg case for ten years during the 1990s.

In November 2009, the archivists of the Central Archive of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) informed two researchers who had been investigating Wallenberg’s fate for many years – Vadim Birstein and Susanne Berger – that on July 23rd, 1947, a still unidentified “Prisoner No. 7” had been interrogated for over 16 hours in Lubyanka Prison.

Based on circumstantial evidence, the FSB archivists concluded that “Prisoner No.7” with “great likelihood was the missing Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg”. However, FSB officials refused to provide a copy of the actual entry for “Prisoner No.7” as it appears in the Lubyanka interrogation register, nor did they permit researchers to review this page in the original. Instead, the FSB released only a heavily censored copy of the page in question. It showed that two other prisoners had been questioned together with “Prisoner No. 7”, on the same day, for more than 16 hours. They were Wallenberg's driver, Vilmos Langfelder, and Langfelder’s cellmate, Sandor Katona. Clearly, something quite dramatic had occurred to warrant such a lengthy interrogation.

Photo: Marie Dupuy

On those two days of July 22nd and 23rd 1947, close to a dozen prisoners were questioned and immediately placed in strict isolation, most of them for many years. As it turns out, all the men had a direct connection to Wallenberg.

Wallenberg had been arrested by Soviet forces in Budapest in January 1945, after he had saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. He was taken to Moscow where he was imprisoned for at least two-and-a-half years. Soviet authorities announced in 1957 that Wallenberg had died suddenly of a heart attack in his cell on July 17, 1947, but the full circumstances of his disappearance have never been clarified.

The proper identification of “Prisoner No. 7”, therefore, goes to the heart of the Wallenberg case, in particular the question of whether he really died on July 17th, 1947 or if, in fact, he survived some time after this date – as FSB archivists allege.

In December 2013, I decided to file my own request for access to the register, as Wallenberg's niece. I received a formal reply from the FSB Central Archive in which archivists informed me that, unfortunately, a review of the original Lubyanka interrogation register for July 22-23, 1947, “is not possible”. They provided no specific reason for their refusal.

Once again, the FSB officials failed to present a full copy of the requested register pages or a detailed description of the entry for this mysterious “Prisoner No.7”, as I had specifically asked for in my letter. I repeated my requests several times, the most recent application being denied earlier this year.

Naturally, I wonder what the FSB is hiding.

Certain notations on the page? Names of other, still unknown prisoners held in Lubyanka Prison in 1947? The name of the interrogator for “Prisoner No.7”? The entries are by now 70 years old and should no longer be subject to the official Russian 30-year secrecy requirements.

Russian privacy laws, too, should not apply to this particular entry, since the full identity of “Prisoner No.7” would remain shielded, plus Russian officials have regularly revealed the name of MGB (Ministry of State Security) investigators that appear in these very registers. Even the 75-year rule governing “personal documents” should be waived in this case, since – according to both Russian and international law – victims of repression and their families have legal Right to the Truth about their ordeal. Consequently the records of victims of repression may not be kept classified.

If not Wallenberg, who could this “Prisoner no. 7” held in Lubyanka in July 1947 be? An unknown cellmate of Raoul’s in Lubyanka Prison, perhaps? Someone who had been active in Hungary in 1944-45? The matter must be fully clarified, because it could provide vital clues to our investigation. For a variety of reasons I have become quite sceptical about the FSB’s claim that no positive identification of this prisoner is possible.

I wonder even more when the FSB refuses me access to documentation that was clearly available to Russian officials as far back as 1991, at the start of an official, bilateral Swedish Russian Working Group that went on to investigate the question of my uncle's fate until 2001.

The information about a “Prisoner No.7” being questioned for 16 hours, together with two other persons very closely associated with Wallenberg, should have been thoroughly examined in the course of that 10-year investigation. Yet it was not, since Russian never formally disclosed the information to their Swedish colleagues. Russian officials simply verbally informed the Swedish side of Langfelder's lengthy interrogation, but never mentioned a “Prisoner no.7” or produced a copy of the relevant page.

For still unexplained reasons, the Swedish side failed to insist on obtaining such a copy. The Chairman of the Swedish side of the Working Group, Hans Magnusson, was allowed to review all register records, but apparently did not notice the entry for July 23rd, 1947.

The information should and would have received serious scrutiny because the Working Group had received an important statement from Boris Solovov, a former investigator in the MGB’s 3rd Main Directorate, 4th Department, which in 1947 oversaw the Wallenberg case. In several interviews Solovov had told Swedish and Russian officials that at some point in 1947, he had been asked by his superior officer to deliver a package to the MGB archives. This package carried the label: “Contains materials related to ‘Prisoner No.7’”. It was to be opened only by the “head of MGB” (Viktor Abakumov).

Even more interesting is the fact that Solovov had indicated explicitly that he knew in 1947 that Wallenberg was this particular “Prisoner No.7”. Solovov further testified that his superiors had prepared a complex diagram designed to keep track of prisoners whom they wanted to place in isolation because they knew of Wallenberg’s presence in Soviet captivity. In fact, Solovov stated that “Prisoner No.7” was included in this diagram.

[It is important to understand that Solovov made these statements many years before the release of the more recent information from 2009, concerning an interrogation of a “Prisoner No.7” on July 23rd, 1947.]

In retrospect, it upsets me greatly that Russian officials apparently intentionally withheld this highly relevant information during the official inquiry in 1991-2001. My late father, Guy von Dardel, fought for over six decades to learn the full circumstances of Raoul’s disappearance. He had agreed to join the Working Group as an official member, trusting that the investigation would be conducted in good faith, from both sides.

Instead, we are now left with the obvious question of what other documents and insights Russian and possibly Swedish officials shave not shared and why. Since the end of the Working Group, a number of other documents have emerged that were not previously shared with researchers. As it turns out, Russian officials repeatedly lied when they stated that the formal Archival-Investigation file of Wallenberg's longtime cellmate, the German diplomat Willy Rödel, had not been preserved.

Some years ago it became clear that the documentation has, in fact, survived. In spite of numerous requests we have yet to see a special MGB file that contains this very documentation about Rödel and other foreign diplomats who died in Soviet imprisonment during the years 1945-1947. Is Wallenberg's case among this collection? Over the strenuous protests of researchers, Swedish officials never insisted on access to the material. The issue attains added urgency in light of the miraculous “discovery” of Raoul's personal possessions in September 1989 – a few weeks before members of our family travelled to Moscow, on the invitation of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

I took the step of filing a formal legal claim against the FSB very reluctantly and only after all other efforts of obtaining the requested information failed. Neither I nor anyone in my family holds any resentments towards Russia. Those who worked with my father know how he enthusiastically and unreservedly embraced the Russian people.

Last September, I and other members of Raoul's family traveled to Moscow to personally submit a comprehensive catalogue of all currently unanswered questions to Russian representatives from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) and the FSB. Our requests concern records that Russian officials can and must share before the question of Wallenberg's fate can be fully laid to rest. So far, we have not received any satisfactory answers or access to the requested documentation.

While Russia clearly holds the key to the Wallenberg mystery, I want to emphasize that the Russian government does not stand alone when it comes to restricting access to information. Important gaps also remain in the Swedish case record. Time will tell why Sweden's passivity in the case was so extreme, what Swedish (as well as possibly U.S. and British) authorities knew about his fate and if there was perhaps an unspoken understanding [with Russian counterparts] to keep the official Wallenberg inquiry within ‘safe’ parameters – and if so, why?

Members of Wallenberg's family and researchers will meet on September 14th-15th in Stockholm to address these and other unsolved questions at the third Raoul Wallenberg International Roundtable. They will be joined by other families of Swedes disappeared, past and present, members of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, as well as international legal experts, historians, journalists and human rights defenders.

Together we will explore options for how we can more effectively enforce the Right to the Truth, which includes finding new ways of obtaining access to still classified documentation in both Russian, Swedish and other international archives. This includes the submission of a catalogue of unsolved questions to Swedish authorities in the Wallenberg case. More than 70 years after Wallenberg's disappearance, it is high time that justice is done and all facts about his ordeal finally come to light.

This is an opinion piece written by Marie Dupuy, niece of Raoul Wallenberg.

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