Jan. 17 marked Raoul Wallenberg Day, in remembrance of, and in tribute to, the Swedish diplomat — Canada’s first honorary citizen and an honorary citizen of the United States, Australia and Israel — who demonstrated that one person with the compassion to care, and the courage to act, can confront evil, prevail and transform history.
From mid-May to the beginning of July 1944, some 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz — the fastest, cruellest and most efficient killing field in the Holocaust. Wallenberg arrived in Budapest as a member of the Swedish Legation in July 1944 and, in a remarkable demonstration of ingenuity and inspiration, bluff and bravado, rescued upwards of 100,000 Jews.
Accordingly, Canada’s seminal “country pledge” at the Swedish International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism in 2021 called for learning about and acting upon Wallenberg’s heroic legacy, a call annually reaffirmed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Raoul Wallenberg Day.
Simply put, Wallenberg was a beacon of light during the darkest days of the Holocaust, and his heroism warrants remembrance. Indeed, this year’s Raoul Wallenberg Day came at a particularly poignant and painful moment.
First, it took place on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz — the worst extermination camp of the 20th century. Over 1.3-million people were deported to Auschwitz, including around 1.1-million Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism did not die at Auschwitz. It remains, today, the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil, reminding us all-too-painfully that while it begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews.
Second, this Raoul Wallenberg Day also marks 80 years since his disappearance on Jan. 17, 1945. Rather than be celebrated as the “hero of the Holocaust” that he was, he became a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and disappeared the gulags.
Third, this year’s commemoration took place amidst an unprecedented, contemporary international drumbeat of evil in an age of atrocity: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine, with its attending mass atrocities; China’s continuing assault on the rules-based order and its mass atrocities targeting the Muslim Uyghurs; Sudan’s second genocide of the 21st century; and Hamas’ horrific mass atrocities of October 7, the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, which triggered the Hamas-Israel war, and the resulting death and devastation.
Indeed, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which I chair, has published landmark reports on each of these atrocities and others — as well as the intensifying imprisonment of human rights defenders amidst the abiding culture of impunity in this age of atrocity.
We also marked the 83rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference on Jan. 20, where the “Final Solution” was foreordained. This is a time to recall that what made the Holocaust so unspeakable was not only the horrors that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened, but that these horrors were preventable. Nobody could say we did not know. We knew but we did not act. Wallenberg did. As Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel taught us, silence in the face of evil ends up being complicity with evil itself.
I first learned of Wallenberg’s heroism from the testimony of Holocaust survivors who he saved, when I was acting in the 1970s as pro-bono counsel for the Canadian Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression. I learned more from U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, himself saved by Wallenberg, who sponsored the bill to confer honorary U.S. citizenship on him in 1981, and inspired me to work to confer honorary Canadian citizenship on Wallenberg in 1985; from Raoul Wallenberg’s family, whom I have been serving as counsel for close to 47 years; and from Swedish diplomat Per Anger, who worked with Wallenberg to rescue Jews in Hungary in 1944, and later became Sweden’s ambassador to Canada, where I developed a close friendship that has continued with Swedish ambassadors to Canada and the Swedish government, to this day.
I also had the occasion, as a parliamentarian, to address the Swedish parliament during the celebration of the centennial of Wallenberg’s birth in 2012, where I witnessed an international exhibit titled, in Wallenberg’s own immortal words, “To me there’s no other choice.” This phrase reflected his singular courage and commitment, which embodies the Talmudic principle that if you save a single life, it is as if you have saved an entire universe.
In transforming history and saving human “universes,” Wallenberg may be said to have presaged five of today’s foundational principles of international human rights and humanitarian law — underpinned by the understanding that indifference and inaction always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, not on the side of the victim.
First, by distributing Schutzpasses — diplomatic passports conferring protective immunity — and establishing safe houses conferring diplomatic sanctuary, Wallenberg has been credited with saving 50,000 Jews by these means alone. His heroic deeds affirmed and validated the principle of diplomatic immunity, and the remedy of diplomatic protection, a foundational principle of international law and a model of the diplomatic capacity to save lives. Simply put, consular or diplomatic assistance should not be seen as a matter of “discretion,” but as a matter of legal obligation — on which I have written separately about — and a principle sorely lacking in today’s public diplomacy.
Second, with his protection and rescue of civilians amid the horrors of the Holocaust, including from death marches and death camp transports on the way to Auschwitz, Wallenberg manifested the best of what we today call international humanitarian law.
Third, with his organization of hospitals, soup kitchens and orphanages — the staples of international humanitarian assistance that provided women, children, the sick and the elderly with a semblance of dignity in the face of the worst of all horrors and evils — Wallenberg embodied the best of what we today call international humanitarian intervention.
Fourth, by saving Jews from certain deportation, death and atrocity, he symbolized what we today call the “responsibility to protect doctrine” — on which I co-edited a book — a Canadian-led initiative adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, when I was serving as justice minister and, regrettably, honoured more in its breach than in its observance.
Fifth and finally, Wallenberg’s last rescue was perhaps his most memorable. As the Nazis advanced on Budapest and threatened to blow up the city’s ghetto and liquidate the remaining Jews, he put the Nazi generals on notice that they would be held accountable and brought to justice, if not executed, for their war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Nazi generals desisted. Some 70,000 more Jews were saved, thanks to the indomitable courage of one person prepared to confront radical evil. In warning the Nazi generals that they would be held responsible for their war crimes, Wallenberg was a forerunner of the Nuremberg principles and what today we call international criminal law.
To the “desk murderer” Adolf Eichmann, who was organizing the transports to Auschwitz, Wallenberg was the Judenhund, the “Jewish dog.” To the Jews, as those saved by Wallenberg would tell me, he was the “guardian angel.”
Yet, while Wallenberg saved so many, he was not himself saved by so many who could. Rather than greet Wallenberg as the liberator he was, the Soviets — who entered Hungary as liberators themselves on Jan. 17, 1945 — disappeared him into the gulags. The Soviets first claimed that he died of a heart attack in July 1947, before changing their story to claim that he was murdered, also in July 1947.
These contradictory Soviet claims have been refuted by several inquiries, including the 1990 International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg, which I chaired, along with Wallenberg’s brother, Guy von Dardel, Elie Wiesel, Russian scholar Mikhail Chlenov and former Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner.
Indeed, in 1985, as our commission report cited, a U.S. federal court found the evidence “incontrovertible” that Wallenberg was alive in 1947, “compelling” that he was alive in the 1960s and “credible” that he remained alive into the ’80s — a position held by Soviet Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov, who conveyed this information personally to Chlenov and me in a meeting we had in Moscow in November 1989, shortly before Sakharov’s death in December.
It is imperative that the international community at this important inflection moment finally come together to secure for Wallenberg and his family the long-denied truth and justice that’s owed to them. Accordingly, I am delighted that Susanne Berger, founder and co-ordinator of the Raoul Wallenberg Research Initiative and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, has launched an initiative that opens up the blank pages of history.
The countries in which Wallenberg is an honorary citizen, including Canada, should lead an international consortium calling upon Russia to open its archives and reveal the long-sought and suppressed truth about this disappeared hero of humanity, whom the UN called “the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century.”
Indeed, as Israel begins its chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in March, it should convene the countries of Wallenberg’s citizenship and honorary citizenship and launch an IHRA initiative in the pursuit of truth and justice over the fate of Raoul Wallenberg. For the IHRA, Sweden and the countries of which he is an honorary citizen, as Wallenberg said, there should be no other choice. In tandem, these countries should hold parliamentary hearings with witness testimony to further this compelling initiative.
Hopefully, this year’s poignant anniversary will be not only be an act of remembrance, but a remembrance to act on behalf of our common humanity.
National Post
Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, emeritus professor of law at McGill University, Isaacman distinguished visiting professor in Holocaust and genocide studies at Gratz College, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and international counsel to political prisoners.