Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
RAOUL WALLENBERG, HERO FOR ALL TIMES
Hill bears a plaque attesting to the heroism of Raoul Wallenberg (1912-47), a Swedish
diplomat and businessman who, together with his colleagues Carl-Ivan Danielsson
(1880-1963) and Per Anger (1913-2002), rescued as many as 35,000 Hungarian
Jews during WWII.
Wallenberg began working in 1936 for a trading firm whose owner was a Hungarian
Jew. In July 1944 the Swedish Foreign Ministry, at the request of Jewish and refugee
organisations in the US, sent the 32-year-old Swede on a rescue mission to Budapest
as an attaché to the embassy there. By that time almost half a million Jews in Hungary
had been sent to Nazi death camps in Germany and Poland.
Wallenberg immediately began issuing Swedish safe-conduct passes (called 'Wal-
lenberg passports') from the Swedish embassy in Budapest. He also set up a series of
'safe houses' flying the flag of Sweden and other neutral countries where Jews could
seek asylum. He even followed German 'death marches' and deportation trains, dis-
tributing food and clothing and actually pulling some 500 people off the cars along
the way.
When the Soviet army entered Budapest in January 1945, Wallenberg went to re-
port to the authorities but in the wartime confusion was arrested for espionage and
sent to Moscow. In the early 1950s, responding to reports that Wallenberg had been
seen alive in a labour camp, the Soviet Union announced that he had in fact died of a
heart attack two years after the war ended. Many believe Wallenberg was executed by
the Soviets, who suspected him of spying for the USA.
Wallenberg was made an honorary citizen of the city of Budapest in 2003. Other
foreigners associated with helping Hungarian Jews in Budapest include Carl Lutz
(1885-1975), a Swiss consul who has a memorial devoted to him on VII Dob utca in
Pest, and Jane Haining (1897-1944), a Budapest-based Scottish missionary who died
in Auschwitz. In 2010 the city of Budapest named a section of the Pesti alsó rakpart
along the Danube in Pest in her honour.
To reach the former Swedish Embassy from the Cave Church follow the small path,
Verejték utca (Perspiration St) and a walkway named after Dezső Szabó, a controver-
sial writer killed in the last days of WWII. You'll pass a funny bust of this large and
rather angry-looking man along the way as you ascend through what were once vine-
yards and are now the well-kept lawns and gardens of Jubilee Park (Jubileum park).
Another route to follow from Gellért tér is along Kelenhegyi út. At No 12-14 is the inter-
esting Art Nouveau Studio Building (1903), which has enormous rooms with high ceil-
ings that were once used to construct huge socialist-realist monuments. Continue up
