This
man born in Apr 1908, after schooling, enrolled
in a technical school, from which he was expelled in 1924 for forging his
report card. He later graduated, but did not take the Abitur exams that would
have enabled him to go to college or university. Instead, he took courses in
Brno in several trades, including chauffeuring and machinery, and worked for
his father for three years. A fan of motorcycles since his youth, he bought a
250-cc Moto Guzzi racing motorcycle and competed recreationally in mountain
races for the next few years. He was to join Czech army, where he rose to the
rank of lance corporal, returned to Moravian Electrotechnic, which went
bankrupt shortly afterwards. His father's farm machinery business closed around
the same time, leaving him unemployed ~
the story of a failed man one may think – yet the man, Oskar Schindler – is a
hero, whose life was imbibed as an inspirational movie, by a person no less
than Steven Spielberg. Schindler's List,
a 1993 American epic historical drama
film directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven
Zaillian was based on the novel
Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar
Schindler, a Sudeten German businessman, who saved more than a thousand mostly
Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories
during World War II.
This is
no post on Oskar Schindler, but on a person who disappeared on this day 75
years ago ! ~ a man who saved the lives of many jews. The
disappearance of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, presaging the 75th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most brutal extermination camp
of the 20th century. Decades later, the international drumbeat of evil and
indifference can still feel overwhelming, with the international community too
often a bystander to atrocity and injustice.
Raoul Wallenberg was born in Aug 1912. In 1944, he saved
thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, only to be arrested and shot by the
Soviets. The son of a renowned Swedish
family of entrepreneurs and diplomats, he was supposed to become a banker, but
found he had neither the inclination nor the talent for the work. Instead he
went to the US to study architecture, dropped out, and returned to Sweden
during World War II to set up a business importing food - owing his success
partly to his experienced Hungarian business partner Kalman Lauer. As an attaché to the Swedish embassy,
Wallenberg enjoyed diplomatic immunity, and he knew how to use it. He bought up
buildings in which those he saved could find refuge under the Swedish flag. He
bribed officials, offered huge financial deals and threatened political
consequences should they fail to help him. Then, the young Swede came up with
the idea of issuing "protective passports" that identified the
bearers as Swedish citizens and therefore citizens of a neutral state. He
managed to save several thousand Jews from the SS and Gestapo.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws in Nazi
Germany, enacted by the Reichstag in 1935, at a special meeting convened during the
annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). The two laws were the Law for
the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and
extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German
females under 45 in Jewish households, and the Reich Citizenship Law, which
declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich
citizens. The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship
rights.
SMERSH was an
umbrella organization for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in
the Red Army formed officially announced in Apr 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph
Stalin. The main reason for its creation was to subvert the attempts by German
forces to infiltrate the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
During World War
II, the Kingdom of Hungary was a member of the Axis powers. In the 1930s, the
Kingdom of Hungary relied on increased trade with Italy and Germany to pull itself out of the Great
Depression. Hungarian politics and foreign policy had become more stridently
nationalistic by 1938, and Hungary adopted an irredentist policy similar to
Germany's, attempting to incorporate ethnic Hungarian areas in neighboring
countries into Hungary. Hungarian forces participated in the invasion of
Yugoslavia and the invasion of the Soviet Union. Their participation was noted
by German observers for its particular cruelty, with occupied peoples subjected
to arbitrary violence, referred as
"murder tourism." Beginning in 1938, the Kingdom of Hungary,
under the regency of Miklós Horthy, passed a series of anti-Jewish measures
modeled on the so-called Nuremberg Race Laws. In April and May 1944 the Nazi
regime and its accomplices began the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to
extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Raoul Gustaf
Wallenberg (1912 – 1945) was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and
humanitarian. He is remembered for saving tens of thousands of Jews in
Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian
Fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's
special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued
protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings designated as Swedish territory.
On 17 January 1945,
during the Siege of Budapest by the Red Army, Wallenberg was detained by SMERSH
on suspicion of espionage and subsequently disappeared. He was later reported
to have died on 17 July 1947 while imprisoned by the KGB secret police in the
Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters and affiliated prison in Moscow. The motives
behind Wallenberg's arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet government, along
with questions surrounding the circumstances of his death and his ties to US
intelligence, remain mysterious and are the subject of continued
speculation. Later he was conferred many
honours – in 1981, US Congressman Tom Lantos, one of those
saved by Wallenberg, sponsored a bill making Wallenberg an honorary citizen of
the United States, the second person ever to receive this honour. Wallenberg is
also an honorary citizen of Canada, Hungary, Australia, and Israel.
A couple of years
ago, a Russian court began hearing a lawsuit from descendants of Swedish
diplomat Raoul Wallenberg against the FSB security service to try to get more
details on his death in a Soviet jail. Wallenberg
was jailed in the notorious headquarters of the secret police in Moscow, where
he died. Wallenberg's niece Marie Dupuy in July launched a legal case against
the FSB - the successor of the Soviet-era KGB - to force it to drop its refusal
to release the full archive on the diplomat. The USSR in 1957 made public a
document saying Wallenberg died of heart failure in the Lubyanka prison in July
1947. In 2000, the head of a Russian investigative commission said Wallenberg
had been shot and killed by the secret police, but gave no specific details. Sweden
officially declared Wallenberg dead in 2016. An FSB representative asked the
court to reject the latest demands in part because it said the archives include
details about the "personal life" of other Lubyanka inmates.
The documents from
1947 can only be made available in 2022 after an official 75-year waiting
period to declassify the documents has passed, the FSB said. "You can wait
for these deadlines," he told the family. Whether
truth and complete information would get revealed by 2022 too is a mystery.
With
regards – S. Sampathkumar
17th
Jan 2020.
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