Wallenberg: More Twists to the Tale

Mária Ember: Ránk akarták kenni (They Wanted to Blame Us). Budapest, Héttorony, 1992, 128 pp.

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The ÁVH worked out a detailed account to back the Soviet claim that Wallenberg had never been in the Soviet Union and that those who sought him should seek him elsewhere. They maintained that nobody had dragged off Wallenberg in 1945, least of all the glorious Soviet Army. Indeed, they could not have done so since Wallenberg - went the author of this fable - had been shot and killed in the basement of the American mission (where else?) by two members of the 1944 Budapest Judenrat, Lajos Stöckler and Miksa Domonkos, in the presence of (who else?) an official of the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi) Party. This was the basis of the ÁVH horror story which Mária Ember came upon.

Her book also shows how well the skills of a journalist and a historian can be combined. It was almost inevitable that Mária Ember, who had sublimated her experience of the holocaust and turned it into literature, should become interested in the fate of Wallenberg, continuously asking questions about him while interviewing people. Mostly she knew more than those she interviewed. When, however, she published an interview with the daughter of Miksa Domonkos, someone read it in Los Angeles, promptly took a plane to Budapest, and rang Mária Ember on arrival.

The name of this key witness was Pál Szalai, who died within two years of talking to Mária Ember, without ever again setting foot on Hungarian soil.

In 1937 Pál Szalai had been found guilty of ultra-right-wing political crimes by a Royal Hungarian court. In 1944, as the police liaison officer of the Arrow Cross Party, this same man did much to help Jews, collaborating with Wallenberg, protecting the Ghetto; so much so that, in spite of the post he had held, he was found not guilty of war crimes by a People's Court in 1945. In 1952 he had been selected as one of the accused in the aborted Zionist trial, with the role of one of Wallenberg's murderers.

After his arrest in 1952, a confession was obtained from him and his fellow accused by torture. Everything was ready for a trial designed to prove that Wallenberg, far from having been dragged off to the Gulag, had been the victim of a conspiracy between Hungarian fascists and cosmopolitan Zionists. One can only guess why a trial prepared in all its details never took place.

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