György Konrád
On Raoul Wallenberg
[..]
When Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, the Hungarian leadership, Jewish community leaders and diplomats from neutral countries (and through them, the allies) were familiar with the accounts of escaped camp inmates. They must have been well aware of what the fate of the Jewish labour lent to Germany actually was (assuming they had not already been struck by the fact that those taken away for work included the babies, the elderly and the invalids). In the official parlance of the time, the Hungarian state had "leased" my young classmates and my cousins to the German state as labourers.
[..]
He'd drink a toast with the devil himself, if in so doing even a single life could be saved, he said.
[..]
He could fear, but he could take risks as well.
Unarmed, he found himself from time to time ordering about armed drunkards. Though he recognized that his life hung by a hair, he could not stop himself. In the morning he was in the lion's den, and even when it was a miracle that even he could get out, in the afternoon he went right back in, for he wanted to bring out those who had thought that they had been offered protection.
More than once he was heard to say that he was truly a coward, but he was brave enough to allow himself to acknowledge this. He had the power to imagine, so he knew whom he confronted. It did not take much of an imaginative leap to recognize his enemies for the unscrupulous murderers they were, who would have been able to do away with him—without as much as a belly-ache afterward—even if they had exchanged a laugh over some joke the night before.
[..]
There were fanatical commanders who made up for their lack of success at the front by destroying Jews, and raised the shooting of Jews into the Danube to the level of sport.
There were party minions, Arrow-Cross gendarmes, who were simply too worn out to lead another group of Jews down to the lower quay (after already sending two groups that day swimming into the icy Danube.)
The various local party headquarters of the Arrow-Cross became autonomous, leaving streetcorner thugs, freed convicts, crack-brained militants, bourgeois-hating, racist proletarians, fanatic street orators, to get their hands on uniforms, arm bands, and machine guns; to pour their way into buildings occupied by Jews, randomly selecting those to be shot, but not before getting them to strip naked, so as to divvy up the loot.
Thieving-murdering, arm-band adorned gangs now reigned in a city where central authority had collapsed. Even if there had been central authority,
how-ever, it wouldn't have opposed the anti-Jewish action—such as the slaughter of children hidden away in convents and monasteries and in church orphanages.
Some killed only for necklaces and wedding rings.
They did not dare catch a tram out to the front, in case brother party members got the loot for themselves.
Wallenberg understood how worthless a person's life had become.
[..]
Of his further fate I have nothing to say. Neither the Swedish government nor his family went especially out of their way to press for his release, and whether he died, or was killed, in 1947, as Andrei Gromyko claimed, or else lived on, one thing is certain: resignation stamped a seal of permanence upon his absence. Not long ago Wallenberg's half-brother looked me up, with an older friend of mine, a Swedish journalist acting as intermediary, for he thought he had come upon a lead that might lead to Wallenberg's supposedly copied and hidden diary. Enthusiastic though I was, the lead proved to be false.
As I leaf through the late Jenoý Lévai's book and read the legation's memos and his colleagues' disciplined reports on the humanitarian missions, I want very much to understand more closely this saintly adventurer and exemplary Swedish patriot, of whom, I have noticed, young Swedes know awfully little, for Count Folke Bernadotte occupies the dais reserved for the real man who saved the Jews.
A statue of Raoul Wallenberg is not far from my present home. My young children were afraid of the tall, sad gentleman, but I reassured them: he was a good man, he loved children.
On Klauzál Square, meanwhile, where the hecatomb of ghetto residents was to have risen, not long ago the playground was refurbished. The children like the new playthings; among them are the children from the nearby Jewish school, mingled together with the neighbourhood Gypsy kids and all the others. ß
Translated by Paul Olchváry
György Konrád,
the novelist, has been President of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin—Brandenburg, since 1997. His books in English include
A Feast in the Garden (Harcourt, Brace
and Jovanovich, 1992) and Stone Clock
(under preparation)..
