Protestáns emlékülést tartottak a Raoul Wallenberg-centenárium alkalmából a Deák téren – Képekkel és hangfájlokkal!
Létrehozás:
2012. augusztus 31., 03:55
Legutolsó módosítás:
2012. augusztus 31., 09:01
Budapest – 2012. augusztus 30-án Budán a Wallenberg-szobornál helyezték el a tisztelet virágait egyházi és világi megemlékezők, majd a Deák Téri Evangélikus Gimnáziumban tartott emlékülésen idézték meg a vészkorszak embermentőinek munkáját, valamint egyházaink szerepét azokban a vészterhes időkben. Szöveg és fotó: Kiss Tamás
Az evangélikus gimnázium dísztermében egybegyűlteket a Magyarországi Evangélikus Egyház programkoordinátora Lackner Pál, az est moderátora köszöntötte, majd először Prőhle Gergely evangélikus országos felügyelőt, a Külügyminisztérium helyettes államtitkárát, a Wallenberg Emlékbizottság tagját kérte köszöntése elmondására a Magyarországi Evangélikus Egyház és Magyarország Kormánya képviseletében.
Az országos felügyelő hangsúlyozta az állam és az egyház különállásának fontosságát, és azt, hogy őszintén szembe tudjunk nézni múltunkkal és jelenünkkel, belátva és elismerve erényeinket és hibáinkat, helyén kezelve azt a sokszínű történelmi arcképcsarnokot, amit elődeink alkotnak.
A következő köszöntést az esemény másik szervezőjének a Magyarországi Református Egyháznak képviseletében Bölcskei Gusztáv püspök, a Református Egyház zsinatának lelkészi elnöke mondta el. Hangsúlyozta, hogy „szükségünk van arra, hogy helyet találjunk Wallenbergnek a saját emlékezetünkben”.
A köszöntések sorát Anna Boda tanácsos, Svédország Magyarországi Nagykövetségének ügyvivője zárta. A svéd diplomata az emlékezés fontosságát és továbbadását hangsúlyozta, mert amíg létezik diszkrimináció és antiszemitizmus addig az olyanok munkája, mint Raoul Wallenberg nem lesz teljes, de például szolgálhatnak az őket követő generációknak.
A délután egyik fő előadója Martin Modéus a svéd Linköpingi Egyházkerület püspöke volt, aki Wallenberg svédországi megítéléséről beszélt. Elmondta, hogy a néhai svéd diplomata meglepően kevés hangsúlyt kap az oktatásban és közgondolkodásban. Személyes emlékeiből idézve elmondta, hogy saját tinédzser korából sokkal inkább emlékszik a Wallenberg eltűnésével kapcsolatos hírekre, találgatásokra, mint arra, hogy mit is tett a diplomata. A püspök beszéde eredeti angol nyelvű formájában olvasható honlapunkon, ahogy a többi előadáshoz hasonlóan meg is hallgatható.
A püspök beszédét követően Izrael Állam magyarországi nagykövetének Ilan Mor-nak spontán köszöntése követte, aki megköszönte a szervezőknek, hogy ez és a hasonló rendezvények létrejöhetnek, valamint elmondta, hogy Izrael Állam első lakosai milyen hamar felül emelkedtek a tragédián, amit az is mutat, hogy hálából Wallenberg mellett Izrael a Világ Igaza-díjjal ismert el több mint 24 ezer olyan embert, akik nem zsidó létükre mentették a vészkorszak idején zsidó embertársaikat.
Az emlékülésen előadást tartott Horváth Erzsébet, a református egyház zsinati levéltárosa, továbbá Gombocz Eszter főiskolai tanár, aki a református és evangélikus egyházak szerepéről és felelősségéről szólt, bemutatva azokat a viszonyokat és döntéseket, amik az üldözöttek megmentésére, vagy éppen kirekesztésére irányultak. A rendezvényt a házigazda, Gáncs Péter evangélikus elnök-püspök egy svéd imádsággal zárta.
Az alkalmon megjelent többek közt Erdő Péter bíboros, prímás, esztergom-budapesti érsek, dr. Fabiny Tamás evangélikus püspök, Jákob János protestáns tábori püspök, Domán István főrabbi, Szita Szabolcs, a Holokauszt Emlékközpont vezetője valamint az országos felügyelő mellett az Északi és Déli Evangélikus Egyházkerületek felügyelői Benczúr László és Radosné Lengyel Anna is. Az alkalmon a jelenlevők az evangélikus Gryllus testvérek zenéjét élvezhették.
Martin Modéus püspök előadása:
Raoul Wallenberg
Budapest 30th August 2012
My own interest
When I was a young Swedish teenager during the days of the Cold War, there were two mysteries which appeared repeatedly in the newspapers. They were good stories because they spoiled the Swedish relations with the Soviet Union and because circumstances were such that they awakened people’s interest.
The first mystery was about the Swedish DC-3 plane which was shot down by Soviet attack planes during a mission across the Baltic Sea in 1952. The other mystery was Raoul Wallenberg. In both cases the events, even up to today, caused an innumerable amount of speculation on how these people had been put into Soviet concentration camps. The DC-3 was found in 2003, and with it only half of the crew. The rest are lost, perhaps in the Baltic Sea, or perhaps prisoners in the Soviet Union. Raoul Wallenberg has never been found. On a general level the Swedish attitude towards the Soviet Union was definitely influenced during a large part of the Cold War by the fact that well-defined lives of people seemed to disappear completely on the other side of the Baltic Sea.
Being Bishop of the Diocese of Linköping makes my interest even greater. Raoul Wallenberg’s grandfather’s grandfather was Marcus Wallenberg, one of my predecessors as bishop in 1819-1833. His son, André Oscar Wallenberg, who is the one who is counted as the founder of the Wallenberg family, grew up in the house where my wife and I now live. When he came of age he established Stockholm’s Enskilda Bank and had considerable influence on the development of the banking systems in Sweden. His friend, Louis De Geer, lived for a time in the neighbouring house. Louis De Geer was a great industrialist and contributed to the reform of the Swedish political system and was the first prime minister in modern terms. The Swedish political-economic history of the 1800’s is strongly associated with the house in which we live, so there is every reason to be interested in the subject.
In Raoul Wallenberg, politics and business come together, but in another way. He had built up his contacts with Hungary through his work in the grocery business. He had a network of contacts and some kind of cultural knowledge, and he spoke very good German. His status in Budapest was as a Swedish diplomat, but his task was in many ways American, working for the organisation called The War Refugee Board, and he was in fact also an American reserve officer.
Wallenberg was an interesting character and his influence is growing. He is as near as one can come to being a hero of our times, at least in Sweden. But he is not the only one. The fascination with Wallenberg is based not only on what he did but equally as much on how he did it. Let me first outline shortly how Wallenberg’s personal life led to the events that took place here in Budapest. How did Raooul Wallenberg become the person he was?
Wallenberg’s upbringing
Raoul Wallenberg’s life started tragically. Before he was born, his father, also called Raoul, died of aggressive cancer. One can of course only speculate on how this would influence his choices in life, but the main consequence was that his grandfather, son of André Oscar Wallenberg, took over responsibility for Raoul’s upbringing and carreer. And this was a task he took with the greatest of seriousness, even though he was actually abroad for most of Raoul’s childhood. Their communication was almost exclusively by letter, and Raoul followed his grandfather’s will and ideas to a great degree. It is a good guess that Raoul’s grandfather transmitted a good deal of the ambitions he had had for his own son, Raoul Senior. Perhaps they were also his own ambitions.
Some parts of the Wallenberg upbringing are very clear. Grandfather had both feet firmly in the 1800s, so values were greatly influenced by an older moral obligation or duty which was associated with the special history of the family, with their mission. Raoul was not like others, he was special, and he was often reminded of this. One important fact in this was that he probably also had just the right age to qualify for a leading position in the Wallenberg clan. He was the oldest of his generation and thus in some way an obvious inheriter. But it wasn’t that easy. In the Wallenberg sphere of that time one was particular that competence should be the deciding factor for a job in the firm. Grandfather therefore planned an ambitious training program. Focus was put on the fact that Raoul should gain international experience which would give him an advantage over his competitors.
During his school years Raoul always had very uneven results. It was as if he could put masses of energy into things that interested him, but also, quite unconcernedly, could ignore things that he was not interested in. But he managed to get through his studies, with effort, when it came to the crunch. It is obvious that he was very talented. At the early age of 19 he wrote an essay on ”The United States of Europe”, and there he warned that national interests would be in the way of common European interests. He also had artistic talents, after his father, and after some years his mother married into one of Sweden’s artistic families, the Dardel family.
One of the most important parts of Raoul Wallenberg’s education was that his grandfather saw to it that he travelled abroad as much as possible. One important reason for this was actually that he wanted to keep Raoul from the bright lights of Stockholm and mainly away from the young women. Gustaf Wallenberg lived with the idea that Raoul would mix with the young ladies of Stockholm and would soon fall in love and get married young. This would put a stop to his carreer and education. It was not at all about morals, but simly more about carreer planning.
As I said, the purpose of the visits abroad was that Raoul should get a greater knowledge of business and also profit from a more dynamic way of thinking. He was therefore sent to USA where he completed a degree in architecture. If his grandfather had allowed him to work as an architect, he would probably have been a very good one. But the point of the time in USA was the international experience and not the education. Raoul also lived and worked in South Africa and Israel, so he was trained to be a world citizen and an internationalist. Travelling became his lifestyle and he often chose the cheapest method of transport in order to be as near to people as possible. If you are sitting and thinking that I am trying to describe a spirit of adventure in Raoul Wallenberg, then I would answer: you are right, to a great extent.
He was able to see a lot of the world, and one of the purposes of his grandfather’s projects was to give him a good assessment of foreign cultures. Broad-mindedness and imagination were encouraged. Raoul Wallenberg was trained to have meaning, to have a mission, to be a special person. But his mission was meant to be in business.
Opinion of Wallenberg in Sweden at that time
Raoul Wallenberg’s destiny influenced how the cold war was conceived in Sweden, but the cold war also influenced the conception of Raoul Wallenberg. His sheer absence got somehow in the way of his deeds. The first question about Wallenberg in Sweden was not: What did he do?, but Where is he? This has also in some way resulted in the discussion about what he did not coming into focus.
As I said, what is significant about Raoul Wallenberg’s actions is not what he did but perhaps primarily how he did it. His undoubtedly unconventional ways of helping people, often with danger to his own life and the lives of his assistants, gives a picture of a cowboy dressed in a suit.
Even if a good deal of attention is paid to Wallenberg today, the path to equal attention in Sweden has been a crooked one. During the first few years after the Second World War, Wallenberg was in fact hardly given any attention at all, not least because the Swedish authorities were unwilling to investigate his disappearance. For political reasons it was more practical to assume that Wallenberg was dead and that responsibility did not rest on the Soviet authorities. There is every indication that feelers were thrown out from the Soviet Union about an exchange of Wallenberg, but that reluctance – or unfamiliarity – with this type of game made the authorities deaf to such possibilities. Many of the details in this are speculation, but the overall picture shows that the Swedish authorities made a series of catastrophic mistakes which then in turn led to further mistakes. The Swedish government’s official apology to the relatives did not come until the beginning of year 2000. All this has meant that attention has for long periods been shifted from Wallenberg’s deeds to the actions of the authorities handling the Wallenberg affair.
It is first this year that a couple of Wallenberg biographies have been published, and the first memorial of him in Stockholm is only ten years old. In school he is hardly mentioned at all. In an investigation of Swedish teaching material it can be seen that of 23 books for high school, Wallenberg is only mentioned in eight and then normally only in one sentence.
The real trace of Raoul Wallenberg stops in Moscow in the summer of 1947, and it looks as if he was murdered there then. Even if this is not true, one can probably suspect that the one hundred years jubilee will in retrospect be seen as the stop date for speculation about Raoul Wallenberg still being alive. The authorities’ mistakes have probably also been investigated as far as is possible. Focus can therefore be moved to where it should have been all the time: to Raoul Wallenberg’s life and work. Raoul Wallenberg can now come forward as a person and argue with the myth of Raoul Wallenberg.
Attention to Raoul Wallenberg har mainly been international, and unfortunately his place in Swedish conscience has not been so great. The reason for the international attention has however not always been so easy to digest. Wallenberg propaganda was in fact a tool for the Americans during the Cold War, where Wallenberg’s fate was used to miscredit Soviet intentions in the world. To show that the Russians kept a Swedish hero as prisoner was a perfect tool to keep the negative opinion alive. Wallenberg’s position as a Swedish diplomat, but with American tasks and instructions also contributed of course to the fact that the Americans were specially interested in spreading knowledge on his life and fate. It is no coincidence that Wallenberg even became American honorary citizen in 1981, an honour that had only been bestowed on Winston Churchill previously.
Wallenberg’s character
How should one then paint the picture that emerges today? He was charming, humorous, happy to make jokes and very talkative. His gift of the gab, which was a family trait from another side of the family, was so extreme that it was mentioned by older relatives as a real obstacle for his carreer in the firm. Raoul Wallenberg seems to have been an entrepreneur and sometimes rather a madcap and adventurer. From his letters we can see that he had a burlesque humour. He was also an intensive and very appreciated socialiser. He was a good actor and clever at scanning environments. He could adjust to his circumstances by choosing charm, ice-cold negotiation or loud anger which could even frighten German SS-officers so much that they fled from his office. All this can be summarized in that he emanated self-confidence, which was no doubt an important key to his success.
In himself, he also needed ”to be clever” and to fulfil the very high expectations of elder relatives. When he was given his task, he is said to have replied: When a Wallenberg is sent abroad on behalf of the State, it has always been his duty to do everything in his power for his country to which the name is committed.*
Coupled with this he also had an extremely good organising ability, and it was probably this rather unusual mix of qualities that led to his actually being able to be so successful, both regarding the daring issuing of protective passports and the enormous amount of work in organising food and protection for thousands of people. Charm, energy, daring and administrative skills all helped on Wallenberg’s personal pallet of qualities.
Wallenberg had a kind of limitlessness in his actions and one can imagine that this limitlessness and his spirit of adventure in his grown-up years led to two things: that he found if difficult to adjust to the Wallenberg environment and that he failed to get himself in line with the unwritten rules of diplomatic discretion. For a diplomat to unembarressingly bribe, threaten and barter with all sorts of people doesn’t perhaps sound quite right – even actually in the service of a foreign state, the Americans. Critical voices were heard even amongst his nearest colleagues at the Embassy here in Budapest.
Even these, sometimes critical, colleagues in Budapest did a fantastic job in saving Jews , and several of them have, like Wallenberg, been honoured with a place amongst those who are called the righteous among people in the memorial place Yad Vashem in Jerusalen. Those who have been given this label of gratitude are Nina and Valdemar Langlet, Per Anger, Lars Berg and Ivan Danielsson. Even if several of these were critical of his adventurous actions, it was probably just this unleashed energy which enabled him to succeed, and perhaps it was this inspiration which was so catching for the others around him.
*Janfeldt, p 231
One of the authors of his biography speculates that there can have been a sort of basic feeling of invulnarability as a result of his rather daring travels in the United States in his youth. On one occasion he had a car crash, and the people who helped him then staged a classical hold-up robbery. Raoul describes himself as being so calm during the hold-up that the robbers became worried. He writes that he thought the whole incident was rather interesting and that he wasn’t at all frightened.
Perhaps the feeling of invulnarability grew as near the end of war he was able to succeed with daring raids in the Nazi arena where he was able to rescue people almost literally from the wolf’s teeth.
Wallenberg’s driving force
In the beginning I noticed that Raoul Wallenberg came from a very church background. This assertion,however, needs distinction. The obvious church background lay four generations back and his biographies show no religious driving forces whatsoever. The film Good evening, Mr Wallenberg from 1990, with biographical ambitions, lets Raoul Wallenberg answer No to the question as to whether he believes in God. Otherwise it is remarkably quiet about Raoul Wallenbergs religious preferences, at least in the material that I have been able to find.
Actually the lack of a relationship with God is so absent that it is an interesting fact in itself. Would a talented, broad-minded, thoughtful and widely-travelled person not even have thought about existential meaning and a belief in God. I do not think so. This is probably quite an interesting peep-hole into the blind eye of Swedish cultural life where important cultural actors can be tone-deaf to the spiritual dimension of life. Should I eggagerate a little, I would say that it is a typical feature for the Swedish attitude to religion that one is conscious of one’s own religious beliefs, but one thinks that one is alone with one’s interpretation.
Nothing shows that he had general wish to change the world, but there are some incidents documented which should suggest that conscious or unconscious characteristics of this type were to be found in Raoul Wallenberg. During his youth in USA he met the famous Elsa Brändsröm, known as the Angel of Siberia, as a result of her active roll in the exchange of prisoners of war. The parallels between their work is interesting and they are well worth some thought as a part of the moral base of Raoul Wallenberg’s character. After having seen the film Pimpernel Smith 1942, it is maintained that he is to have said: I would like to do something like that myself.*
*Jangfeldt, p 231
It is however a feature of the Lutheran calling that it does not need to have expressive religious driving forces in order to be highly valued. The calling to good deeds relates to coram hominibus and not coram deo, or, more simply: the good deeds are not motivated by man’s wish to be of worth in the eyes of God, but by the need which man sees in the eyes of his neighbour. This insight makes Lutheran theology vulnerable to secularization. Sin risks losing its existential dimension and the good life changes into agreements of a more practical nature. I will not go into this as we will then be sitting here all day, but one can see rather clearly that the secular ethics in an argument can lead to both altruistic and totalitarian consequences. To maintain the absolute worth of man is easy in a secular society as long as one has a majority on one’s side, but otherwise?
Wallenberg reminds us that each person must take his or her individual responsibility, and shows us that in the right context and time in history this can have enormous meaning. When I read about how Wallenberg influenced his context I am sure that more lives were saved around him than those he was personally involved in, merely because he gave people inspiration to take human responsibility. I want to finish with a quote from Talmud which is a motto for the rightous among people, and which will now stand as a motto for those Swedish people, Wallenberg included, and all other people, known and unknown, who risked their lives to reach out a hand to their neighbour. The quote is: He who saves a human being, saves a world.
