Author Description

One of the most remarkable and stirring episodes of World War II involved a young Swede from a distinguished banking family named Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg had watched the progress of the war and the treatment of the Jews from his neutral country with growing horror and the burning ambition to do something. When in June of 1944 he was approached to oversee a rescue operation of Hungarian Jews being deported to the death camps by Adolf Eichmann, he accepted this clearly perilous and probably hopeless mission without hesitation. Hurriedly accorded diplomatic status by his own government, Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in early July of 1944. By the time of his arrest by the Soviet army on January 17, 1945, roughly six months later, he had helped to save the lives of over 100,000 people. Gathering together several elements of Wallenberg's written record, Letters and Dispatches, 1924-1944 marks the fiftieth anniversary of his tragic and still mysterious disappearance and offers some answers. At the heart of this collection is the correspondence between Raoul and his paternal and sternly patrician grandfather Gustaf Wallenberg, who had pledged to support his fatherless grandson so long as Raoul studied and worked outside of Sweden. He urged Raoul to go to America. In the fall of 1931, Raoul matriculated at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to study architecture and spent four years observing and admiring a country lifting itself up from the depths of the Depression. He also hitchhiked to California, studied New York's skyscrapers, worked at the World's Fair in Chicago, and drove a pickup truck to Mexico City, all the while engaged in a spirited exchange of ideas and impressions withhis grandfather. Gustaf's plan was for Raoul to distinguish himself abroad and then, using contacts he himself would supply at the right moment, to go back to Sweden and begin a career. Dutiful though increasingly restless, Raoul obeyed his grandfather's directives and worked in South