Credits: Wikipedia
Budapest in the spring of 1944 had become a sort of waiting room for death. Every morning, a deportation train left Budapest for Auschwitz, and the Jewish population of the city had been earmarked for extinction. It was into this hell that Raoul Wallenberg, a young Swedish diplomat, walked, refusing to embrace the plausibility of genocide.
Instead of a club, he showed up with writing paper. He invented a forged document called the Schutz-Pass, which indicated that the bearer of the document was under Swedish protection. The papers were extremely official-looking, with stamps and coats of arms, and Wallenberg gave the documents away by the thousands. Wallenberg spoke German fluently and was so confident that he made the Nazis hesitant to stop him.
Wallenberg converted ordinary buildings into places of refuge, hanging big Swedish flags outside and declaring them "protected houses". Inside, entire families were hiding, some slept on the floor, others shared small amounts of food, while troops of the Arrow Cross were marauding the streets outside.
Wallenberg did not hide behind his title. He drove over gun fire to deliver supplies, he confronted armed guards, and at train stations, he entered the fray ordering people around as though he commanded an army. There are eyewitness accounts of him climbing on top of trains, shoving passports in windows and demanding people be let off the trains. Most often, it worked.
When Soviet forces arrived in Budapest, Wallenberg had saved about 100,000 individuals. Then he disappeared, arrested by the very army that would free Hungary from Nazi rule. His fate is unknown.
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