Raoul Wallenberg: A Life from Beginning to End

Raoul Wallenberg lived at a time when one of the worst outrages of inhumanity was occurring—the Holocaust. As a Swedish businessman in Hungary, he bore witness to this tragedy firsthand as Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to Auschwitz.

Raoul Wallenberg wasn’t a soldier, and he didn’t have armies he could fall back on to blast the Nazis to smithereens, but he did have important connections in the diplomatic circles of Sweden. He used these connections to provide passports and other documentation that would allow the Jews of Hungary to travel out of the country and on to freedom. He also orchestrated a wide array of other services—including shelter, food, and medical care—and his combined efforts are said to have saved tens of thousands of people.

Wallenberg’s story, however, took a tragic turn when he was captured by the Soviet Red Army and disappeared into Stalin’s Gulag, his fate becoming one of the Cold War’s most enduring mysteries. This is his life—this is his story.