Mar. 1



SWEDEN:

The Wallenberg Curse ---- The Search for the Missing Holocaust Hero Began
in 1945. The Unending Quest Tore His Family ApartArticle


In neat script, blue ink on white letterhead, Fredrik von Dardel began
writing to the stepson he had long been told to leave for dead: "Dear
beloved Raoul."

It was March 24, 1956. He always wrote at his living-room table, his wife,
Maria, looking on from a corner of the couch by the phone. On a chest, a
spray of flowers she kept fresh stood beside a picture of her son, Raoul
Wallenberg.

Mr. Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who safeguarded 20,000 Jews in
Budapest in the waning months of World War II, vanished into the Soviet
penal system in 1945. But the couple, then 71 and 65 years old, believed
their son was alive and readied a letter for Sweden's prime minister to
take to Moscow.

"We have been sustained by the hope of one day seeing you among us and
again being able to kiss you and hold your hands and hear your beloved
voice," his stepfather wrote in an old and elevated Swedish. "There's a
room here waiting for you."

Mr. Wallenberg did not come home then, or ever. His end remains unclear.
The world now knows the missing Swede as a symbol of humanitarianism -- an
honorary citizen in four countries, commemorated with stamps in eight and
monuments in 12, the subject of scores of films and books.

Unknown, however, is the price his family paid as it tried in vain to
bring him home. For six decades, his parents and siblings battled Moscow
and their native Stockholm, mounting a search for answers that cost them
their savings, careers, relationships, health and, concealed until now,
two of their lives.

Also unknown, even to the Swedish foreign ministry -- whose file on Mr.
Wallenberg dwarfs its record of any king, colony or war -- is that the
family documented its struggle. Mr. Wallenberg's late mother and
stepfather, who died two days apart in 1979, kept a diary. His
half-brother, Guy von Dardel, now 89, compiled a 50,000-page archive.

Together with hundreds of interviews, the family's thousands of journal
entries, letters and documents -- most read for the first time by The Wall
Street Journal -- lay bare the toll of an unending quest.

"It's a bestial thing," says Nina Lagergren, who at 87 still spreads her
half-brother's name. "If you don't know if somebody is dead or if they are
alive, you have to go on to look for the truth."

Raoul Gustav Wallenberg was born on Aug. 4, 1912, in Liding, Sweden. His
father, a member of a family with wide-ranging influence in banking and
business, had died of stomach cancer three months before. Twenty-one years
old, the widowed Maj Wallenberg wished to die, too. "But then I felt that
I wanted to live, for my little poor fatherless child," she wrote weeks
later.

In 1918, she married Fredrik von Dardel, a healthcare official who would
later head the Karolinska Institute, Sweden's top medical university.
Raoul's half-siblings, Guy and Nina, were born over the next three years.

Raoul's paternal grandfather, Gustav, groomed the multilingual Wallenberg
scion for a banking career and dispatched him to business posts in South
Africa, then Palestine.

There, in a kosher boarding house in Haifa in 1936, the Swedish Lutheran
met a German Jew whose brother had been murdered by a Nazi. He soon read
Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf twice, his half-sister recalls.

On Jan. 22, 1944, the United States established the War Refugee Board, an
agency intended to protect the endangered populations of Europe. The board
asked the Swedish foreign ministry, which staffed a mission in Budapest,
to suggest a candidate to run an office there. Word reached Mr.
Wallenberg.

Hired by the U.S. and granted diplomatic status by Sweden, Mr. Wallenberg,
31, arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944. The Nazis had already deported
more than half of Hungary's 750,000 Jews, nearly all to Auschwitz in
Poland, where most were killed. Slight, balding and colorblind, Mr.
Wallenberg used safehouses, counterfeit passports and bravado to safeguard
thousands who remained.

On Dec. 12, he wrote his mother that the Soviets were so close he could
hear their gunfire. He expected to be home by Easter. "Dearest Mother," he
concluded. "I will say goodbye for today."

On Jan. 17, Soviet officers in Budapest arrested him on orders from
Moscow.

Sweden's foreign ministry asked the Soviets about the wellbeing of its
mission in Budapest. The Soviets wrote them Mr. Wallenberg was in their
custody. According to Soviet and Swedish records, Stockholm didn't
respond.

In mid-February, Mr. Wallenberg's mother arrived unannounced at the Soviet
embassy in Stockholm to appeal for her son. Ambassador Alexandra Kollontay
told her "that Raoul was in the Soviet Union and that he was treated
well," Ms. von Dardel recounted to a reporter in 1971.

Appeals for Aid

Courtesy Guy von DardelA letter to Stalin from Raoul Wallenberg's mother,
July 21, 1947:

"I am desperately appealing to the powerful ruler of the Soviet Union for
help regaining my beloved son." See the full letter. (Courtesy
Riksarkivet)

* * *
In 1947, Guy von Dardel, enlisted fellow physicist Albert Einstein to
appeal to Stalin on behalf of Mr. Wallenberg, his missing half-brother :

"As an old Jew, I appeal to you to do everything possible" See the full
letter. (Courtesy Guy von Dardel)

* * *
From 1952 to 1978, Mr. Wallenberg's stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel, kept a
diary. This is an excerpt from the second entry, Nov. 12, 1952:

"This was irksome, particularly as this paper is a life-organ of our
social circle. After I and several others shook up the editorial offices,
they inserted in their national edition, and in the subsequent Stockholm
edition, a corrected announcement in a prominent place." Read the full
diary entry. (Courtesy Riksarkivet)

* * *
A letter to Mr. Wallenberg from his stepfather and mother, March 24, 1956:

"The 11 years that have passed since your disappearance have been filled
with despair night and day, but we have been sustained by the hope of one
day seeing you among us and again being able to kiss you and hold your
hands and hear your beloved voice." Read the full letter. (Courtesy Guy
von Dardel)
On March 8, the Soviets stated on Hungarian radio that the Gestapo had
murdered Mr. Wallenberg in Budapest.

But assured by the ambassador, Ms. von Dardel was hopeful when, on April
18, she stood on a Stockholm quay awaiting the ship Arcturus. Some of its
passengers had worked alongside her son in Budapest. She scanned the
disembarking Swedes. Raoul wasn't there.

Sweden didn't ask for Mr. Wallenberg's return, even though the Soviet
Union had seized the diplomat in violation of international law. Current
and former Swedish foreign ministry officials say that amid worsening
East-West relations, neutral Sweden feared petitioning the emerging
superpower on behalf of a diplomat financed by the U.S.

Swedish leaders also worried about offending Scandinavian principles of
egalitarianism. "How could the socialist government be seen to intercede
on behalf of a Wallenberg?" says Jan Lundvik, a retired Swedish ambassador
who handled the Wallenberg case in recent decades.

On April 25, more than three months after Moscow had told Stockholm that
Mr. Wallenberg was in its custody, Sweden responded. "It is possible that
[Mr. Wallenberg] has been in some kind of accident," Swedish ambassador
Staffan Sderblom told the Soviet deputy foreign minister, according to a
memo in the Russian foreign ministry archives. The ambassador gave him a
more brazen message in December: "It would be splendid if the mission were
to be given a reply...that Wallenberg is dead."

On June 15, 1946, the ambassador reiterated this message to Joseph Stalin.
The case, Stalin promised, "will be examined and solved."


Sipa Press
Solitary Search: Guy von Dardel in 1989 outside Lubyanka prison in Moscow,
one of the places where his half-brother Raoul Wallenberg was held.
The Swedish foreign ministry told Mr. Wallenberg's family that it knew
nothing of his fate.

The family marked Raoul's 33rd birthday with a dinner in August. It paid
his annual taxes in October, a City Hall official classifying him as
bortavarande, missing. And it began to seek help through meetings, phone
calls and letters addressed to everyone from the World Jewish Congress to
United Nations chief Dag Hammarskjld to actress Ingrid Bergman.

In the coming months, rumors placed Mr. Wallenberg in an Estonian prison,
a Slovakian castle and an airplane arriving at the Stockholm airport,
where his brother raced in vain in October.

In fact, her son was alive and in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, according to
Russian foreign ministry documents. There, in cell 203, a fellow inmate
later recalled to Swedish officials, Mr. Wallenberg tapped coded messages
on walls and pipes. Returning in March 1947 from his fifth interrogation,
he relayed his interrogator's withering words: "Nobody cares about you."

On Aug. 18, 1947, Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister,
sent a letter to the Swedish ambassador in Moscow. It read: "Wallenberg is
not in the Soviet Union and he is not known to us."

Others, too, washed their hands of Mr. Wallenberg. Leaders of Sweden's
Jewish community endorsed the country's foreign ministry. U.S. officials
did not pursue their former representative in Hungary after Sweden's
ambassador in Moscow snubbed their offer to help.

A List of Leads
Between 1952 and 1978, Mr. Wallenberg's stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel,
kept a diary. In 1976, with his wife Maj, he typed its handwritten pages
and indexed the 587 people and institutions mentioned in them. Click the
image below to read a portion of the S's.


The von Dardels readied for a long fight. They helped found Wallenberg
Action, a committee to fund and publicize the search. The mother
instructed her younger children to presume Mr. Wallenberg alive until the
year 2000.

'A Dark Cloud'
On Oct. 24, 1952, his 34th wedding anniversary, Mr. von Dardel started a
diary. After two paragraphs devoted to his wife, he turned to the stepson
who had come to call him Papa: "Raoul Wallenberg's fate has lain like a
dark cloud over our existence."

The next year, after Mr. von Dardel retired, the couple moved to a
ground-floor apartment. There they would press their son's case for the
rest of their lives, he at his table and she on the couch some 10 feet
away.

Mr. von Dardel railed in letters and his diary against Swedish officials.
He wrote of his wife's heated words for the foreign minister. "In
Germany," she had told Mr. Undn, "there were a few who worked and
succeeded in getting home the many. Here in Sweden, it seems many are now
working but are not succeeding in getting home one."

Ms. von Dardel spent hours on the phone, most often on "negative, chilling
calls from the foreign office, when they seemed to be quite without
heart," recalls her daughter, Ms. Lagergren. Ms. Lagergren's daughter,
Nane Annan -- the wife of diplomat Kofi Annan -- recalls her grandmother's
knuckles whitening as she clutched her phone.

The von Dardels had their distractions. He played solitaire and painted
watercolors. She sewed dresses and repaired the home. But they had all but
stopped socializing: Sweden's neutrality during World War II remained a
discomfort to Swedes, and the loss of Raoul served as a constant reminder
of it. "People have a difficulty meeting somebody who lost someone," Ms.
Lagergren says. "They cross the street."

On March 24, 1956, days before he was set to travel to Moscow, Swedish
prime minister Tage Erlander visited the von Dardels. He told them he
shared their wish that he return with their son. Mr. von Dardel sat down
to write his stepson of the family's previous 11 years and their yearning
for his return.

Mr. Erlander took their letter. He returned empty-handed. The family
Easter, Mr. von Dardel wrote in his diary, was ruined.

On Feb. 6, 1957, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow received a memo from
Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. It stated that Soviet
officials had recently found, in the archive of Moscow's Lubyanka prison,
a letter dated July 17, 1947, that prison health director Alexander
Smoltsov had written to Soviet security minister Viktor Abakumov.

It began: "I report that the prisoner, Walenberg [sic], who is well known
to you, died suddenly in his cell this night, probably as the result of a
heart attack." A notation added that the body had been cremated without
autopsy.

The Swedish foreign ministry alerted the von Dardels to the memo the
afternoon it arrived. "First they say that they have taken him under their
protection," says Ms. Lagergren. "Then they say that he was
murdered...then that he didn't exist in Russia. They kept with this until
they said that he died in 1947, that he died of a heart attack. So
naturally, we didn't take it seriously."


Courtesy Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren
Fredrik and Maj von Dardel at home in 1975 with an article about their
son.
The von Dardels had hoped that Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the powerful
brothers at the helm of their family bank, would press the Kremlin to send
home the cousin they had called "little Rulle." But the family
acknowledges the brothers wrote just two letters on Raoul's behalf -- one
to former ambassador Kollontay in 1947, another in 1954 to a Czech
business contact with Soviet ties. They also repeatedly declined to meet
with the von Dardels' group, Wallenberg Action, according to a letter the
group sent them in 1954.

"Mommy has been suffering for a long time," Ms. Lagergren wrote her
brother Guy in March 1959, "not having any contact or support from Raoul's
family."

Peter Wallenberg, 82, says his father, Marcus, who co-headed the family
bank, had told him that Raoul's mother had asked the Wallenbergs not to
interfere. "You didn't do things without total government consent," he
added. "And there was not total government consent in regards to Raoul."

'Slippery as an Eel'
Mr. von Dardel increasingly scorned that government. He wrote that
ambassador Rolf Sohlman was an "ineffective bastard," prime minister
Erlander "slippery as an eel," foreign minister Undn "horrible."

As Mr. von Dardel recorded the drip of witness accounts in his diary over
the years, his stepson was aging. But looking out from a picture frame on
the green-marble chest top in his parents' Stockholm apartment, he
remained 24.

In 1970, Mr. von Dardel wrote "Raoul Wallenberg: Facts Around a Fate," a
sober recounting of the family's 25-year search. The book didn't sell.
Says Ms. Lagergren: "People got tired."

And increasingly uncomfortable. "People look at me as if I was mentally
ill," Ms. von Dardel told a reporter in 1970.

Having endured so many reports of her son's death, she periodically wished
for her own. "She said over and over again, 'I no longer want to live,' "
recalls her daughter-in-law, Matti von Dardel.

Maj von Dardel had broken her leg years before and walked with forearm
crutches, a bag about her neck to carry things. Her husband, blind for
decades in one eye, was losing sight in the other. But both wished to see
their diary published. In 1976, they typed its handwritten entries and
created an index of the 587 names that populated its pages. No publisher
was interested.

On Feb. 6, 1978, Mr. Lundvik visited the von Dardel home. "A very painful
meeting with these two old people," the ambassador wrote in his diary.
"That he is alive is taken for granted."

The next month, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal -- who had earlier reported
that Mr. Wallenberg was in an Irkutsk psychiatric hospital -- told the von
Dardels he'd been mistaken.


From Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren
Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren in 1989 with their brother's passport.
On April 28, 1978, Mr. von Dardel concluded the diary begun nearly 10,000
days before. On its final page, he wrote two English words: "stone wall."

On July 10, Mr. von Dardel wrote to Swedish doctor David Hummel. According
to a book written by a colleague, Dr. Hummel was helping people to die
with insulin and Diminal Duplex, a sleeping pill. "I would like to give
you my wife's and my thanks," Mr. von Dardel wrote, his script large and
slack, "for your regards and for your prescription."

Soon after, Mr. von Dardel lay in his bed and raised a spoonful of
sleeping pills to his lips. "But," says his daughter-in-law, "he dropped
it and couldn't find his pills."

In 1979, Swedish papers reported that a former Soviet prisoner testified
to the Swedish foreign ministry that Mr. Wallenberg had been in a prison
in the city of Vladimir until at least the summer of 1975. But holes now
emerged in this testimony, too.

Mr. von Dardel, aged 93, decided again to end his life. On Feb. 12, he
died in his bed.

Raoul Wallenberg's mother, again widowed, lay on her sofa two days later
and swallowed an overdose of barbiturates.

Nina Lagergren arrived shortly after. Her mother, still alive, asked Nina
to promise that she and Guy would keep fighting for their older brother --
and presume him living, as she had long instructed, until 2000.

Nina gave her word.

Mourners laid a blanket of yellow, white and pink flowers over a pair of
closed coffins. In their parents' death notice, the siblings listed three
surviving relatives: Nina Lagergren, Guy von Dardel and Raoul Wallenberg.

Siblings' Secret
Together, Nina and Guy would carry until now the secret of their parents'
suicides. But they would fulfill their mother's deathbed request in ways
that increasingly pulled them apart.

After their half-brother's disappearance, Guy von Dardel often turned from
his wife, two daughters and career as a particle physicist in Geneva to
help his parents pursue Mr. Wallenberg. He chipped at diplomatic
stonewalls and mined contacts -- persuading fellow physicist Albert
Einstein, for example, to argue Mr. Wallenberg's case in a letter to
Stalin.

Nina Lagergren, a housewife and mother of four in Stockholm, tried to
provide her parents daily respite from their singleminded search. "I
thought the best I could do for Raoul was to give them a real life," she
says.

In the days after their parents' deaths, Mr. von Dardel, 59, asked his
sister, 57, to help him form an advocacy group for Mr. Wallenberg. Ms.
Lagergren wondered to a friend, Nobel Foundation president Stig Ramel,
whether she should take up the mantle without traumatizing her family. She
later recalled that he responded: "Can you do anything else?"

Ms. Lagergren soon asked her missing brother's cousin for help. Marcus
Wallenberg offered funding and an office. Within months, the Raoul
Wallenberg Association had a board and members.

Throughout the spring and summer, Mr. von Dardel and Ms. Lagergren sowed
word of their sibling, meeting with dignitaries from Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin to U.S. Senator Joseph Biden. By fall, Raoul
Wallenberg committees were flowering in Jerusalem, London, New York and
Stockholm.

Ms. Lagergren began to dress in red and blue, she says, "for courage." She
found strength meeting Jews shielded by Mr. Wallenberg, including U.S.
politician Tom Lantos and his family. "I felt a very strong emotional
sensation looking at these lovely people, all so deeply committed in
wanting to pay their debt to their saviour," she wrote in July 1979.

In December, Mr. von Dardel took the siblings' search to Moscow. He tried
to drum up support for a Soviet-Swedish commission to research his brother
and persuaded fellow physicist Andrei Sakharov to travel to sites where
former prisonmates of Mr. Wallenberg were rumored to be.

In January 1980, Sweden's foreign ministry declassified some 2,000
documents -- about one-ninth of its holdings at the time. Ms. Lagergren
told reporters: "We must look forward and act with certainty that Raoul is
alive."

Mr. von Dardel wrote his sister: "You are doing a fantastic job."

In February, the first anniversary of their parents' suicides, Ms.
Lagergren placed flowers on their adjoining graves. "I think that mom and
dad in heaven probably are quite pleased with developments," she wrote to
her brother. "We haven't been able to free Raoul, but his name is known as
never before."

Mr. von Dardel let his sister know, however, that he saw little point in
publicizing Raoul's exploits. "Next Sunday," he wrote to his sister on
June 22, 1980, from Palo Alto, Calif., where he was on a teaching
sabbatical at Stanford, "Mrs. Fleishacker, who is it seems one of the ten
upper class people in San Francisco, opens her house in honour of Raoul. I
do not normally find that Raoul is much helped by social events."

But such events drew Diaspora dollars and press. Mr. Wallenberg's story
joined the writings of Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank and William Styron in the
Holocaust education of a postwar generation.

On Oct. 5, 1981, Ronald Reagan declared Mr. Wallenberg an honorary U.S.
citizen -- its second, after Winston Churchill. "What he accomplished was
of biblical proportions," the president said in the White House's Rose
Garden, the two siblings standing alongside.

Sweden, however, had no Raoul Wallenberg street, stamp or statue. And when
a Soviet submarine ran aground on its coast in late October, Stockholm
ignored a call from Mr. Lantos -- now a U.S. representative -- to trade
its crew for answers about Mr. Wallenberg. It towed the sub into
international waters

"The place where we are met with the most indifference," Mr. von Dardel
wrote in a letter two months later, "is still our and Raoul's native
country."

In 1984, Mr. von Dardel stepped up his assault, suing Moscow in a federal
district court in Washington, D.C. "Von Dardel v. Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics" alleged that the arrest of a Swedish diplomat was
illegal and demanded the return of Mr. Wallenberg or his remains. The
court ruled in Mr. von Dardel's favor. But the Soviet Union didn't respond
and the case was eventually dismissed. He retired to search full-time for
his brother.

A Sister's Campaign
Nina Lagergren tirelessly spread the name of Mr. Wallenberg, her
half-brother. Among the thousands of honors bestowed him are these eight
stamps issued between 1983 and 2001.

Ms. Lagergren, meanwhile, assembled a book of letters her mother wrote
about Raoul when he was young. She headlined the New York premiere of a
Raoul Wallenberg movie in the fall of 1984. The next spring, at a
black-tie dinner in her missing half-brother's honor, she dined on gravlax
and reindeer alongside Henry Kissinger and Max von Sydow and lamented that
her mother hadn't received such support.

Mr. von Dardel didn't attend either event.

Swedish reticence and Soviet intransigence began to give way. In 1987,
Sweden issued a Raoul Wallenberg stamp and dedicated a Stockholm square to
him. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced an era of openness.

Mr. von Dardel traveled to Moscow in 1987 and 1988 to meet again with Mr.
Sakharov, relaying locations near Tbilisi and Leningrad where his
half-brother was rumored to be. Mr. Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner,
set off. "I was in a state of urgency," Ms. Bonner recalls.

The next year, the Soviet ambassador in Sweden summoned the siblings to
his embassy and said they were invited to Moscow. "Their faces were
glowing," he later recalled to a Swedish newspaper.

On Oct. 16, 1989, a Soviet official set a wooden box before Ms. Lagergren
and Mr. von Dardel. The siblings, 68 and 70, beheld what had been seized
from their half-brother 45 years before: an address book, calendar, car
registration, cigarette case, diplomatic passport and stacks of old money
-- Bulgarian leva, Hungarian pengos, Swedish krona, Swiss francs and U.S.
dollars. The Soviets reiterated that Mr. Wallenberg had died in 1947 and
nearly all his case files had been destroyed.

Mr. Sakharov, too, told the siblings that he believed their brother was
dead.

Memories of Brother

The two returned home from Moscow, their paths now increasingly determined
by their pasts.

Ms. Lagergren recalled her missing brother vividly. He had loved to dance
and mimic, imitating German officers and French diplomats at a 1943
Christmas party. He remained everpresent in her home -- a bust of Raoul in
her entryway, his architectural sketchings in her study, the wooden box
from Moscow now tucked in her basement.

She spoke about him weekly at her Stockholm association but not to her
aristocratic circle of friends. Ms. Lagergren began to take
anti-depressants and sought refuge in her yard, tufts of corydalis ringing
the trunks of her apple and pear trees. "I must have this dual life to be
able to exist," she says.

Mr. von Dardel had not been as close to his brother and kept few of his
possessions. He struggled to recall him, says his wife, Matti. A doctor
suspected Parkinson's disease. Mr. von Dardel's face became increasingly
still. Soon after, he wept without expression when he listened to Raoul's
college classmates recount how the missing man had hitchhiked, shopped at
Montgomery Ward and liked Laurel and Hardy.

The former physicist turned to research. He created the
Soviet-International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul
Wallenberg, which gave way to a Swedish-Russian governmental group. Its
members hoped the Soviet Union's collapse would loosen archives and
officials.

Mr. von Dardel distanced himself from the Raoul Wallenberg Association he
had founded with his sister. The dues of its 1,000 members funded an
annual concert and helped spread his name. There was now a Raoul
Wallenberg daffodil, a Raoul Wallenberg wax statue in a Swedish museum, a
Raoul Wallenberg entry in the Guinness Book of World Records ("Greatest
Number of People Saved from Extinction"). In 1991, Mr. von Dardel did not
attend the association's board meeting and in later years did not return.

"I have found these activities relatively uninteresting, if not to say
tasteless, as long as Raoul's destiny is unsolved," he wrote in June 1994
to Peter Wallenberg, who had supported the association since assuming his
family's helm in 1982. Mr. von Dardel asked the banker for $50,000 to fund
his search.

Peter Wallenberg declined the request. (He says he was instructed to do so
by Ms. Lagergren; she says this is false.) Soon, the Wallenberg bank also
refused Mr. von Dardel access to its archive, the family lawyer stating on
Swedish television that it was open only to "serious research."

Mr. von Dardel commissioned an FBI sketch of what his brother would look
like at age 80. He wrote his sister to ask for Raoul's dental records. He
traveled to Russia 15 times in 1994 alone -- the 75-year-old man enduring
scabies, hypothermia and, when he approached a man Soviet files say
interrogated his brother a half-century before, a cane swung at his head.
He began to question the motives of those he'd hired to help him, letters
show, and wondered if his phone was tapped.

Mr. von Dardel had used his savings, a few hundred thousand dollars, to
fund his research, his wife says. He'd spent another $100,000 from his
youngest daughter. By 1995, 50 years after he began looking for his
brother, he'd all but stopped speaking to his sister.

Using his wife as an intermediary, she says, he told Ms. Lagergren he
wanted to tap the account Mr. Wallenberg had left behind. Ms. Lagergren
acquiesced. Over the next five years, Mr. von Dardel withdrew $130,000,
Mr. Wallenberg funding his own search.

The siblings' Raoul Wallenberg Association closed its doors in 1999. Ms.
Lagergren opened the Raoul Wallenberg Committee. She was its sole member.

Apology From Sweden
The year was 2000. The siblings were to assume their brother dead. But Ms.
Lagergren couldn't bring herself to do so. The time, she says, "was not
ripe yet."

In January 2001, the Swedish-Russian group that included Mr. von Dardel
published its final report on Mr. Wallenberg. It was inconclusive.

Days later, Swedish Prime Minister Gran Persson phoned the siblings.
Recalls Mr. Persson: "It was an expression of apology from the kingdom of
Sweden."

The prime minister failed to comfort. "How can one call after so many
years?" asks Ms. Lagergren. "Just call?"

In short order, Mr. von Dardel broke his hip, got a pacemaker, caught
pneumonia and, says his family, spoke less and less. He stopped speaking
of his brother.

His doctors were unsure why. His family wasn't. "You understand now," says
his daughter, Louise, "that the illness is Raoul Wallenberg illness."

In 2003, a commission appointed by the Swedish prime minister published "A
Diplomatic Failure," an open critique of Sweden's policy toward its
missing diplomat. "Diplomatic opportunities that might have helped
Wallenberg were missed," says Sweden's current deputy foreign minister,
Frank Belfrage.

Mr. Lundvik, the ambassador who long handled the Wallenberg case, is more
blunt. "The Swedish government did not want him back," he says.

In 2005, Mr. von Dardel's younger daughter, Marie Dupuy, emptied the
contents of her father's living-room closet into her Peugeot and drove it
to her home in Versailles, France. She divided some 50,000 pages into 75
bins. One was devoted to her father's career in physics, 74 to his missing
half-brother.

Here were the 32 years before Mr. Wallenberg disappeared -- a tracing of
his newborn foot, an invitation to a 1944 cocktail party he hosted. But
mostly, here were the 61 years that came after -- pleas for information
from soldiers and girlfriends, lawsuits and librettos bearing his name.
Here was the account of the Pole who claimed to have given Mr. Wallenberg
extra soup rations. Here was the thank-you note, dated 1978, to the doctor
who would help Raoul's parents die.

In September 2007, Ms. Lagergren visited Geneva and stopped to see her
brother. He didn't speak. "The years when he was on the commission must
have been very trying for him," she says.

On Aug. 4, 2008, dressed in red and blue, Ms. Lagergren clipped three red
roses from her garden. She placed the flowers, as her mother had, next to
the portrait of Raoul that had stood in her parents' living room.
Ninety-six years after the day he was born, she still presumed him living.

Eight days later, Mr. von Dardel sat silently in Room 233 of a Geneva
hospital. Belted to a recliner chair, his hospital bracelet sliding over
his thin right forearm, he listened to this reporter recount his family's
search.

"I think it was very unfair," he said in a faint voice, of the brunt of
two suicides on his sister. "Nina was in the center position."

Talk turned to the search.

"One should go to the top," he said.

Vladimir Putin?

"Yes."

What would he like to tell the Russian leader?

Days before turning 89, Mr. von Dardel summoned his strength: "If we sit
down...try to find out...the real hope would be if new information..."

Did he still think about Raoul?

"Yes, I do," Mr. von Dardel answered in his strongest voice.

Later, he added: "I see him in Russia."

(source: Wall Street Journal)




ENGLAND:

Holocaust-denier Williamson "will fight any German extradition"


British bishop Richard Williamson is to fight with all legal means any
extradition request from Germany over remarks he made in that country
denying the Holocaust, it was reported Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph newspaper quoted his lawyer Kevin Lowry- Mullins as
saying this after German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries told
journalists last week that Berlin could demand Williamson's extradition to
face court proceedings for Holocaust denial.

The lawyer, who according to the Sunday Telegraph had already represented
another Holocaust denier, was quoted as saying Williamson would fight any
extradition request right to the final instance of appeal, Britain's House
of Lords.

Denial of the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, but not in Britain, to
where Williamson returned last week after being expelled from Argentina.

Zypries, in remarks to reports in Brussels, had said Friday that 'in
principle, the offence falls under the rules of the European Arrest
Warrant. That means that Germany could indeed issue such a warrant.'

This was because an interview in which Williamson questioned the scale of
the Holocaust, broadcast in Sweden, was recorded in Germany, giving the
German courts jurisdiction, she said. The bishop is already under
investigation in Germany for his comments.

Williamson, who has been residing at an undisclosed location in Britain
after his expulsion from Argentina on Wednesday, later published a
statement on the website of the British arm of the ultra- conservative
Society of Saint Pius X expressing 'regrets' about the 'harm and hurt'
which his Holocaust denial remarks had caused.

Williamson said Pope Benedict XVI had requested that he reconsider the
remarks made on Swedish television four months ago, 'because their
consequences have been so heavy.'

'Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having
made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and
hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to
survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I
would not have made them.'

In the Swedish television interview, Williamson, 68, had challenged the
figure of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and said he believed that
the figure was 'up to 300,000' Jews killed, and that 'I believe there were
no gas chambers during World War II.'

But as with the original remarks, his new statement published Friday only
served to raise further controversy.

In an initial reaction from Rome, the Vatican dismissed the new statement
as falling short of what the pope had demanded. Holy See chief spokesman
Father Federico Lombardi said that the apology 'does not seem to respect
the terms' set by the Vatican.

Lombardi described the statement as 'generic and equivocal,' contrasting
it to a request made by the Vatican to Williamson that he 'clearly and
publicly distance himself' from his remarks on the Holocaust.

(source: Monster and Critics)





NORWAY:

Norway honors writer Hamsun with mixed feelings


Some 15 years ago, sculptor Skule Waksvik started work on a statue of
1920 Nobel Literature Prize winner Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian who was
adored by his countrymen for his writing but despised for supporting
the Nazis during World War II.

"No one wanted it," said Waksvik. "I threw it away."

Waksvik is trying again, this time with a firm order for a 7-foot bronze
statue for the National Library's Hamsun Year, which started Feb. 19 and
culminates with the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth on Aug. 4,
1859. He's prepared for angry reactions.

"I know it might get knocked over or vandalized," said Waksvik.

The idea of honoring Hamsun, reviled as a traitor after 1940-45 Nazi
occupation of Norway, stirs angry debate here, 57 years after his death on
Jan. 19, 1952. Hamsun supported Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling and his
collaborator government, gave his Nobel medal to Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels in 1943 and wrote an obituary praising Adolf Hitler in 1945.

Yet this is the also the man whose writing inspired the likes of Ernest
Hemingway and who is called a definer of "modernist" novels. His most
famous works include "Hunger" and the Nobel-winning "Growth of the Soil."

"We have two writers in Norway of international format: (Henrik) Ibsen and
Hamsun," said Atle Kittang, a literature professor at the University of
Bergen. "Hamsun was celebrated and loved by Norwegian readers until the
war. It was as if they were wounded in love, and that hurt sits deep. In
Norway, that hurt can also be passed from generation to generation."

Quisling was executed after the war. Hamsun's wife, Marie, served three
years of hard labor for treason. But what of Hamsun? How could they punish
a famous, Nobel Prize-winning, 85-year-old writer?

"He was charged with treason, but an order came, from quite high up, for
him to have a mental examination," said Kittang. "He was declared to have
a lasting mental impairment (and declared unfit to stand trial) so the
charge was dropped."

The "mentally impaired" Hamsun completed his last book, the best-seller
"On Overgrown Paths" in 1949, partly while in custody. He was later fined
for having been a member of the Norwegian Nazi party, a claim he denied.

Lars Frode Larsen, one of Hamsun's biographers, said the Nazi issue always
distracts from Hamsun's brilliance as a writer.

For example, in the town of Grimstad, the city council voted 18-17 in
February to name a town square after Hamsun outside a new museum devoted
to his life.

The head of the theater for Nord-Trondelag county, Otto Homlung, declared
his stage a "Hamsun Free Zone" for 2009, asking in the Jan. 13 edition of
the Adressavisen newspaper: "Can we separate celebration of the wordsmith
Hamsun from a celebration of the Nazi Hamsun?"

The Aftenposten newspaper reported that the Hamsun Committee had trouble
finding sponsors because companies don't want to seem to support a Nazi.

Hamsun was born in central Norway as Knud Pedersen a patronymic based on
his father's name Peder. The family moved when he was 3 to the Hamsund
farm in the far northern town of Hamaroey, about 100 miles north of the
Arctic Circle.

Like many of his characters, Hamsun was born into poverty, and had little
formal education. At age 9, he was sent to work for an ailing uncle under
a regime of strict discipline and hard work. Since he was not allowed to
play with other children, he read and learned to write on his own in what
he later called his "blighted" childhood.

Hamsun's first short story "Den Gaadefulde" which means the enigmatic
was published in 1877 under the name Knud Pedersen when he was 18.

Eventually, he took the name of the Hamsund farm, a common practice at the
time, and in 1884 at least as Hamsun lore has it the 'd' was
accidentally dropped from his name in the printing of an essay on Mark
Twain in 1884, and he liked it.

The young Hamsun also worked a variety of usually menial jobs in the
United States, including as a trolley car conductor in Chicago. He
described his difficult times in the U.S. in the sarcastic book "From the
Cultural Life of Modern America."

Hamsun's breakthrough came with the 1890 publication of "Hunger," a partly
autobiographical tale of a starving writer that is often described as one
of the first psychological novels. However, it was his Nobel-prize winning
"Growth of the Soil" from 1917 that won him world attention.

Kittang said Hamsun had reactionary views with a strong aversion to
classical civilization and modern society, and he idolized an
old-fashioned, rural life of working the soil.

He was also an ardent supporter of Germany, and Kittang said some aspects
of Nazism appealed to him, such as idealization of nature. However, he did
not appear to adopt the "ugly" aspects of Nazism or display any
anti-Semitism, the researcher said.

Hamsun was 80 when German troops marched into Norway in April 1940, and
Kittang said he may have become so ideologically inflexible in his old
age, just automatically preferring Germany to its enemies. However, Hamsun
had also openly supported Hitler since 1934, and wrote in support of the
occupation.

According to biographies, Hamsun had a disastrous meeting with Hitler in
June 1943, when he enraged the Nazi dictator complaining about the
mistreatment and executions of Norwegians by German occupation forces.

With uncannily poor timing, Hamsun wrote one more article that remains
etched in the national consciousness: an obituary praising Hitler as "a
warrior for mankind" that was published as Norway was being liberated in
May 1945.

"There were a lot of Norwegian Nazis, but they are forgotten now," said
Kittang. "Hamsun was too famous to be forgotten."

(source: Associated Press)




POLAND:

Poland seeks foreign donations to preserve Auschwitz camp



Poland has appealed for international donations to preserve facilities
and exhibits at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz where more than
one million Jews perished during World War Two.

The Auschwitz site, near the city of Krakow in southern Poland, comprises
155 camp buildings, 300 ruined facilities and hundreds of thousands of
personal belongings and documents scattered over more than 200 hectares.

In a letter obtained by Reuters on Friday, Polish Prime Minister Donald
Tusk said those running the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum would set up a
foundation to administer a special fund with a minimum capital of 120
million euros.

"Saving Auschwitz-Birkenau means saving the memory of millions who
suffered and were bestially murdered. It is the responsibility and duty of
entire Europe," Tusk said in a letter addressed to leaders of European and
some other countries, especially those with a large Jewish diaspora.

The museum itself lacks the resources to check the progressive decay and
deterioration of its facilities and objects, Tusk said in his letter,
dated February 10 but not previously made public.

Jews from all over Europe perished in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-
Birkenau concentration camp set up by the Nazis after Germany's conquest
of Poland in 1939. Many others died of starvation, forced labor, disease
and in medical experiments.

Poland founded a museum on the site, known as Oswiecim in Polish, after
the war. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the museum every year,
passing through the iron gate bearing the motto "Arbeit macht frei" (work
makes free).

(source: Reuters)







GERMANY:

Schaeffler Founder Had Nazi Ties, Cicero Reports

Wilhelm Schaeffler, one of the founders of Schaeffler Group, was a member
of the Nazi party and employed forced labor to produce weapons for the
German military during World War II, Cicero magazine reported.

Schaefflers company, called Davistan AG at the time, was purchased in 1940
from creditors after being abandoned by its Jewish owner in 1933,
according to Gregor Schoellgen, a historian commissioned by the Schaeffler
family to research their past, the magazine said in its March issue.
Wilhelm Schaeffler joined the Nazis in 1941 yet didnt play an active role
in the party, the report said.

Schaeffler, who died in 1981, was the brother-in-law of Maria-Elisabeth
Schaeffler, who now owns Schaeffler Group with her son Georg. The
manufacturer, strained by 11 billion euros ($14 billion) of debt from the
purchase of Continental AG, makes transmission parts and ball bearings for
cars, planes and fishing reels.

In 1942, Wilhelm Schaeffler converted some of the companys textile
production to the manufacture of bombs, armored vehicles and canons. He
acted as did most German industrialists of this time, Schoellgen, a
professor at the University of Erlangen, said in the report.

Those who wanted to keep their companies above water entered the defense
business and contributed to the German war and annihilation machine,
whether they wanted to or not, said Schoellgen.

Imprisoned Until 1951

Slave labor was used by the company from 1943 as military call-ups led to
labor shortages, the magazine reported. Wilhelm Schaeffler was arrested in
1946 and imprisoned until 1951 for misappropriating Polish property.

The report rejects claims that the company used human hair from the
Auschwitz concentration camp to produce textiles.

All evidence today contradicts these suspicions, said the report, adding:
None of the systematic searches of German archives in connection with
Schaeffler found even a hint of links to Auschwitz, let alone the delivery
of hair, said the report.

Detlef Sieverdingbeck, spokesman for Herzogenaurach, Germany-based
Schaeffler, said in an e-mail yesterday that Schoellgen was engaged
several years ago to investigate business activities prior to Schaeffler
Groups founding in 1946 on the familys own initiative.

Because of false reports and allegations that have surfaced recently on
the Internet, Professor Schoellgen published, for clarification, the most
essential results of his research in Cicero, he said.

(source: Bloomberg News)




**********************


Feb. 24




USA:

Exhibition Review | 'State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda'
Nazis' 'Terrible Weapon,' Aimed at Minds and Hearts


The most haunting image in "State of Deception: The Power of Nazi
Propaganda," a major new exhibition at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum here, may be the first one you see after the introductory
videos. At the end of a darkened corridor is a black-and-white photograph
on a black background. Underneath, with unornamented simplicity, is a
single word: Hitler.

It is a campaign poster from 1932, when the Nazi Party was already the
second largest in the German Parliament. The mass rallies, the storm
troopers, the frenzied rhetoric of this electrifying speaker: all are
condensed into this silent face, which is deliberately unsettling, starkly
divided into light and shade, mixing comfort with ferocity, transparency
with subterranean energies.

It is chilling because we know what that face unleashed, and as we make
our way through the exhibition, we feel almost physically assailed. A
muscular fist smashes into the face of a cringing, sweating Jew (1928). An
enormous Hitler is superimposed on a crowd of ecstatic Germans raising
hands in salute as red gothic letters shout, "Ja!" (1934).

These images verge on kitsch but have too much force to be easily
dismissed. Some are as graphically brilliant as the Nazi flag Hitler
designed, its blood red background surrounding a white circle stamped with
the swastika scar. That jagged black cross is almost never in repose; it
pivots on the point of an extended arm, its shape cutting through space,
as if caught in circular motion, a fearsome revolutionary weapon.

The exhibition mounts some of these posters as they might have been seen
at the time, plastered on walls. Beside them campaign images attacking the
Nazis in 1932 - democracy's last gasp - seem hopelessly understated, even
one from the Social Democratic Party that shows a skeleton with a Nazi
cap and bloody hands. "Nein!" the poster futilely shouts.

As the show, organized by Steven Luckert, winds its way from the
beginnings of Nazism in the aftershocks of the First World War to the
Allied attempt to eradicate Nazi propaganda after the Second, the effect
is overwhelming. Conceptually everything is familiar: the foundering
Weimar Republic, the celebrations of Aryan virility, the Jew as embodiment
of evil, the mass rallies, the death camps, the defeat. But the effect is
not in the facts but in the images and artifacts, many of which have been
lent by institutions in Europe for this show.

And if this is how powerfully these images affect an early-21st-century
viewer who would have been a prospective victim, imagine the power they
had on believers, flattering their highest vision of themselves while
reminding them that endangering this imminent utopia was the conniving
Jew, known from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In one 1943 poster a
giant hand points accusingly at a corpulent caricature wearing a yellow
star, "Jude": "He is to blame for the war!" This, of course, while Jews
were being carried off on trains heading east to feed the crematoriums.

The impact of these images is prerational or antirational; they
short-circuit argument. To suggest that perhaps this caricatured figure
was not to blame for the war would be like insisting on an alternate
universe. The accusation could be rejected only if everything were
rejected. Exorcism and murder were not a policy; they were a
responsibility. They all flowed out of these posters and their associated
beliefs.

And once accepted they are tirelessly applied. A children's game here,
"Juden Raus!" ("Jews Out!"), has a playing board that is a perverted
version of Candyland. Its pictured resting places are retail stores
labeled Gorstein, Cohn or Stern. Succeed in chasing out six Jews, the
board affirms, and you win.

At the exhibition too are pages from the most fervent Nazi publication,
Der Strmer, helpfully translated. One advertisement shows a label that
must have been the Nazi equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal: "This
emblem on clothing protects you from unwittingly buying Jewish products!"

But however medieval the vision, the methods were contemporary. On display
is the Volksempfnger, the Peoples Receiver: an inexpensive radio powerful
enough to bring Hitler's voice to millions of Germans, yet weak enough so
few signals could be received from other countries.

The people's radio helped ensure a closed world in which the Nazi vision
could unfold without challenge. Propaganda, as Hitler noted in "Mein
Kampf", "is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert."

The exhibition should have included more on how Nazi propaganda was used
on an international scale to lull the democratic West into acceding to
Hitler's expansionism, and how it portrayed Germany's triumphs and
defeats. But the shows major flaw is that it cant quite settle on what to
make of propaganda itself. Surely we don't need the Nazi example to teach
us that propaganda "omits information selectively," "simplifies complex
issues" and "plays on emotions." That is also true of advertising and much
political advocacy.

And while it is necessary to understand the historical context, as this
exhibition does, how far can such insight go? The narrative begins with
Allied propaganda during World War I, which caricatured the "Hun" as a
fearsome brute. Hitler wrote: "There was no end to what could be learned
from the enemy by a man who kept his eyes open." If the Allies could make
up stories about German war atrocities, why shouldn't the Nazis use that
strategy against the Jews?

But the situations are less comparable than they seem. German atrocities
during World War I were exaggerated, but historians do not regard them all
as delusions. Nazi propaganda was something different in kind, not just
degree. It created a world that had no foundation except in myth, even
attributing the Nazi desire for extermination of the Other to the Other.
Nazis accused the Jews of having a secret plan to exterminate the Germans
and, as evidence, cited a crank vanity publication by a New Jersey
salesman.

The show ends with an account of the Nuremberg trials in which Julius
Streicher, the founder and editor of Der Strmer, was convicted and
executed for being a propagandist, setting a precedent for prosecuting for
"incitement to genocide." The exhibition points out that in 2003 that
charge was used to convict the publisher of a tabloid and the owner of a
radio station in Rwanda. It also notes that some have suggested the
charge be brought against the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for
declaring that Israel "must be wiped off the map."

The museum is developing a curriculum based on the show that will probe
the notion of propaganda and examine contemporary implications. But here
the slope becomes slippery. How much does the Nazi manipulation of media
reveal about propagandas misuse in democratic societies? Does the extreme
example shed light on the commonplace, without the dangers of the extreme
being lessened, the dangers of the commonplace amplified?

Such analogies risk slighting what was so powerful about Nazi propaganda:
It didn't just distort reality to make an argument; it reshaped it. It
tapped into mythic beliefs about Jews being genocidal and inhuman, thus
spurring retaliation. Is anything rhetorically comparable today?

Perhaps. The exhibition points out that the Nazis financed anti-Semitic
broadcasts by Haj Amin al-Husseini, "an Arab nationalist and prominent
Muslim religious leader." Now no sponsorship seems needed. Major Middle
East media outlets have asserted that Jews use childrens blood to bake
matzos. In recent weeks we have heard that Jews are following the
nefarious plot outlined in the Protocols to exterminate all gentiles, this
from the poet and former member of the Lebanese Parliament Ghassan Matar.
An Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, has described Jews being as "smooth as
a viper": "Dispatch those son of apes and pigs to the Hellfire."

And an Egyptian cleric with strong ties to the West, Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradhawi, has described Jews as "a profligate, cunning arrogant band
of people": "Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the
very last one."

The extent of these visions (chronicled by the Middle East Media Research
Institute), the historical distortions they codify and the readiness with
which they are taught to children and are secularized into political
action suggest that the strongest contemporary analogy to Nazi propaganda
may be one the exhibition leaves unmentioned.

"State of Deception" remains on view through December 2011, at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW,
Washington; (202) 488-0400.

(source: New York Times)




*********************


Feb. 22



USA:

Elie Wiesel: Embracing memory and madness----The 81-year-old Holocaust
survivor's 49th book, 'A Mad Desire to Dance,' revisits themes common to
his writing through the years.


Reporting from New York -- "Purple in the grays. Vermillion in the orange
shadows, on a cold, fine day."

-- Pierre Bonnard, from his notebooks


Manhattan in a winter storm seems galaxies away from Bonnard's bright
interiors. I carry an exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of
Art to Elie Wiesel's office in Midtown.

As we talk, the bright yellow cover blinks up from the coffee table,
louder than the thousands of books in his office; louder than his voice,
which is soft with a strong French accent and something else.

Wiesel is 81. He is modestly dressed in a blue blazer, gray pants and
black shoes. His manner is a gentle combination of elegance and humility.
He is not frail, but I suspect I am not the first to feel the instinct to
protect him, to speak quietly, not to move suddenly, to live up to the
sophistication and humanity he deserves.

Wiesel's 49th book, "A Mad Desire to Dance" (Alfred A. Knopf: 274 pp.,
$24) is a novel that contains, like all his books, the voice of a madman.
"These were the first people to be taken away," he says, thinking back to
World War II. "Children, old people, madmen. I give them shelter in my
books; there is always a place for them. They haunt my universe and I say,
'Come in.' "

In the novel, Doriel, a middle-aged man whose parents lived through the
war, believes he may be haunted by a dybbuk -- in Jewish folklore, the
dislocated soul of a dead person. He seeks help from a young female
therapist. The chapters follow the progress of the therapy, alternating
between the therapist's and Doriel's points of view.

Wiesel began writing to bear witness to the Holocaust and to inspire
others to write their stories. For years, he has defended the importance
of memory against those who deny aspects of the Holocaust.

A loyal following

Even on the day we meet, the media carry the story of a Catholic bishop
who questions the existence of the gas chambers. But readers have never
abandoned him. Half a century after its publication, "Night," which
details his months in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a young teenager,
continues to appear on bestseller lists.

"Why did I write it?" Wiesel asks in the 2006 preface to a new
translation. "Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to
go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense,
terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of
mankind?"

In February 2007, Wiesel was attacked by a different sort of madman,
pulled off an elevator in San Francisco by a 22-year-old Holocaust denier
named Eric Hunt who tried to drag him into a hotel room. Ever since,
Wiesel has had a bodyguard. He has just returned from the inauguration and
sees the election of Barack Obama as "history trying to redeem itself." He
remembers visiting the South in the early 1950s and feeling ashamed to be
white.

Most of Wiesel's books are written in French; the author settled in France
after the war, studying psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne. His
wife, Marion, was his translator for many years, but recently she has been
called to full-time work at the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which
the couple started after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and which
suffered losses of around $15 million, substantially all of its assets, in
the Bernard Madoff scandal. "Night" was written in Yiddish, his childhood
language.

"A Mad Desire to Dance," the author explains, is a response to his 1964
novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," in which Michael, a Holocaust survivor,
returns to the town in which he was born, is captured by communists, put
in prison and tortured. The novel ends with Michael locked in a cell with
a madman, a catatonic who is unable to break through his wall of silence.
"He knows," Wiesel explains of Michael, "that if he does nothing he will
go mad as well, so he tries to cure the madman."

In "A Mad Desire to Dance," Doriel is "cured" when his therapist leads him
to the realization that his mother, a prominent resistance leader, had an
affair during the war.

Did the new novel begin with a memory of dancing? "I've never danced in my
life," Wiesel says. "I don't know how to dance or swim." Rather, the book
"began with a melody. As for the structure, it offers itself from the
inside. If I were to begin a novel with a preconceived structure, it would
be false."

Certainly the structure of "A Mad Desire to Dance" comes from Doriel's
therapy: the realization of his mother's affair and his ability to forgive
her. "I believe in therapy," Wiesel says, "particularly between friends.
If a friend talks to another friend to relieve his suffering, that is
therapy. Human beings were not born to be alone. God alone is alone.
People are capable of falling in love. Illness is not being able to fall
in love."

Wiesel writes each book three times. He is long past denying the element
of autobiography in his work. He is, like many writers, exhausted after
writing. "One," he says, "has to condense so much."

Readers often come away from Wiesel's books questioning their faith, even
the existence of God. "I want them to feel that life is worth living," he
explains, "but I'm not a policeman. Who am I to be a guardian of faith? It
is humanity I believe in. Humanity is so frail."

When Wiesel speaks, he often comes across a memory. Speaking of human
frailty, he recalls how frightened he was as a young boy in the camps. "I
kept thinking, I haven't done anything to remain alive."

After his father died, on Jan. 28, 1944, in the bed next to him, Wiesel
says flatly, "I died. I asked myself what would I have done if I had been
chosen to be a kapo [a prisoner selected to help supervise other
prisoners]. I hope I can say with certainty that I would have said no, but
I honestly don't know. I haven't been tested. What can I tell the child in
me?"

This is the question Wiesel asks in all his books. "The child in me is my
judge."

'It was a nightmare'

Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, in 1928. When he returned 20 years
after the war, he did not recognize the town. "It looked the same," he
says, "but there were no Jews. Strangers lived there. It was a nightmare.
I felt threatened. But I found, in the synagogue, some of the books that
had once been mine and some of the commentaries I wrote as a child on the
Bible. I remembered what we had done the last night before we were taken
away."

On that long ago evening, Wiesel's father had dug a hole in the basement
to hide the families' valuables. Wiesel, meanwhile, had hidden a gold
watch his grandfather had given him in a tree. Two decades later, he snuck
out in the middle of the night "into someone else's garden to see if the
watch was still there. It was there. I put it back. I left it there."

Wiesel has taught philosophy for 40 years. (He is the Andrew W. Mellon
professor in the humanities at Boston University.) "I love my students,"
he says. "I spend time with them; I listen to their stories." He also
loves the thousands of stories he receives from fellow survivors; he reads
them all, writing letters and prefaces and sending encouraging words. Once
in a great while, he discovers that a writer is lying, and this shocks
him, but he does not judge. "It is difficult enough to tell the truth," he
says.

Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was difficult for the author to get his
books published. No one wanted to read about the Holocaust. "Now," he says
with pride, "there isn't a school that doesn't teach it."

In the end, Wiesel believes, "The beauty of a good book is the special
link between the reader and the writer -- sparks from the ashes, light and
shadow." But he worries about preserving that link amid the speed of
modern life.

"When I was a child," he recalls, "we would spend months preparing to
visit my grandfather. We had time to think about things -- to anticipate
-- before we did them. You'd think for a long time about taking a girl
out. Now you ask her out and get divorced on the same day.

"In America, everything is numbers. But I'm happy if I write one good
sentence."

(source: Los Angeles Times)







********************


Feb. 17




FRANCE:

France Responsible in WWII Deportations-----Ruling by Nation's Top
Tribunal Is Clearest Official Admission of Government's Role in
Expulsions



France's highest administrative tribunal ruled Monday that the French
government was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews to
Nazi death camps during World War II.

The ruling, by the Council of State, marked the clearest and most
authoritative official admission of responsibility for the still-
controversial role of the collaborationist Vichy government in the
treatment of Jews during four years of German occupation. It said French
authorities helped deport Jews even without being forced to by the
occupying German army, rejecting an interpretation still clung to by some
French people unwilling to confront the history of what happened.

The declaration's practical effect for French Jews seemed likely to be
limited, however, as the council also ruled that reparations paid to
deportees and their survivors by the French government since 1945 "have
repaired, as much as this is possible, all the wrongs suffered." The
reparations were decided in accordance with the norms of human rights, it
added, and were similar to reparations paid by other European governments.

The council was responding to a request for a ruling from a lower
administrative tribunal hearing a claim from the daughter of a Jew
deported from France who perished at the notorious Auschwitz camp. She
demanded about $250,000 in reparations for the death of her father and for
the hardships she herself suffered during and after the war.

The council's judgment, although significant for its sweeping admission of
responsibility, appeared to signal a dismissal of her claim in the lower
court and of a number of similar such claims before various French courts.
The council, a sort of supreme jurisdiction for France's administrative
tribunals, is widely respected as the last word in interpreting
administrative law.

"The various measures taken since the end of World War II, by way of
indemnities as well as symbolic, have repaired, as far as this is
possible, all the wrongs suffered," the ruling said.

There was no immediate response from the claimant or any of the several
organizations that represent France's half-million Jews.

The role of the French government under Nazi occupation has long been a
tender subject in France. Collaboration was widespread, including the
government based in Vichy that openly cooperated with Berlin.

Charles de Gaulle, taking power at the war's end, chose to emphasize those
who resisted German authorities as a way to enhance national unity as the
country sought to recover from its defeat. Since then, however, new
generations have arisen and the subject of France's conduct during the war
has been widely examined by French historians, writers and filmmakers.

Then-President Jacques Chirac in 1995 formally acknowledged the betrayal
of French Jews during the war, saying the country was guilty of a
"collective fault." Olivier de Berranger, bishop of Drancy, two years
later asked forgiveness for the silence of the Roman Catholic hierarchy as
thousands of Jews were deported to camps via a railway staging point at
Drancy, in the Paris suburbs.

In the same vein, the tribunal's ruling Monday said Marshal Philippe
Ptain's collaborationist government, using French police, carried out
"arrests, internments and transports whose destination was transit camps
that were, during World War II, the first station of the deportation of
these people toward the camps in which most of them were exterminated."

(source: Washington Post)