Wallenberg honored in Budapest, 50 years after statue disappeared

BUDAPEST, April 19 (JTA) — The story of a new monument to Raoul Wallenberg here is convoluted — as befits the uncertain ending of the man the statue commemorates. Several hundred people, including the mayor of Budapest, leading public figures and Holocaust survivors whose lives were saved by the Swedish diplomat, gathered Sunday to dedicate the statue in the area of this Hungarian capital where Wallenberg focused his activity. The 19-foot-high statue features a man killing a snake, as well as a relief of Wallenberg’s face. Fifty years ago, a monument to Wallenberg, who saved approximately 33,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II with the help of forged Swedish passports, was slated to be unveiled. But Communist secret police removed the original statue and took it to a secret location. A few years later, part of the monument surfaced in the eastern Hungarian town of Debrecen in front of the Biogal pharmaceutical plant. The Israeli company Teva, which bought Biogal in 1995, was originally asked to bring the original statue back to Budapest from the entrance of the Biogal plant, but refused, agreeing only to make a copy of the statue. The company kept the original in Debrecen, where, according to one version of events, Wallenberg was killed. Teva paid for one-third of the costs of the new statue. The municipality of Budapest and other donors paid for the remainder of the statue. “At last, the statue of Raul Wallenberg is now rehabilitated and returned to its original place, where it was planned to be exactly half a century ago,” the mayor of Budapest, Gabor Demszky, said at the ceremony. Wallenberg himself was last seen in January 1945, when he was taken away by Soviet soldiers. Although he is alleged to have died in a Soviet prison, his fate is still unknown. He “was a mysterious figure, a heaven-sent hero for us,” said Gyorgy Somlyo, a poet who was among those saved by Wallenberg.