📍Lidingö, Stockholm, Sweden
1912 – 1947“I grew up on the island of Lidingö outside Stockholm, in a comfortable upper-middle-class Swedish family, and my childhood there gave me the security and the values that I later put to extraordinary use. Sweden's tradition of neutrality and humanitarian engagement was in the air I breathed growing up, and when I was sent to Budapest in 1944 as a Swedish diplomat with a special mission to save Hungarian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, I drew on everything that background had given me — the confidence to confront authority, the creativity to invent solutions, the absolute conviction that what was happening was intolerable. I issued thousands of Swedish protective passports, rented buildings and declared them Swedish territory, pulled people off deportation trains. The exact number I saved is disputed but it was in the tens of thousands. I was arrested by the Soviets in January 1945 and was never seen again in the West.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Bierman, J. Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg (1981), Viking Press; Marton, K. Wallenberg: Missing Hero (1982), Random House; Yad Vashem archives