Secular Saints

In 2001, the Government of Canada declared January 17 as Raoul Wallenberg Day to "honour the courage, character and humanity of an exceptional individual". This coming Sunday will, in fact, be the 65th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg's arrest by the Red Army, in Budapest, Hungary. After his arrest, nothing more was heard of his whereabouts for decades. It was suspected that he had been held in a Russian prison camp, but Soviet Russia always denied it.

First-hand accounts of former Russian prisoners having spoken directly to this great humanitarian put the lie to that. When and how Mr. Wallenberg died has never been ascertained and it is doubtful whether Russia will ever disclose it, but it is certain that he spent hopeless decades as a political prisoner of the USSR, which doubtless classified him as some kind of "American spy" during the Cold War that succeeded the end of the Second World War.

In March of 1944 Adolf Hitler dispatched Adolph Eichmann to Hungary to organize mass deportations of Hungarian Jews to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau to honour the Third Reich's declaration to the world that it would favour humankind by destroying worldwide Jewry through the Final Solution. An agreement between Sweden and the U.S. led to plans for a rescue mission.

Raoul Wallenberg, multilingual, wealthy, an intellectual banker familiar with Nazi bureaucracy was given free reign under cover of a diplomatic position as first secretary of the Swedish legation, to do what he could to save as many Hungarian Jews as he could manage. He spoke of his mission as a personal obligation to "save a nation".

Knowing full well his personal safety was at risk he used guile and bold ingenuity to perfect a quasi-legal diplomatic document called a "Schutzpass". This document testified that whoever bore it was protected by the Swedish Embassy, and thousands upon thousands of these Schutzpasses were distributed. Raoul Wallenberg is credited with saving up to 100,000 Jewish lives.

Many of those whom he saved came to Canada to live their lives. A park in Nepean, Ottawa, was named Raoul Wallenberg Park to commemorate and give honour to his supreme humanity. Twenty-five years ago, an honourary Canadian citizenship was issued in his name. This courageously brilliant tactician helped the world recover some semblance of its self-respect.

As did also other righteous citizens of the world, such as Pastor Niemoller, the pacifist, anti-nuclear protester who was imprisoned for years by Hitler for defying him; best known for his statement identifying German failure to resist the Nazis:

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

As did Miep Gies, who risked her life for years to shelter Anne Frank's family and four other Jews before they were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz and where Anne died in Bergen-Belson just before liberation. Contrast these and many other splendidly courageous people, "righteous gentiles" who risked their lives in compassion for other human beings, against dread odds.

And then consider the moral amnesia of the single individual with the most powerfully persuasive moral position in the world who chose not to speak out and who has been beatified as characterizing "supreme virtue" in preparation for sainthood following canonization.