Book Review
Wallenberg Book Details U.S. Culpability In Betrayal of Holocaust Hero
NEW YORK, July 30,2001. A book containing new and controversial material about Raoul Wallenberg, a hero of the Holocaust, has just been published. Titled A CONSPIRACY OF INDIFFERENCE: The Raoul Wallenberg Story, the book reveals that for half a century the United States, which had recruited Wallenberg, abandoned the Swedish diplomat.
This book begins where others end and takes the Wallenberg story to the present day.
Two large gray boxes from the Central Intelligence Agency containing 1,500 documents analyzed by author Alan Gersten, specify that, through inaction and subversion, the U.S. and Swedish governments let Wallenberg languish in the camps of silence, known as the Gulag Archipelago. These documents show that America, which sent Wallenberg on one of World War II's most hazardous missions, betrayed this man who achieved the unachievable to rescue 100,000 Jews.
Since his disappearance, many tried and all failed to find Wallenberg or pinpoint his whereabouts. His family made impassioned pleas to the highest levels of American government to locate and free him, only to be ignored five times. All attempts to free Wallenberg were perpetually bungled. These included proposed spy swaps and an unusual lawsuit against
the Soviet Union that the plaintiffs initially won, but ultimately lost.
A joint Swedish-Russian group--after more than nine years of study--released two reports on January 12, 2001, which Mr. Gersten also draws upon. The Russian version claims Wallenberg was killed in 1947, yet the Swedish version raises many theories without arriving at any conclusions.
The first reaction to the book comes from Dr. Marvin W. Makinen, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, who has been working for about 20 years to try to free Raoul Wallenberg or find out what happened to him. Dr. Makinen helped champion the lawsuit and participated as an expert in the Swedish-Russian Group.
He said, in part, "I am pleased with the level of detail in your book. You will probably be the only biographer of Wallenberg to have traversed the arduous path of details, statements, and events with respect to efforts to take the case into court. I still regret greatly that that path which I still believe would have worked, given a sufficiently agile and tenacious lawyer, did not prove to be more successful."
Mr. Gersten, an award-winning journalist, spent seven years on this carefully researched book to provide new insights into this frustrating episode. In addition to the CIA documents and the Swedish-Russian reports, Mr. Gersten examined an additional 1,000 documents from the archives of the State Department and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., and supplemented archival research with interviews of family members and others connected with the cause-celebre.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alan Gersten, a freelance writer living in New York, won the Loeb Award, one of the highest prizes in financial journalism, for his column on investing as well as the Ciba Gigy award for an in-depth look at a Colorado farm family. He won a fellowship to Columbia University, where he studied economics for an academic year. For further information, contact Mr. Gersten at 718 624-8384.
HOW TO BUY IT: Now available on bn.com (Barnes & Noble), and soon will be at amazon.com. Libraries, museums and resellers can order the book at their reduced price from the suggested retail of $16 only by contacting the publisher, Xlibris, at 1 888 795-4274, extension 276, or fax: 215 923-4685, ISBN #0-7388-6602-4. The website is www.xlibris.com, and there is no minimum order.