Today people around the world are honouring the memory of Raoul Wallenberg.
I’ve been reading Alex Kershaw’s book “To Save a People”. It is in equal parts heartbreaking in its accounts of individual cruelty and suffering and inspirational in its description of the idealism and bravery that Wallenberg and his colleagues displayed.
I was intrigued to read that the British Embassy in Stockholm might have played a role in inspiring Wallenberg. In December 1942, the night before he left Stockholm to travel to Budapest, his sister Nina and he attended a private screening arranged by the Embassy of a 1941 British film “Pimpernel Smith”.
In the film, the English actor Trevor Howard, himself the son of a Hungarian Jew, plays a man who saved persecuted Germans from the Nazis. Leaving the cinema, Wallenberg ‘s sister recalls his saying “This is something I would like to do”.
The rest is history, tragedy and greatness.