To Save a People

New York Times bestselling author Alex Kershaw has written the first full biography of one of the most remarkable men to have outwitted Hitler - Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who almost single-handedly saved the lives of countless Hungarian Jews, at unimaginable risk and great cost to himself. As a Holocaust survivor said, 'Schindler saved hundreds. Wallenberg saved tens of thousands.' This is the story of how he achieved this and of his personal duel with Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel charged with obliterating Hungarian Jewry, who sent half a million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. This confrontation reaches its climax in 1944 when Soviet and German troops are fighting hand-to-hand through the suburbs of Budapest and Eichmann's push for the Final Solution is personally opposed by Wallenberg. The book also sheds new light on Wallenberg's fate - he disappeared into the Soviet Union after the war to a highly controversial and disputed death. (The Americans were so determined to discover what happened to him that they made him an honorary citizen in order to prise information out of the Russians.) It's an inspiring story which moves at the pace of a master thriller-writer, but the truth behind it is heartbreaking.

New York Times bestselling author Alex Kershaw has written the first full biography of one of the most remarkable men to have outwitted Hitler - Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who almost single-handedly saved the lives of countless Hungarian Jews, at unimaginable risk and great cost to himself. As a Holocaust survivor said, 'Schindler saved hundreds. Wallenberg saved tens of thousands.' This is the story of how he achieved this and of his personal duel with Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel charged with obliterating Hungarian Jewry, who sent half a million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. This confrontation reaches its climax in 1944 when Soviet and German troops are fighting hand-to-hand through the suburbs of Budapest and Eichmann's push for the Final Solution is personally opposed by Wallenberg. The book also sheds new light on Wallenberg's fate - he disappeared into the Soviet Union after the war to a highly controversial and disputed death. (The Americans were so determined to discover what happened to him that they made him an honorary citizen in order to prise information out of the Russians.) It's an inspiring story which moves at the pace of a master thriller-writer, but the truth behind it is heartbreaking.

Vorwort
The epic and heroic story of how Raoul Wallenberg saved more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the death camps

Autorentext

Alex Kershaw

Klappentext

'Raoul Wallenberg is the Swedish saviour of almost 100,000 Jewish men, women and children. What he did, what he accomplished was of biblical proportions. Wherever he is, his humanity burns like a torch ... He nurtured the lives of those he never knew at the risk of his own.'

These are the words of Ronald Reagan at a White House ceremony in 1981, where Raoul Wallenberg was made an honorary citizen of the United States.

To Save a People is the extraordinary storyof how, during the last winter of World War II, a young Swedish diplomat succeeded in outwitting SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi mission to exterminate all surviving Jews in Hungary.

Raoul Wallenberg was posted to Budapest in July 1944. At unimaginable risk, he came up with an ingenious ruse to prevent wearers of the yellow Star of David from being deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He invented something called the Schutzpass. It had no basis in international law, but it signified that the bearer was under the official protection of the Swedish embassy. It looked official.

Wallenberg was a practical man, who used bribery, lying, blackmail and intimidation in his rescue operation. And he was not afraid of personal intervention. When Eichmann could not make use of the trains, he ordered Jews to be rounded up and marched 120 miles to the Slovak border. Wallenberg managed to persuade the SS guards to honour as many passes as he could distribute.

While Oscar Schindler is rightly famous for his courageous efforts on behalf of some hundreds of Jews, it is estimated that over a million people around the world are alive because of one man - Raoul Wallenberg.

Based on extensive research in international archives and interviews with a group of survivors, Alex Kershaw's To Save a People is the intensely dramatic account of one of the darkest yet most inspiring chapters in twentieth-century history.