Raoul Wallenberg

Wallenberg was the Swedish diplomatic envoy in Budapest, in the closing years of the Second World War. With great personal courage he stood up against the Nazi extermination machine and saved thousand of Hungarian Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
In January 1945 the Russian Red Army liberated Budapest and Wallenberg was arrested, taken to Moscow and never heard of again. The former USSR denied any knowledge of his abduction or fate.
Andre Gromiko, the Russian Foreign minister, informed the Swedish government in 1957 that Raoul Wallenberg had died in his prison cell at Lubjanka on 10th July. 1947. However, other informants have referred to a Swede seen in the Siberian prison camps in later years even as late as the 1970s.

1978

Oil on Board 61 X 122 cms