Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web, by Elenore Lester (Prentice-Hall, 183 pp., $12.95). Raoul Wallenberg’s Chaplinesque outwitting of the Nazi bureaucracy in Hungary began with his Schutzpasse, an extraordinarily impressive document with no basis in international law that served as a magic Wand for tens of thousands of Jews. January 17, 1983 marked the 38th anniversary of the day Wallenberg was taken prisoner by the Russians for the “crime” of saving at least fifty thousand Jews from extermination by the Nazis. The author reminds us of the words of Swedish Minister Söderblom to a colleague querying him in the early days of Wallenberg’s disappearance: “Remember: not one harsh word about the Russians!” This was the attitude throughout the West, the fear of “offending” the Soviet Union, that helped to seal Wallenberg’s fate in a Soviet prison camp. As Miss Lester points out, it was not until the Russians themselves—Solzhenitsyn and others—started speaking out that the media blackout on Soviet oppression was lifted. Miss Lester’s book compresses into a short space a vivid account of Raoul Wallenberg’s life. She does not invent dialogue or events to increase the drama, nor does she speculate as to Wallenberg’s motivations. The mystery is judiciously respected. Instead of broad strokes, Miss Lester gives us light brushlines. And Wallenberg does emerge: a young Swedish aristocrat, no leftist but simply someone who could not abide the strong bullying the weak. We see him as an architectural student in Michigan, as a lover of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Chaplin. Miss Lester writes: “Wallenberg was not built for sainthood or martyrdom. He loved the outdoors, beautiful buildings, a well-planned city, commercial enterprise, the company of civilized humans. He was a practical man who cared for decency.” She counters the revisionist historians who rewrite history with the United States as villain and the Soviets as “peace seekers.” (It was the United States that brought about Wallenberg’s role in Hungary.) She also makes it clear that others—the Vatican, Switzerland —did far more to combat the Nazis than they have been credited with. But the focus of this brilliant book remains on Wallenberg himself. Who can forget the image of Wallenberg climbing onto the roof of a train taking Jews to their death and “distributing passes to all the hands that could reach him through an opening”? This was the only time in death-filled Nazi Hungary that shots were reported to have been fired at Raoul Wallenberg. When the Russians entered, they picked him up immediately, and carried him off to death, or to a living death somewhere in the Gulag Archipelago.
The Life of John Berryman, by John Haffenden (Roulledge, 451 pp., $22.50). John Berryman’s life was a disaster area. Abandoned by his father’s suicide, overwhelmed by his strong mother’s possessiveness, bullied in school, overpraised in college, resenting the women who loved him, wanting fame but feeling guilty about it when it came to him, he drank himself into insensibility and finally committed suicide himself by jumping off the bridge between St. Paul and Minneapolis. The question raised by this huge biography is:
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