A Hungarian Jew who, as a teen in 1944, was herded onto a train by German SS associates destined for Auschwitz had several brushes with near death until he was given a protective travel document – the Schutzpass.
It was when Erwin Fenyo was in a pinch, sitting in a cell in Budapest, that he said a tall, imposing man in an overcoat and a hat appeared and whispered through the prison bars “We are going to save you!”.
That man was Raoul Wallenberg.
When Fenyo was warned by a German soldier that he was not headed to the Austrian border to dig trenches, where he had been told he was going, but rather to a concentration camp, he escaped on an army truck to Budapest. On his arrival in the city, the young man was arrested, charged with desertion and condemned to death by firing squad.
Copying the claims of other prisoners, Fenyo denied being a Hungarian citizen and told his captors that he could not be charged or punished. Little did he know that the previous day, his mother had gone to the Swedish Embassy to beg for assistance and had even left his photograph for an identity paper.
An invention of Swedish diplomat Wallenberg, the Schutzpass document incorrectly identified pass-holders as subjects of a neutral Sweden and therefore they could not be imported by German forces out of Hungary.
Read the article by Melissa Coade in The Mandarin.