The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe

The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe . . .
by Alex Kershaw
Da Capo, 2010. 294 pgs. Non-Fiction

This beautiful, terrible narrative tells the story of Raoul Wallenberg, Adolph Eichmann, and the near-annihilation of Hungary's Jews during the last days of World War II. Wallenberg, dispatched with U. S. money from neutral Sweden to try to halt or delay Eichmann's rush of Jews to the death camps, saved tens of thousands of Jews by issuing them Schutzpasses, documents conferring Swedish protection and allowing him to move people into Swedish safe houses and some to escape the country. Again and again Wallenberg risks his own life and freedom by setting up his "little black table" at the train station and pulling people off the transports at the last minute by randomly calling out the most common Jewish names. Kershaw tells his story in a powerful understated prose filled with poignant details about individual Hungarians as well as the historic figures of the time. Descriptions of the Blue Danube running red with the blood of women and children shot on its banks, their bodies thrown into the water, and of Jewish bodies laid out on the ice in a pattern mocking the Star of David bring a terrible immediacy to Kershaw's historical narrative. Contrast this with the hope against hope and eventual salvation of those whom Wallenberg's intervention saved, as he appeared suddenly, almost as an angel of light, among the deportees at the station. Wallenberg's own disappearance into the Soviet gulag brings this extraordinary book to a heartbreaking conclusion, though the appendix which details the number of people saved and the estimated number of their descendants makes powerfully the point of how much may be accomplished by even one very good man.