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.