Tea at Trianon: The Mystery of Raoul Wallenburg

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 8, 2013

The Mystery of Raoul Wallenburg

Triumph and tragedy. To quote:

In the course of less than eight weeks after Germany’s occupation of Hungary in March 1944, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were exterminated. It was the largest deportation operation of the whole war, and, according to Winston Churchill, ‘probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world’. In July Wallenberg was sent on an American-led diplomatic mission to Budapest with the task of trying to prevent the quarter of a million Jews still alive from being gassed.

The rescue effort that Wallenberg set in motion in Budapest was impressive in scope. He invented a new type of document, a ‘protective passport’, which was issued to close on 10,000 Jews who were made Swedish citizens and thereby avoided deportation and death. It is for this Schutzpass that he is best known. But an equally important part of his mission was the comprehensive social safety net that he built up. He organised health care and the distribution of foodstuffs, he set up children’s homes and homes for the elderly. Thanks to this humanitarian activity, thousands more were saved from starvation and death. (Read more.)