Tea at Trianon: Remembering 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

Monday, July 13, 2015

Remembering Raoul Wallenburg

From the World War II Database:

In spring 1944, American diplomat Iver Olsen arrived in Stockholm, looking for someone who was willing to help the American War Refugee Board to work in Hungary to help Hungarian Jews. Having already wanted to take on a greater cause in his life, [Wallenburg] accepted the task when Olsen approached him. He arrived in Budapest, Hungary in the summer of 1944 as a secretary assigned to the Swedish embassy on the pretense that he was a newly assigned secretary. In this role, he issued many protective passports to Hungarian Jews, which effectively made them Swedish objects, and Wallenberg could then prevent them from being deported by the Hungarians to concentration camps. To house these Jews, he rented 32 buildings in Budapest of various sizes (using funds provided by the War Refugee Board); he declared these buildings extraterritorial much like the general treatment of embassies on foreign soil. Soon, he took on actions that put him directly between Hungarian authorities and the Jews. On more than one occasion, for instance, he arrived at railroad stations where Hungarian police were loading Jews onto rail cars; he walked among the Jews, either making up stories of how he recognized some of the Jews as those working with Swedish firms, or whispering instructions to them to answer his later call of fake names, ignoring warning rifle shots that the Hungarians fired over his head. It was a generally accepted estimate that he had saved the lives of more than 10,000 Hungarian Jews. (Read more.)