The late Ambassador Per Anger was the subject of my book A Quiet Courage. This article reflects an early stage in his career when he was a diplomat representing Sweden in Budapest.
The Price Tag of One Life
It was late at night in the spring of 1944. The Nazis had begun their purge of Hungarian Jews, the last large intact group of Jews in Europe. A handful of neutral nations, Sweden in particular, were trying to save as many Jews as possible. But now those efforts had become more complicated. With the heightened Nazi presence in Hungary coupled with the Jews being forced to wear the yellow star in order to identify them, every Jew’s life was in danger as never before. On one of the first days that Jews appeared on the street with the yellow star sewed onto their garments, a knock was heard on the door of the young second secretary of the Swedish Legation. As the thirty-two year old Swede, Per Anger, opened the door he saw a friend, a Jewish businessman, Hugo Wohl standing there in the darkness. The man was obviously agitated as he stood covering with his passport the huge yellow star which was sewn on to his clothing.
“Come in! Come in!” said the Swede as he motioned to the man and closed the door simultaneously. The relationship between the two men had been primarily that of trade between Budapest and Sweden. It had involved two men of equal standing working together and respecting one another. Now the businessman was pleading with the diplomat. “Per, you must help me!” he said.
Per’s mind went back a second to the immediate past, the day when he walked out into the streets of Budapest and saw for the first time multitudes of Jews wearing bright yellow stars on their clothing which marked them as Jews, “life unworthy of life.” In the words of another Swedish diplomat, Lars Berg, the star cried out: “I am a Jew. Treat me as you like. Beat me; deport me; rob me; send me to the gas chamber. I am not a human being, just a Jew.” Per felt their loss of dignity deeply. Now he felt that loss even more acutely in the friend who stood in his residence.
His next thoughts were desperate. He was a diplomat from a neutral nation, but what difference did that make now? What could he do to save this man which was any more effective than what he had already been trying to do?
Then gradually an idea began to formulate in his mind. He routinely issued provisional passports to Swedish citizens who had lost theirs. That was a normal function for any foreign embassy. Hugo Wohl was not a Swedish citizen, but still maybe those provisional passports could save his life, and if his life, why not the lives of his family members and even other Jews?
Per Anger was the correct, career diplomat. Years later he became an ambassador. He was kind, gentle, bright, but he was not used to breaking rules. Until now he had functioned within prescribed guidelines. A decision to break rules now could cost him his career. It could jeopardize the well-being of his wife and his soon-to-be-born baby. But to obey the rules could also jeopardize the very life of this man who stood before him.
“They can fire me,” he said out loud. “But I have to do this.” Hugo Wohl and his family were given the Swedish provisional passports. And eventually others too were saved in the same way.
Later that year another Swede, Raoul Wallenberg, joined the original six Swedish employees of the Swedish Legation in Budapest. He took the idea of using the provisional passports and transformed them into a more elaborate document called the Schutz-Pass, with the golden emblem of the Swedish crowns and the picture of the person to whom it belonged. It looked more official and appealed to the detail-oriented mind of the Germans. The Schutz-Pass was often called “the paper of life and death.” It officially declared the protection of the Swedish government to the point that toward the end of the conflict in Hungary, the Swedish Legation on the hill overlooking the city began to be called the Jewish Embassy by those who were thwarted and angry in their failed efforts to eliminate all Jews. By the end the Swedes and their comrades had saved one hundred thousand Jews.
The effectiveness of Swedish passes, however, started that one night in the Spring of 1944, when a young Swedish diplomat decided that his whole career was not worth the price tag of endangering the life of another human being. Although it was not on his mind that night, he also learned that one person truly can make a difference.
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“Occasions do not make a man either strong or weak. They only show what he is.” – Thomas A Kempis