To Save a People

Description

The epic and heroic story of how Raoul Wallenberg saved more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the death camps 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.

Alex Kershaw is the author of the widely acclaimed books The Bedford Boy, The Longest Winter, The Few and two biographies- Jack London and, more recently, Blood and Champagne- The Life and Times of Robert Capa. He has been a journalist and screenwriter in the UK and now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

It's to be hoped that, thanks to people like Alex Kershaw, the memory of this true freedom-fighter will be more venerated than he was by Hungary's self-styled "liberators". * Sunday Herald * Alex Kershaw has delivered a masterpiece about Raul Wallenberg, as witnessed from every perspective. -- New York Journal of Books Alex Kershaw describes in this intensely moving, graphic and skilfully researched study, the extraordinary story of how Wallenberg succeeded on saving 100,000 Jews from certain death. * Tribune *