This is a photograph of the memorial in Budapest honouring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Nazi era. The memorial consists of an information plaque describing Wallenberg’s heroic actions and a bronze statue of Wallenberg dressed in a coat, positioned between two blocks of pink Swedish granite. On the granite there is an image of a man stabbing a snake decorated with swastikas. This image also shows part of an inscription written in Latin by the Roman poet Ovid: “Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos tempora si fuerint nubila solus eris” (until you are lucky, many friends you have, once the sky turns cloudy, alone you remain).
The memorial was created by Hungarian sculptor Imre Varga. The inspiration for the monument came from a monument that was created by Pal Patzay and erected in Budapest in 1949 but then removed by the Communists before it was even dedicated. It had consisted of a man holding a snake, as in Varga’s later monument.
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Raoul Wallenberg - Raoul Wallenberg was born into a prestigious family of diplomats in Sweden in 1912. He studied architecture and business, and, at one stage, worked in Palestine, where he established many connections with Jewish people. He was arrived to Hungary in July 1944 as Sweden’s special envoy and used his position to save Jews from the Nazis. He managed to save 10,000 Jews by giving them protective documents and housing them in Swedish-owned buildings.
In 1945, after Budapest was liberated from Nazi occupation, he was arrested by the Soviet Red Army under suspicion of espionage, taken into detention, and subsequently disappeared. There are a number of theories about what may have happened to him, but none have been officially confirmed. Most reports have claimed that he was killed in 1947, although the question of who killed him remains a matter of debate. Due to his heroic actions, Wallenberg received many humanitarian honours including being designated by Israel one of the Righteous Among the Nations and being named an honorary citizen of the United States, Hungary, Australia, and Israel.
