19 Summer 2025 Accordingly, Canada's seminal “country pledge” at the Swedish International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism in 2021 called for learning about and acting upon Wallenberg’s heroic legacy, a call that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reaffirms annually on Raoul Wallenberg Day. Simply put, Wallenberg was a beacon of light during the darkest days of the Holocaust, and his heroism warrants remembrance. Indeed, this year’s Raoul Wallenberg Day came at a particularly poignant and painful moment. First, it took place on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz – the worst extermination camp of the 20th century. Over 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, including around 1.1 million Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism did not die at Auschwitz. It remains, today, the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil, reminding us all-too-painfully that while it begins with Jews, it doesn't end with Jews. Second, this Raoul Wallenberg Day also marks 80 years since his disappearance on January 17, 1945. Rather than being celebrated as the “hero of the Holocaust” that he was, he became a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and disappeared into the gulags. Third, this year's commemoration took place amidst an unprecedented, contemporary international drumbeat of evil in an age of atrocity: Russian President Vladimir Putin's criminal aggression in Ukraine, with its attending mass atrocities; China's continuing assault on the rulesbased order and its mass atrocities targeting the Muslim Uyghurs; Sudan's second genocide of the 21st century; and Hamas’s horrific mass atrocities of October 7, the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, which triggered the Hamas-Israel war, and the resulting death and devastation. Indeed, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which I chair, has published landmark reports on each of these atrocities and others, as well as the intensifying imprisonment of human rights defenders amidst the abiding culture of impunity in this age of atrocity. On January 20, we also marked the 83rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, where the “Final Solution” was foreordained. This is a time to recall that what made the Holocaust so unspeakable was not only the horrors that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened, but that these horrors were preventable. Nobody could say we did not know. We knew but we did not act. Wallenberg did. As Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel taught us, silence in the face of evil ends up being complicity with evil itself. I first learned of Wallenberg’s heroism from the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who he saved, when I was acting in the 1970s as pro-bono counsel for the Canadian Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression. I continued to learn more from U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, himself saved by Wallenberg, who sponsored the bill to confer honorary U.S. citizenship on him in 1981, and inspired me to work to confer honorary Canadian citizenship on Wallenberg in 1985; from Raoul Wallenberg’s family, whom I have been serving as counsel for close to 47 years; and from Swedish diplomat Per Anger, who worked with Wallenberg to rescue Jews in Hungary in 1944, and later became Sweden’s ambassador to Canada, where I developed a close friendship that has continued with Swedish ambassadors to Canada and the Swedish government to this day. I also had the occasion, as a parliamentarian, to address the Swedish parliament during the celebration of the centennial of Wallenberg’s birth in 2012, where I witnessed an international exhibit titled, in Wallenberg’s own immortal words, “To me there's no other choice.” This phrase reflected his singular courage and commitment, which embodies the Talmudic principle that if you save a single life, it is as if you have saved an entire universe. In transforming history and saving human “universes,” Wallenberg may be said to have presaged five of today's foundational principles of international human rights and humanitarian law – underpinned by the understanding that indifference and inaction always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, not on the side of the victim. First, by distributing Schutzpasses – diplomatic passports conferring protective immunity – and establishing safe houses conferring diplomatic sanctuary, Wallenberg has been credited with saving 50,000 Jews by these means alone. His heroic deeds affirmed and validated the principle of diplomatic immunity, and the remedy of diplomatic protection, a foundational principle of international law and a model of the diplomatic capacity to save lives. Simply put, consular or diplomatic assistance should not be seen as a matter of “discretion,” but as a matter of legal obligation – on which I have written separately – and a principle sorely lacking in today's public diplomacy. Second, with his protection and rescue of civilians amid the horrors of the Holocaust, including from death marches and death camp transports on the way to Auschwitz, Wallenberg manifested the best of what we
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