WHAT: The Wallenberg Monument
WHERE: Great Cumberland Place (map)
BY WHOM: Philip Jackson
WHEN: 1997
Walk a couple of hundred metres north of the Marble Arch along Great Cumberland Place and you come to a little semi-circle of properties, one of which is the West Marble Arch Synagogue.
This little crescent is now known as Wallenberg Place, and in the centre of it, and the cause of its renaming in the 1990s, is a monument to Swedish businessman and diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a man whose actions may have saved the lives of as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews.
Sweden was neutral in World War Two and Wallenberg, from a rich family and working for an import-export company, made many business trips to Hungary (which was allied to Nazi Germany).
In 1944 the Nazis, fearing that the Hungarian government was about to negotiate a peace deal with the allies, occupied Hungary and installed a pro-German puppet authority, which began the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to the death camps. By June 1944 435,000 had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Wallenberg was recruited by the US War Refugee Board with the aim of trying to save potential victims of the deportations and murders, and was attached to the Swedish legation in Budapest. He arrived in that city in his new role of diplomat in July 1944, by which time only about 230,000 Jews remained in Hungary.
Protective passports (“Schutzpasse”) were issued that said that the bearers were Swedish citizens – and therefore citizens of a neutral country – who were waiting repatriation to Sweden and so could not be deported. It is thought that perhaps 100,000 Jews were saved as a result of this; on one occasion Wallenberg climbed onto the roof of a train about to leave for Auschwitz and started handing out these passports to the Jews in the trucks, then led them out to a fleet of Swedish flagged cars that were waiting to take them to safety.
When the Red Army took Budapest in January 1945 Wallenberg was arrested and disappeared into the Soviet prison system. It is not known when or how he died, but the suspicion is that he was executed shortly after the end of the war.
Philip Jackson’s memorial is cast in bronze and shows Wallenberg standing be a wall made up of 100,000 of the Schutzpasse and was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth in 1997. Another cast of the memorial is in Buenos Aires.
Other London works by Jackson include the central group of the Lancaster crew at the Bomber Command Memorial on Piccadilly, the statue of Gandhi on Parliament Square, the Queen Mother on The Mall, and the Gurkha Memorial by the Old War Office. He has also done a large number of footballers – Bobby Moore, Peter Osgood, Matt Busby, Alex Ferguson and George Best, among others.
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