When we saw the new US postage stamps honoring Raoul Wallenberg, we were moved to do something out of the ordinary for the Giraffe of the Month. The Giraffe Project does not do posthumous awards and, despite the hopes of thousands of people, despite the “Raoul Wallenberg Lives” button that we treasure ourselves, he hasn’t been seen alive in over 10 years—one must assume that he is dead. But here is our founder’s 1990 article about this astonishing man—so you'll know who that fellow is on your snail mail.

In the decade I've been working with Giraffes, I’ve often felt dumbstruck with admiration. Never more so than reading about Wallenberg. Raoul Wallenberg’s story is the stuff of legends, a tale so powerful it has moved hundreds of people to join in a demand to know how the story ends. Did Wallenberg die in 1947, as the Soviet government has claimed? Was he alive as recently as 1987, as prisoners in Soviet jails and mental hospitals have attested? If he really is dead, how did he die? Or is he, as growing numbers of admirers fervently hope, still alive?

Raoul Wallenberg was a young Swedish diplomat sent into Budapest by the US War Refugee Board in the summer of 1944 to rescue Jews from the Gestapo. It was late in the war, millions of Jews had already been killed, and the ghastly extermination operation seemed unstoppable. Many a would-be savior of Jews had gone to the gas chambers with them. Wallenberg was a new player in the deadly game and he didn’t play by the Nazis’ rules; he had his own and they were light years away from anything an SS thug could understand. How could they cope with an adversary whose personal role models were Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers? Wallenberg mixed absurdity with audacity, giving him a bizarre power to bluff and bribe and out-maneuver the Nazis. Wallenberg knew that his adversaries had an inordinate respect for authority and official documentation—and zero sense of humor.

Early on, he got permission to issue Swedish protective passports to 1,500 people. While he was going straight-faced through formal channels for permission to issue a thousand more, he was actually printing them as fast as his hidden presses would go. These wholly bogus documents were loaded down with “official” seals and crests. They worked. So Wallenberg printed up more. And more. Within weeks, 400 Jews were staffing Wallenberg’s operation, none of them wearing the required Star of David. Wallenberg set up safe houses all over the city festooned with Swedish flags and guarded by young, blond Jewish men in Nazi uniforms. Budapest was becoming a city of Swedes, many of them wearing the hats, beards and earlocks of the Orthodox. Survivors of those terrifying times tell stories of Wallenberg that make the hair stand up on the listener’s neck.