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Probers Revive Hope
That Wallenberg Is Alive
Montreal (JTA) — An
international commission
that visited Soviet prisons
this summer in an effort to
establish the fate of Raoul
Wallenberg has reached the
preliminary conclusion that
the Swedish diplomat miss-
ing since 1945 may possibly
still be alive somewhere in
the vast Gulag that is the
Soviet penal system.
In any event, the commis-
sion believes it has
"incontrovertible evidence"
that Mr. Wallenberg did not
die in 1947 in Lubyanka
prison, as the Soviets have
insisted until recently.
The commission consists of
experts from several coun-
tries, including the Soviet
Union, in the fields of law,
science, politics, academia
and other humanities.
It began its "search for the
truth" about Mr.
Wallenberg's fate on Aug. 27
and concluded the first
phase of the search last mon-
th.
The commission's mem-
bers included Mr.
Wallenberg's half-brother,
physicist Guy von Dardel of
Sweden; biochemistry Pro-
fessor Marvin Makinen of
the University of Chicago,
an American who was once a
political prisoner in
Vladimir prison in the
Soviet Union; and Professor
Irwin Cotler, a professor of
law at Montreal's McGill
University and a human
rights advocate.
Prof. Cotler, who has been
probing for years to get at
the truth about Mr.
Wallenberg, described the
commission's findings and
explained the conclusions it
has reached so far.
What made the most re-
cent effort unique, he said, is
that the Soviets, who for 45
years refused to allow any
outside investigation into
Mr. Wallenberg's
whereabouts, agreed to co-
operate fully with the com-
mission in an "open-ended"
investigation.
Soviet officials agreed to
open their prisons, prison
archives and dossiers for
scrutiny by the commission,
archives that had not been
made available to outsiders
at least since 1917.
The investigation, unear-
thing evidence damaging to
the Soviets, found, for exam-
ple, that the Soviets never
conducted their own in-
vestigations into Mr.
Wallenberg's fate, although
they gave many assurances
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to the contrary over the
years.
Prison archives were not
scrutinized, nor were offi-
cials or relevant witnesses
examined off the record or
under oath.
Alexander Semyonova, the
warden at Butyrka prison,
was quoted as saying that
"Mr. Wallenberg was a non-
person for us until 1988, an
unmentionable. We couldn't
even talk about him before
that, let alone investigate if
he had been imprisoned
here."
It was quickly established
by the commission that the
official Soviet stance on Mr.
Wallenberg had no em-
pirical foundation.
Certainly there was none
to substantiate the Feb. 6,
1957, memorandum of then
The Soviets agreed
to cooperate fully
with the
commission.
Soviet Foreign Minister An-
drei Gromyko, stating that
Mr. Wallenberg died of a
heart attack at Lubyanka on
July 17, 1947.
The commission centered
its examination on prisons
where Mr. Wallenberg was
reported to have been seen
alive after that date.
It spent a full week at
Vladimir prison, the site of
much of the witness
testimony of the 1950s.
It learned that foreigners
incarcerated there at the
time were generally
registered under a number
or a false identity. Subse-
quent investigation at
Butyrka corroborated that
finding.
The commission's study of
prisoner files, registration
documents and other sup-
port materials allowed for
the placement of Mr .
Wallenberg in prisons where
he had reportedly been seen
over the years.
"Analysis clearly con-
firms, by way of a clinical on-
site investigation (of the
prisons), the actual presence
of those witnesses who gave
testimony that they had
seen Mr. Wallenberg alive,"
Mr. Cotler stated.
"We now have proof of the
existence of 15 of these in-
dividuals, something we did
not have before."
The commission
discovered that in addition
to personal prison files,
there were parallel
.