PURELY COMMENTARY

8 | JANUARY 5 • 2023 

A

lumni and fans 
of the University 
of Michigan will 
do a lot of cheering this 
holiday season, whatever 
the football team’s fate in 
the national playoffs. For a 
quasi-interested 
observer, 
who roots for 
another Big Ten 
team, it’s rather 
easy to mark 
when moments 
of ecstasy fully 
grip the U-M 
faithful: they are always 
punctuated by the stirring 
brass of “Hail to the Victors.”
It’s a great fight song, 
maybe the best in college 
football, but I had never read 
the lyrics before setting out to 
write this piece. Yeah, I knew 
there were a lot of “hails” 
in it, but the song always 
seemed opaque, perhaps 
caused by the Latinate 
construction of the opening 
verse: “Hail! to the victors 
valiant.” I should also declare 
that massive crowds of people 
shouting “Hail!” in unison 
make me rather uneasy. 
But I’m glad to learn finally 
the phrase “victors valiant,” 
because unlike the song’s 
second line, with its emphasis 
on conquest — “Hail! to the 
conqur’ing heroes”— the first 
invites thoughts beyond the 
gridiron. Valor may be most 
often ascribed to soldiers in 
combat, but the word has 
wider implications, conveying 
in Webster’s terms a “strength 
of mind or spirit that enables 
a person to encounter danger 
with firmness.” 
Throughout the six hours 
of The U.S. and the Holocaust 

Ken Burns and company 
brought a host of villains 
before us. Hitler, of course, 
but also such Americans as 
Breckenridge Long, the State 
Department obstructionist, 
Father Charles Coughlin, the 
mad dog radio priest from 
Royal Oak, and perhaps worst 
of all, Charles Lindbergh, the 
famed aviator whose support 
for isolationism made him 
seem a Nazi dupe, if not an 
outright antisemite.
Although I am wary of 
attempts to seek optimism 
amidst Holocaust despair, 
the sentiment too often 
ascribed to Anne Frank, a 
search for the valiant, those 
who confronted Nazi evil 
yet remained steadfast, is a 
precious part of this history.
The reality of life during 
the Nazi terror is that Jews 
who survived were, in nearly 
all cases, helped by someone, 
somewhere, at some crucial 
point. And while the Burns 
documentary perhaps focuses 
a bit too much on what 
Americans did not do, it does 
include segments on rescuers 
like Varian Fry and John 
Pehle, though neither man 
put himself in harm’s way. 
Diplomats, emissaries and 
government officials seldom 
do.
Which makes the story 
of Raoul Wallenberg all the 
more inspiring. 
His rescue efforts as 
a Swedish diplomat, the 
subject of many books and 
films, brought numerous 
posthumous honors. The 
street next to the U.S. 
Holocaust Memorial 
Museum was renamed 
Raoul Wallenberg Plaza. A 

dozen years 
earlier in 1981, Congress 
awarded him honorary 
American citizenship, only 
the second recipient in its 
history, joining him with 
Winston Churchill. Yet how 
many among the 100,000 
who fill the Big House on 
Saturdays in October could 
name this exemplary man 
as a University of Michigan 
alumnus? Or know that there 
is a Wallenberg Endowment 
to support University of 
Michigan students inspired 
by this great humanitarian? 
(You can donate via this 
link: https://leadersandbest.
umich.edu/find/#!/good/
wallenberg.)
He graduated with honors 
in 1935, earning a degree in 
architecture. Though from a 
wealthy family, Wallenberg 
resisted the trappings of 
his privilege; indeed, he 
chose Michigan over Ivy 
League institutions because 
of its place as a major public 
university. During his years 
attending the university, he 
lived in modest apartments, 
ate breakfast each day at 
the Union, and even spent 
vacations hitchhiking across 
the United States and Mexico.
I would be the last to argue 
that a university education 
made Wallenberg the person 
he became. There were too 
many Nazi murderers with 
PhDs, MDs, and JDs for me 
to ever have complete faith in 

higher education’s ennobling 
influences. But I’m tempted 
to believe that Wallenberg’s 
encounter with ordinary 
Americans during the 
Great Depression, whether 
in Ann Arbor or on the 
nation’s highways, must have 
strengthened the empathy 
that was fundamental to his 
character. 
You can read about Raoul 
Wallenberg on your own, or 
perhaps watch the 1990 film 
Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg, 
and learn how in Budapest 
he saved at least 4,000 Jews 
through a combination of 
courage and what can only 
be termed chutzpah. With 
almost no authority to do so, 
Wallenberg issued thousands 
of official looking papers that 
declared the holders under 
the protection of the Swedish 
government. He housed these 
Jews in apartments that he 
then claimed as Swedish 
territory.

Rob 
Franciosi

guest column

A ‘Victor Valiant’

continued on page 9

COURTESY OF WALLENBERG CENTER SITE AT U OF M.

Wallenberg’s 
student ID card

Raoul 
Wallenberg

