Lifelong hunt for missing brother
Nina Lagergren
campaigner b March 3, 1921 d April 5, 2019
Nina Lagergren, who has died aged 98, retained a clear recollection of her half-brother, Raoul Wallenberg. ‘‘When I was a child, he was my big brother,’’ she said in 1989. ‘‘He seemed very much older: when I was 10 he was 20. He was very exuberant . . . really very special.’’
She was 23 when Wallenberg, a special envoy, was sent to Hungary by Sweden at the behest of the Americans, to help Jews to escape the mounting terror as the Germans occupied a country that, until the start of the war, had been a relative haven. By all accounts, he saved tens of thousands of lives but, in January 1945, as the Red Army overran Budapest, he disappeared.
Discovering his whereabouts became Lagergren’s all-consuming goal for the next seven decades.
In interviews her voice would remain clear and calm, even when describing the painful period when it slowly dawned on the family that her half-brother would not be coming home. For years the Soviet authorities denied all knowledge of his fate. Then in 1957 they said he had died from a heart attack 10 years earlier.
‘‘My mother never gave up,’’ Lagergren said. ‘‘She was a very
strong person and she lived with Raoul’s suffering every minute, day and night.’’
Wallenberg’s mother and his stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel, repeatedly questioned the Swedish and Russian governments, but to no avail. The former, tainted by its neutrality during the war, sometimes appeared as uninterested as the latter.
In 1979, driven to despair and growing old, her parents committed suicide two days apart. Their wish was that their children keep looking for Raoul until 2000, then stop; Lagergren, however, continued the hunt.
In 1989, at a meeting with KGB officials in Moscow, she was given a wooden box containing Wallenberg’s personal effects, including his diplomatic passport, identity cards and money. Still she believed he was alive, held in isolation, his identity hidden.
She and her brother Guy, a physicist, spent almost 50 years searching for their half-brother, by which time they were barely speaking to one another.
She was born Nina Viveka Maria von Dardel in 1921. She always spoke with delight of Raoul’s talent for mimicry, particularly at family parties during the war years. ‘‘He used to entertain the family with sketches in which he played all the parts,’’ she told The Observer in 1989. One had an Englishman with an Oxford accent, a Scot, a Frenchman and an American arguing with a Nazi officer. ‘‘He acted it so well we were shouting with laughter.’’
In 1943 she married Gunnar Lagergren, a Swedish judge. He died in 2008. They had four children including Nane, who was married to Kofi Annan, the UN secretarygeneral, and another daughter, Mi. They accompanied their mother at public appearances promoting the cause of the missing diplomat.
Wallenberg remained everpresent in Lagergren’s home: there was a bust of him in her hallway; his architectural sketches were in her study; the packet of his belongings handed over in Moscow was stored in her basement.
When Guy died in 2009, Lagergren asked that Wallenberg be officially declared dead. The Swedish government duly published search notices for him and received no new information. On October 31, 2016, the authorities recorded his official date of death as July 31, 1952. Lagergren was by then 95 – and her life’s work complete, although her goal remained unfulfilled. – The Times