The Nazi attack on the roots of civilization was a defining element of the twentieth century. Hitler was the epicenter of that attack and its main exponent, not its main cause. “(From” Hitler, the definitive biography “, a monumental work of 1,300 pages by historian Ian Kershaw).
The “miracle of life” rising on the Nazi robbery of madness and death adds a new chapter every day, stories ignored or hardly spread. 72 years after the Third Reich surrender, the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation is in charge of an ongoing investigation that has enabled it to detect what it calls “Houses of Life” in Rome, Florence, Budapest, Paris and Warsaw. What are the houses of life? Catholic churches and convents that housed Jewish children whose parents marched to the scaffold of concentration camps and delivered their children to preserve them from certain death.
It is still possible to find survivors of that epic of silent love, which crossed religious identities in celebration of life. Those children are now very old priests or nuns who have hardly ever left the cloisters where they grew up and were educated in the realm of a faith different from that of their parents. Many died there, perhaps without knowing their origins. Others don´t. The story appears as a new chapter of resistance to the Holocaust thanks to the patient research of the Wallenberg Foundation, an NGO that reconstructs the memory of the Shoah, consecrates the interfaith dialogue and keeps the history of Raoul Wallenberg fresh.
It could be said that Wallenberg was a Swedish Oskar Schindler. A man who risked his life to save thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest. He issued “protected passports” that equaled to a safe passage into freedom. In Budapest, Wallenberg served as the first secretary of the Swedish embassy and was detained by the Soviets when the Red Army took Budapest. His whereabouts are still unknown. His disappearance and certain death still stirs controversy: Moscow accused him of being an American spy. Perhaps, once Hitler fell, he became the first victim of the incipient Cold War.
“The Nazi attack on the roots of civilization” of which Kershaw speaks, always found prodigious beings who said enough. Foundation sources assured Clarin that only in France were located so far 527 Houses of Life and another 243 in Rome and its outskirts. Not all of them remained their entire life in these shelters. Dr. Mordechai Paldiel, a survivor of the Holocaust, was saved by a Catholic priest and now lives in the United States.
Baruch Tenembaum, a “Jewish gaucho” born in Las Palmeras, Santa Fe, a vital intelligence at the Wallenberg Foundation, is 83 years old and a citizen of the world, an activist of interreligious dialogue. He is determined to announce to the world that, in the Holocaust, life resisted in these shelters. We Argentines know little about him.
