Raoul Wallenberg.  A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.  Born to an prominent Stockholm business family in 1912, he never quite made it in the Swedish business world and had several failed ventures on his resumé when he was dispatched to Budapest on a humanitarian mission in July 1944.

In Budapest, he found his vocation.  He was tireless in his efforts to save Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps, alternately defying the Nazis and negotiating with them.  In January 1945, as the Soviets surrounded Budapest, he crossed the lines and demanded to see General Malinovsky, in a last-ditch attempt to save the remaining Jews in the ghetto.  A few days later, the Soviets issued a warrant for his arrest, and he was transferred to Moscow.  The Swedish authorities believed that he was under Soviet “protection.”  It took weeks for them to conclude that he was missing.
 

Alan Riding, a former European cultural correspondent for the New York Times, recounts Parisian life under the Nazi swastika and the forced compromises of French writers, artists, and performers under Hitler’s rule.

Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man’s courage and a nation’s struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression.