Anger Per

Anger, Per Per Johan Anger was born in Göteborg, Sweden in 1913. He studied law at the Universities of Stockholm and Uppsala, graduating in 1939. He joined the diplomatic corps and was offered a position at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin, Germany in January 1940. In 1942, he was appointed second secretary at the Swedish Legation in Budapest, Hungary and his sphere of expertise was Swedish-Hungarian trade. After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Anger began to be involved in rescue operations of Jews, risking his life as the assistant of Raoul Wallenberg*. As his close associate, he cooperated with Wallenberg in saving many thousands of Jewish lives in wartime Budapest and helped persecuted Jews avoid deportation and death, by issuing them provisional documents. Anger saved Jews from transports that were already heading to the death camps, from the death marches as well as from labor battalions. He also arranged various jobs for Jews, to prove that they were vital and therefore they should not be deported. Prof. Lars Ernster, one of the Hungarian survivors, testified that Anger saved him, his wife, their two daughters and their husbands, as well the parents of his wife, their children and sons-in-law. Anger provided them with provisional Swedish passports – documents that were usually used for Swedish citizens who lost their papers. Similar emergency passports were handed by Anger to various Hungarian Jews who used to maintain commercial ties with Sweden. Among the Jews that were provided with such documents were Hugo Wohl, director of a Swedish firm’s factory in Budapest, together with his wife, their daughters and their husbands. After October 15, 1944, when the Arrow Cross party came to power in Hungary, the Swedish Legation transferred the protégés, including Wohl’s family, to one of the Swedish-protected buildings, where they were safe. Some members of Wohl’s family were engaged as workers in the Swedish Legation and they witnessed the extensive rescue efforts of the Swedish diplomats, and especially those of Per Anger and Raoul Wallenberg. In an interview Anger described the dilemma off the diplomats faced with the plight of the Jews: "So what can we do? They were queuing up outside the embassies, pleading for help… What could we do? There was nothing in our books of instructions telling us how we could save people of other nationalities…” Per Anger, Swedish diplomat in German occupied Hungary." After the war, Anger continued his long and illustrious diplomatic career with postings to various countries, serving in the 1970s as Swedish Ambassador to Australia and then to Canada. In 1981, Anger wrote his memoirs: “With Wallenberg in Budapest.” Per Anger, was a young Swedish diplomat in Budapest, who became a friend and partner of Raoul Wallenberg in the rescue of the Jews in Budapest. For his daring activity, he too was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. In 1981 he published his memoirs “With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest”, in which he described the rescue operation that was put in place, his last encounter with Wallenberg, and analyzes the efforts (or lack of them) to find Wallenberg. In the book he described a short return to Budapest in the fall of 1956. At that time he was stationed in Vienna, and following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, was sent on a short mission to Budapest to report about the situation and to help the Swedish legation staff. He described how, on his return to Vienna, he witnessed the many refugees who were pouring across the border and into the refugee camps that had been set up. “In Andau, the bus was parked on a little hill near the border and I headed for the canal, where I found the two students again. The refugees arrived at the same time of night as before, and the same scenes took place. I led the group of refugees to the bus and the waiting Margit Lemmel [of the organization Save the Children in Sweden], who efficiently carried out shuttle service between Andau and the receiving camp. Among the refugees were several Jews whom Wallenberg and we had once rescued with Swedish protective passports. An elderly Hungarian woman fell, weeping, into my arms. She had recognized me from that day at the end of 1944 when, at the railway station in Budapest, I succeeded in rescuing a number of Jews from deportation. She was one of them! It was a strange and touching reminder of the days in Hungary with Raoul Wallenberg.” On April 28, 1981, Yad Vashem recognized Per Anger as Righteous Among the Nations.