Raoul Wallenberg lecture by Professor Bengt Jangfeldt on Monday 19 January 2015

19 January 2015 (18:00-20:15)

at The Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5EW

Professor Jangfeldt will cover key aspects of Wallenberg's life before his posting in 1944 to Budapest, where he rescued Jews from deportation and almost certain death by issuing them Swedish passports and by sheltering and feeding them in more than thirty safe houses under Swedish diplomatic protection. His talk, 'Raoul Wallenberg's Fate, 1945-47: A Diplomatic Failure', however, will centre on the events following Wallenberg's disappearance in Budapest on January 17, 1945, at the hands of the Soviet occupying forces, and the subsequent failed attempts (or lack thereof) by the Swedish government and the Wallenberg family itself to attain his release. 

The event has been arranged by the Cryptos Society of the Reform Club.

A new history of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon

A substantial and well-received new book examining the wartime history of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the 1983 honoree of the Roger E Joseph Prize, has been published. Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by the biographer and human rights journalist Caroline Moorehead is the second volume of a projected trilogy on resistance in World War Two that began with A Train in Winter. Village of Secrets uses previously unseen diaries and new interviews to give a true account of how the village resisted the Vichy and Nazi collaborators. It is on these last rather than the refugees that the book sheds new light, redressing the balance of this history from the heroism of those who saved lives to revealing the precise nature of the persecution of Jews and who carried it out. The Daily Telegraph's review takes this further and sees the book as being "not so much about heroes and monsters; instead, [Moorehead] sees ordinary people responding in different ways to a world of cruelty".

The book has been reviewed by several newspapers in the UK, including the Financial Times and the Independent. It is available in the US from HarperCollins and in the UK from Chatto & Windus.