My Swedish Connection
Overloaded by the harrowing details of World War II movies after a trip to Normandy, I began to hesitate before watching them. However, when the infinity of streaming offerings dries up, I still occasionally give one a watch—which led me to The Swedish Connection.
One problem with a WW2 movie is that the tone is usually somber, emotional, and the hero is god-like. Makes sense, but after the Nth such movie, it's not too entertaining. Here the tone is almost that of a light comedy. This works, once you get used to it, as the facts of the story are that of a mid-tier lawyer in the Swedish government working through the bungling bureaucracy trying to help Swedish citizens escape from Norway or Denmark or such and get back to Sweden. At this time early in the war, Sweden was nominally neutral, though they unfortunately were bidden to supply material and more to the Reich. With this pseudo-alliance, the Nazis were apt to help Sweden in their efforts to repatriate ex-pats.
Our hero is based on the real lawyer Gösta Engzell, whose government assignment was to help full Swedish citizens get the correct passports and visas needed to get out of Nazi-occupied Norway or Denmark and get back home. Little by little, Engzell is able to broaden the requirements, especially for Swedish Jews in danger of "deportation" - perhaps not a citizen, but married to one; or not a citizen but lived in Sweden for a time, etc. The trick was to find some Swedish connection and to convince the Nazi apparatus that this was enough to let the person return.
About 20 minutes into the film, I suddenly realized that this was very close to a story I had been obsessed with in the '80s. I must have watched a TV documentary on Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish architect turned wartime diplomat who worked tirelessly in Budapest late in the war to do this exact same job. (One reason for my interest being that Wallenberg graduated, as I did, from The University of Michigan). Wallenberg provided paperwork, often quite fictitious, and set up houses and apartment buildings to shelter people safely until the paperwork and transportation was arranged. Perhaps five thousand lives were saved.
Wallenberg's story has some extraordinary and dramatic parts to it: At one point near the end of the Nazi occupation, as the Soviets were closing in, he negotiated directly with Adolf Eichmann to make sure the Jews he was protecting would be safe. And ultimately, after the Soviets began their takeover of Hungary, Wallenberg was driven to the Soviet generals' headquarters, and was never seen again. For decades there would be odd reports of an aging Swede in different parts of the Gulag prison system, but still today, no one knows what happened to Wallenberg. Among the honors given to him, in 1963, Yad Vashem designated Wallenberg as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations". In 1981, Wallenberg was only the second person (after Churchill) to have Congress declare him an Honorary American Citizen.
There are a few movies and plays about Wallenberg: A 1985 US TV movie starred Richard Chamberlain, which was fairly good, though of course picturing him as a bit too perfect. This contrasts with a 1990 Swedish movie starring Stellan Skarsgård as an exhausted, overworked half-maniac — a much more realistic, or at least more interesting, character.
Back to The Swedish Connection.... By the end of the movie, Engzell and his staff have helped some hundreds of people escape Nazi-occupied territories. And finally, the Swedish government changes some of their passport requirements to make this kind of work easier. It's now sometime in 1943, and suddenly a tall, somewhat gaunt but good-looking man arrives and asks to see Engzell to understand how the new visa/passport system works to help Jews escape – "My name is Raoul Wallenberg" !!! I literally jumped out of my chair. Turns out the occasional narration was by this actor; this is essentially the origin story of Wallenberg. Most people in Sweden will catch this, perhaps from the beginning; for most US audiences, this ending will be a bit of a puzzle.
As befits the film's light touch, the film ends with two small jokes. When Wallenberg introduces himself to Engzell, he is not recognized, which is accurate; to that point, Wallenberg was a nobody. Engzell passes him to his office staff to learn more—something like seeing Watson ignoring Holmes on first introduction. And the final shot, of the Engzell family in the car, fades out to Bing Crosby singing the upbeat "You've Got to Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive", a nod to the film's tone.
Crazy that an offhand watch of a Swedish WW2 movie brings back the connections to the Wallenberg story I had studied in the '80s and a thrill to discover Gösta Engzell, the man who laid the legal groundwork for the survival of thousands of persecuted Jews.