States.

Wallenberg, a non-Jewish Swedish diplomat, was a beacon of light during the darkest days of the Holocaust, and his inspiration remains so today. Prior to his arrival to the Swedish legation in Budapest in mid-July 1944, some 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in 10 weeks – the fastest, cruelest and most efficient mass murder of the Holocaust. Yet Wallenberg rescued some 100,000 Jews in Hungary in the last six months of 1944, demonstrating that one person with the compassion to care, and the courage to act, can confront evil, prevail and transform history.

I witnessed the celebration of Wallenberg’s heroism in Stockholm during the centennial year of his birth in 2012, in an international exhibit titled, in Wallenberg’s own immortal words, “To me there is noof the diplomatic capacity to save lives.

In his protection of civilians amid the horrors of the Holocaust, he manifested the best of what we today call international humanitarian law.

In his organization of hospitals, soup kitchens, orphanages, the staples of international humanitarian assistance that provided women, children, the sick and the elderly with a semblance of dignity in the face of the worst of all horrors and evils, Wallenberg symbolized the best of what we today call international humanitarian intervention.

In saving Jews from certain death, deportation and atrocity, he symbolized what we today call the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

Finally, Wallenberg’s last rescue was perhaps his most memorable. As the Nazis advanced on Budapest and threatened to blow up the city’s ghetto and liquidate the remaining Jews, he put the