Raoul Wallenberg - Early Life

Early Life

Wallenberg was born in 1912 in Kappsta, Lidingö, near Stockholm, where his maternal grandparents, professor Per Johan Wising and his wife Sophie Wising, had built a summer house in 1882. His paternal grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, was a diplomat and envoy to Tokyo, Constantinople and Sofia.

His parents, who married in 1911, were Raoul Oscar Wallenberg (1888–1912), a Swedish naval officer, and Maria "Maj" Sofia Wising (1891–1979). His father died of cancer three months before he was born, and his maternal grandfather died of pneumonia three months after his birth. His mother and grandmother, now both suddenly widows, raised him together. In 1918, his mother married Fredrik von Dardel; they had a son, Guy von Dardel, and a daughter, Nina Lagergren.

After high school and his compulsory eight months in the Swedish military, Wallenberg's paternal grandfather sent him to study in Paris. He spent one year there, and then, in 1931, he matriculated at University of Michigan in the United States to study architecture. Although the Wallenberg family was rich, he worked at odd jobs in his free time and joined other young male students as a passenger rickshaw handler at Chicago's Century of Progress. He used his vacations to explore the United States, with hitchhiking being his preferred method of travel. About his experiences, he wrote to his grandfather saying, "When you travel like a hobo, everything’s different. You have to be on the alert the whole time. You’re in close contact with new people every day. Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact."

Raoul was aware of his one-sixteenth Jewish blood, and proud of it. Professor Ingemar Hedenius (one of leading Swedish philosophers) recalls a conversation with Raoul dating back to 1930, when they were together in an army hospital during military service:

He graduated university in 1935, but upon his return to Sweden, he found his American degree did not qualify him to practice as an architect. Later that year, his grandfather arranged a job for him in Cape Town, South Africa, in the office of a Swedish company that sold construction material. After six months in South Africa, he took a new job at a branch office of the Holland Bank in Haifa, Israel. He returned to Sweden in 1936 and obtained a job in Stockholm with the help of his uncle and godfather, Jacob Wallenberg, at the Central European Trading Company, an export-import company trading between Stockholm and central Europe, owned by Kálmán Lauer, a Hungarian Jew.