Patrick Comerford
In a blog posting last night, I described my recent visit to the Western Marble Arch Synagogue near Hyde Park in London. The synagogue is in a curved terrace of period houses on Wallenberg Place, which was formerly part of Great Cumberland Place.
The crescent was originally intended as the east part of a complete circus on the Portman estate. The circus was never completed, and today the semi-circular open space is dominated by a larger-than-life monument to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, one of the outstanding heroic figures of the Holocaust and World War II, who saved the lives of as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II.
It is appropriate that this monumental sculpture stands outside one of London’s leading synagogues and close to the Swedish Embassy.
The 10 ft bronze monument was sculpted by Philip Jackson and shows Raoul Wallenberg standing against a bronze wall draped with the Swedish flag made up of 100,000 Schutzpässe, the protective passes Wallenberg used to rescue Hungarian Jews.
The monument was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on 26 February 1997, at a ceremony attended by the President Ezer Weizman of Israel, who was on a state visit to London, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, and survivors of the Holocaust. The attendance also included Sir Sigmund Sternberg, a former Hungarian Jewish refugee who chaired the Wallenberg Appeal, and Robert Davis, then the youngest Lord Mayor of Westminster.
The statue was described as a monument at the time of its unveiling rather than a memorial, as Wallenberg’s family believed that there was no evidence for his death.
The inscription on the sculpture reads: ‘Wallenberg’s bravery helped save the lives of as many as 100,000 men, women and children, destined for the death camps only because they were Jews. When, in January 1945, Budapest fell to the Soviet army, Wallenberg was taken under guard to Moscow where he vanished into the Soviet prison system. The last resting place of this selfless hero is unknown.
‘In 1944, armed only with determination and courage, Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest as a member of the neutral Swedish legation and set about recruiting the 230,000 Jews who remained, snatching many from Nazi and Hungarian death squads. He demanded the removal of others from trains departing to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He placed tens of thousand under the protection of the Swedish crown by issuing them with false passports, “Schutzpasses”, sheltering them in safe houses from which he flew the Swedish flag.
‘The twentieth century spawned two of history’s vilest tyrannies. Raoul Wallenberg outwitted the first but was swallowed up by the second. His triumph over Nazi genocide reminds us that the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruellest state machine. The fate of the six million Jews he was unable to rescue reminds us of the evils to which racist ideas can drive whole nations. Finally his imprisonment reminds us not only of Soviet brutality but also of the ignorance and indifference which lead the free world to abandon him. We must never forget these lessons.’
The sculptor Philip Jackson is noted for his modern style and emphasis on form, and his sculptures can be seen in many cities in Britain and in Argentina and Switzerland.
His statue of Constantine the Great at York Minister is a bronze statue depicting the Roman Emperor Constantine I seated on a throne. It was commissioned by York Civic Trust and unveiled in 1998 to commemorates the accession of Constantine as Roman Emperor in the year 306 on the site.
His ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ in the Theatre District in Milton Keynes is part of his distinctive series of sculptures based on the Venetian carnival and masque, inspired by Venice and the Maschera Nobile. It was completed in 1997 and renovated in 2017.
Jackson’s many public commissions include the Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park, and his twice life-size (6 metre) bronze statue of Bobby Moore, erected outside the main entrance at Wembley Stadium in 2007.
Philip Henry Christopher Jackson was born in 1944 and studied at the Farnham School of Art, now the University for the Creative Arts. After leaving school, he was a press photographer for a year and then joined a design company as a sculptor. He now works at the Edward Lawrence Studio in Midhurst, West Sussex, and lives nearby. Half of his time is spent on commissions and the other half on his gallery sculpture.
He is known for his major outdoor pieces, such as the Young Mozart in Chelsea and the Jersey Liberation sculpture. Recently, he was the acting Royal Sculptor to Queen Elizabeth II. His sources of inspiration have included Jacob Epstein, Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Oscar Nemon and Kenneth Armitage. But he says the most powerful influences in his life are his wife Jean and son Jamie who work with him.
Raoul Wallenberg would have been 84 when the monument was unveiled in 1997. No 26-40 Great Cumberland Place was renamed Wallenberg Place in 2014 in honour of Raoul Wallenberg. Two years later, 71 years after he had disappeared in the Soviet Union, Raoul Wallenberg was declared dead by Sweden in October 2016.
