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- Raoul Wallenberg led one of the most extensive and successful rescue efforts during the Holocaust that saved 100,000 lives.
- A Swedish diplomat, Wallenberg was assigned as first secretary to the Swedish legation in Budapest, Hungary, in July 1944.
- He worked with the United States War Refugee Board (WRB) and the World Jewish Congress to protect tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
- By July 1944, the Germans had deported nearly 440,000 Jews from Hungary. Some 200,000 Jews remained in Budapest, and they too faced deportation.
- Wallenberg began distributing Swedish protective passports to the Jews in Budapest in July 1944. He established hospitals, nurseries, and a soup kitchen, and set up more than 30 safe houses that together formed the core of the "international ghetto" in Budapest.
- In November 1944, during the death march of Hungarian Jews from Budapest to labor camps in Austria, Wallenberg secured the release of bearers of protective passports and those with forged papers to save as many as possible.
- When Soviet forces liberated Budapest in February 1945, more than 100,000 Jews remained, mostly because of the efforts of Wallenberg and his colleagues.
- Wallenberg disappeared in January 1945 while on his way to meet Soviet officials in Debrecen. Although his exact fate is not known, he is presumed to have died, or been murdered, in a Soviet prison.
- In 1985, Canada declared Raoul Wallenberg its first honorary citizen. In 2001, Canada proclaimed that on January 17 we would commemorate Raoul Wallenberg Day, as a way to honour the courage, character and humanity of an exceptional individual.
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