George Preger, CEO and members of the OVED team are pleased to welcome Jan Anger as an honorary director of OVED for Human Rights. Jan, who resides in Australia, is the oldest son of the late Mr. Per Anger, whose heroism saved thousands of lives during WW2.
Swedish diplomat Per Anger, independently and together with his colleague Raoul Wallenberg, managed to save up to 200,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. This was achieved by issuing fake Swedish identification papers – Schutzpasses – that established safe houses under protection of the Swedish Legation in Budapest, as well as rescuing Jews from the deportation trains to the concentration camps by claiming they were Swedish citizens, and rescuing Jews from the death marches to Austria, in the final weeks of the war.
Our co-founder George Preger feels deeply honoured by Ambassador Per Anger, who at the time was Swedish Ambassador to Canada, when he asked him to accept a framed copy of the parliamentary Bill appointing Raoul Wallenberg as the first-ever honorary citizen of Canada, as Sweden’s proxy. A dual citizen, George himself survived the Shoah in Budapest as an eight year old boy.
Per Anger was named Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and there is a monument celebrating his name and that of Raoul Wallenberg, adjacent to Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest, close the Tree of Life donated by actor Tony Curtis, himself a Hungarian Jew.
Mr Jan Anger continues his father’s quest to find out why his father’s friend and colleague Raoul Wallenberg, was murdered by the NKVD in Moskva after the end of World 2.
Jan Anger is a frequent speaker about his dad and particularly about his father’s modesty, always putting himself behind his friend Raoul Wallenberg. Jan Anger and OVED team members George and Alistair Hughes have created two videos about Per Anger, which have been widely viewed . They are available on the Videos page of our website.
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