The Hot Hand by Ben Cohen

Author:Ben Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Six

The Fog

“Be true to the data.”

1.

As the biggest city in a politically neutral country, Stockholm was an exceptionally strange place to experience World War II. It was close enough to battlefields that it was a safe haven for spies and diplomats but far enough that everyday life there felt almost normal. “To a traveler who has seen bomb-pitted Britain,” one foreign correspondent wrote, “Stockholm seems a little bit of heaven.”1 Swedes still went to concerts and the opera. They still went dancing in tuxedos and gowns. And they still went to the movies.

In the bitter winter of 1942, the hottest movie in Stockholm was “Pimpernel” Smith, a film about a swashbuckling professor on a covert mission to free concentration camp prisoners. It was banned in Sweden for being too political, but the fact that it was banned didn’t mean it was hard to find. This censorship actually had the opposite effect. It only made even more people want to see it. To keep up with the demand, the British embassy hosted a screening of “Pimpernel” Smith, and one of the people who came to watch a hero battle evil was a young man named Raoul Wallenberg. He walked out that night feeling overwhelmed by inspiration.

“That,” he said, “is something I would like to do.”2

But he was never supposed to do anything like that. Raoul Wallenberg belonged to a family that was the Rockefellers of Sweden. to be—not to be seen was the motto on their crest. Raoul was always different from other Wallenbergs, though. He never enjoyed the comforts of aristocracy. His father died when his mother was pregnant with him, and he made a deathbed wish for the son he would never meet: “I will be happy if only little Baby becomes a nice and good and simple person.”3 Raoul was nice and good. He was anything but simple. He was groomed from a young age by his paternal grandfather, a Swedish ambassador who understood the importance of being worldly and empathetic, which was the reason he shipped Raoul to the University of Michigan to study in a wholesome American environment. “The conviction here at home that we are better than anyone else needs to be shaken,” he wrote in a letter to his grandson, later adding, “A trailblazer discovers the good to be found out there among the foreigners.”4

Wallenberg’s time out there among the foreigners left him idealistic and wildly ambitious. He knew he wouldn’t be in the United States forever and drenched himself in Americana while he could. Wallenberg was unpretentious about his travels around this foreign country. He derived a special pleasure from hitchhiking, and he took pains to assure his grandfather that it wasn’t beneath someone of his family’s stature to ask random strangers for a ride. “Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact,” he wrote in a letter.5 “As for the risks, they’re probably exaggerated.” But not always. He was robbed at gunpoint one night while hitching back from Chicago and surprised himself when he found the whole thing unusually thrilling.

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