MOSCOW - Raoul Wallenberg and Andrei Sakharov have emerged as metaphors for human rights in our time. They embody the Talmudic idiom that a person who has saved one life is as if he has saved an entire world. They have shown that one person can and does make a difference.

Wallenberg, the Guardian Angel as the survivors called him, the Swedish non-Jew, saved more Jews in the Second World War than any single government.

Andrei Sakharov, the conscience of his people, as Soviets called him, the conscience of humankind as he veritably came to be, was a person of moral authority and moral courage unparallelled in our time... .

During my last evening in Moscow one month ago as a member of the Canadian delegation accompanying the prime minister of Canada on his visit to the Soviet Union, I paid, together with Mikhail Chlenov, a memorable visit to this great and memorable man, Andrei Sakharov.

I had gone to see Sakharov, as I had done many times over the years, to discuss the fate of certain political prisoners, refuseniks, and increasingly of late the fate and whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg. I had been surprised to learn - though I should not have been - of the deep involvement of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner in investigating the whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg.

It is only natural that this conscience of humanity should engage himself in the fate and whereabouts of this lost hero of the Holocaust, just as it seemed only natural when Sakharov signed a petition, after some initial reluctance, on behalf of Ethiopian Jewry. The reluctance was born not of any resistance to the cause, but of a deep sense of hu mility that he could not really help. When told that his name would save the lives of Ethiopian Jews, Sakharov signed.

Indeed, as I speak I am reminded of Sakharov's clarity of mind and his unique capacity to sum up in one pithy sentence a condition about which volumes could be written, the state of Soviet Jewry and human rights in the Brezhnev era.

In conversations we had in 1979, just prior to his exile to Gorky, he summed up the condition in a series of memorable statements, as follows:

* On the Helsinki Final Act - "The Helsinki Final Act is our Human Manifesto. The Soviet Union has turned it into a prosecutor's club.''

* On the trial of Natan Sharansky - "The trial of Natan Sharansky is the trial of the Jewish people."

* On Soviet state anti-Semitism - "The Soviet Union has raised anti-Semitism to the level of a state religion in a Godless society."

* And, more recently, on the fate of Raoul Wallenberg - "I do not know if Raoul Wallenberg is alive today. I do know that he did not die when the Soviet government said he did in 1947. Soviet authorities owe the Wallenberg family and the world an accounting."

Then, on the visit to Sakharov on Nov. 24, came an encounter with history.

While discussing the Wallenberg case, the phone rang. It was Francesco Janouch, a leader of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. He called to tell Sakharov that the Czech politburo had fallen, that there were over 250,000 celebrating its demise. Sakharov was elated. As he told his caller, capturing history in the moment of history, "I feel 21 years younger tonight."

The conscience of the Soviet Union, who had condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the invasion of Afghanistan of 1979 while lending his moral authority in support of Soviet Jewry and the just causes of our time, was once again vindicated by history, just as Raoul Wallenberg, who showed that it was possible to resist evil and prevail, transformed history.

And, as we pay tribute to Sakharov and Wallenberg, may I pay tribute at this historical gathering to the historical contribution of Soviet Jews themselves.

For it is Soviet Jewry that has been in the vanguard of the Soviet human rights revolution.

It has been Soviet Jews like the Slepaks, Beguns, Nudels, and Sharanskys who put not only their livelihood but their lives on the line, who joined with Andrei Sakharov and other Helsinki monitors in giving expression to the Helsinki Final Act, who first demanded - and paid the price for demanding - the protection and implementation of the humanitarian principles of the Helsinki process, who became, as it were, the soul of the Helsinki process, who made of Soviet Jewry one of the most morally uplifting causes of our time, who joined together the Jewish people and the human rights movement and demonstrated the power of solidarity in a just cause, who invoked the case of Israel like no other movement, and whose contribution to the founding and building of the State of Israel is without parallel or precedent in our day...

* Irwin Cotler is a Montreal lawyer long active in the cause of Soviet human rights. This is an excerpt from the inaugural Wallenberg-Sakharov Lecture on Human Rights, given to the founding Congress of Jewish Communities of the Soviet Union on Dec. 20.

Credit: FREELANCE

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