By Martin Gottlieb, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

During the 100th anniversary year of Raoul Wallenberg’s birth, a one-man play is coming to Dayton — having been seen before only in Chicago — that explores his development into a venerated hero.

Wallenberg was the Swedish diplomat who saved perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews in Hungary from the Nazis.

Actually, “diplomat” is misleading. He was a 32-year old Swedish businessman — American educated and with ties in Hungary. He was recruited late in the war basically by the American government to plan an aid effort in Hungary.

Making him part of the Swedish legation was part of the plan.

The play is not so much a telling of the Wallenberg story: false passports, bribes, the breathtaking interception of a train, Wallenberg’s own desperate efforts to avoid capture, negotiations with Adolph Eichmann, desperate efforts to forestall massive new attacks on Jews until the Soviets arrived. (The Soviets are believed to have arrested Wallenberg as an alleged American spy, and he apparently died in their custody, though the full story is still unknown.)

The play is focused instead on the emergence of the man at the heart of all that. Here, after all, was a non-Jew who risked everything for people to whom he had no ties.

Unlike some other heroes of Holocaust resistance, he did not find himself in a horrific situation and look for ways to cope for himself and those around him. He injected himself, despite being neither a diplomat nor a military man nor even a citizen of a combatant country.

He was also, as the creator of the one-man play notes, not a Mother Teresa, bent on a life of service and self sacrifice. Nor did he have any particular connection to or interest in Jews.

David Chapman, also in his early 30s, is a director, writer and performer from Chicago, with a wide range of experience. He spoke with The Observer from New York, where he is now developing a production about dumpster divers.

“The overlaps are unmistakable,” he explains of his connection with Wallenberg. “Raoul was born 70 years before me, 100 years ago…When Raoul was 18, he moved to the Midwest for college. When I was 18, I moved from the Midwest to attend college in North Carolina. When Raoul was in his late 20s, he started making trips to Hungary. When I was 22, I also went to Hungary, where my grandmother was born (but who had already left for America before Raoul could have possibly met her). In Hungary, I rented an apartment in a beautiful building that had a courtyard with an enormous tree that reached up higher than my sixth floor balcony. The address? Number 2, Raoul Wallenberg St…”

Mainly though, what struck Chapman was Wallenberg’s emergence from a “similarly fortunate upbringing” and his passage from a “confused young man” to become a man of monumental moral accomplishment at a young age.

Where did that come from? He developed his interest in Wallenberg after his mother, an artist, worked on a related exhibit for a Swedish event in Chicago. Chapman read Wallenberg’s recently republished correspondence as both a young man and as the “diplomat” in Hungary.

Chapman was struck particularly by his early letters to his grandfather, partly because Chapman also wrote about his experiences and feelings at that age; that writing has also been preserved.

The result is Raoul Wallenberg: Letters from Young Men, to be performed Thursday, Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. at the Boonshoft CJCE as part of the 2012 Dayton Jewish Cultural Arts and Book Festival. Co-sponsoring the play will be the National Conference for Community and Justice.

Chapman first did the show — to standing ovations — at the Swedish Museum on Chicago’s North Side last year.
For Chapman, his story — the effort of a young, Jewish man to fathom and relate to another young man — is about the connection between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The Dayton Jewish Cultural Arts & Book Festival presents David Chapman in Raoul Wallenberg: Letters from Young Men, Thursday, Oct. 11, 7 p.m. at the Boonshoft CJCE, 525 Versailles Dr., Centerville. Co-sponsored by the National Conference for Community and Justice. $8 in advance, $10 at the door. Call 853-0372 or go to jewishdayton.org.