Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is credited with saving about 100,000 Hungarian Jews, including Vera Lorant of Wilmington. Vera, employed by the Swedish Embassy set up by Wallenberg, twice was saved from death by his personal intervention. He often appeared at deportations and personally removed startled Jews from lines of the doomed, declaring that he was claiming Swedish citizens. He also established dozens of safe houses throughout Budapest, sheltering thousands of the city's Jews under the guise of Swedish diplomatic buildings. In a bitter twist of fate, the Russians arrested Wallenberg as a spy on January 17, 1945, and he disappeared into the Gulag. Claims of his death in 1947 were made in the late 1950s, although his fate remains unknown. In 1981, President Reagan signed a resolution making Wallenberg an Honorary United States Citizen.