''I owe everything to Australia but I owe my life to Raoul Wallenberg,'' said Frank Vajda, recalling the Swedish diplomat, and now first ''honorary Australian citizen'', who saved his life during World War II.
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Professor Vajda, from the neurology department at Melbourne University, was nine when he was saved by Wallenberg in Hungary. Professor Vajda attended Monday's ceremony in Canberra, where the diplomat was awarded his posthumous honour.
He was seized by Soviet troops in 1945, and the exact timing and circumstances of his death are unknown.
Wallenberg's rescue operation ultimately saved the lives of nearly 100,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, by issuing protective passports and providing shelter in diplomatic buildings.
Wallenberg had already been honoured in Australia through parks and monuments but Governor-General Quentin Bryce said she was proud the country was going ''one step further.''
''I cannot think of a more appropriate and significant figure to welcome to our Australian family,'' she said.
Wallenberg had tried to save as many Jews as possible, ''repeatedly putting his own life at risk,'' she said. ''Wallenberg's life is an example to all of us.''
Professor Vajda has been campaigning for honorary citizenship for the man who saved his life for decades.
With his mother, he was lined up in front of a machine gun for not wearing the yellow Star of David in 1944. Wallenberg persuaded members of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party to release their group.
Monday's ceremony at Government House was also attended by George Farkas, the son of John Farkas - a resistance fighter who was the last known person to see Wallenberg alive.
''I think it's a recognition that some people can do unbelievable good in the face of reprehensible evil,'' he said of the award.
Mr Farkas said there had been sightings of the diplomat up into the 1980s in Russian prisons and psychiatric hospitals.
''Can you imagine what Wallenberg must have thought … that the world had forgotten him?'' he said.
Wallenberg has been recognised as an honorary citizen of the US, Israel, Hungary and Canada.
Last week, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced he would be similarly honoured by Australia for his ''tireless devotion to human life during the Holocaust''.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said it would have been ''so easy to look the other way''.
''Of all the examples of resistance to Nazi tyranny, Raoul Wallenberg's is perhaps the most flagrant,'' he said.
