How a British Rail employee was put on trial for war crimes
THE TICKET COLLECTOR FROM BELARUS by Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson 384pp, Simon & Schuster, £20, ebook £9.99 ★★★★
On February 9 1999, Britain’s first and last war crimes trial began at the Old Bailey in London. In the dock – or, more accurately, beside his lawyers in the well of the court – sat 77-year-old Andrei Sawoniuk, a former British Rail employee, accused of murdering Jews in the Nazioccupied town of Domachevo in eastern Poland (now part of Belarus) in 1942. Among the prosecution’s star witnesses was Ben-Zion Blustein, Sawoniuk’s childhood friend, who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust before emigrating to Israel.
They had not seen each other for more than 50 years. Yet, as writers Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson explain in The Ticket Collector from Belarus, fate had brought them hem together for this landmark legal showdown: one facing retribution; ibution; the other vindication “for the suffering uffering and loss he had endured”.
Immediately after the war, ar, British government policy was to turn its back on the “horrors of the past and look to the future”. The e surviving Nazi leaders had been brought to justice at Nuremburg and there was no appetite to pursue the Holocaust’s minor players. But two events prompted a U-turn: in 1986, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre delivered a dossier to
British authorities on 17 ex-Nazis believed to be living in the UK; and two years later, as part of Mikhail ail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost nost – openness – the Soviets released a list of 97 Nazi war criminals domiciled in the
UK. A subsequent inquiry led to the War Crimes Act of 1991, which allowed British courts to try acts of murder and manslaughter committed in Germany and German-held territory in the war.
A number of alleged perpetrators were investigated by specialist War Crimes Units. But only Andrei “Andrusha” Sawoniuk – number 57 on the Soviet list of Nazi war criminals – was identified and put on trial. Having emigrated to Britain from Poland in 1946, he had worked until his retirement as a British Rail porter, cleaner and ticket inspector. In the absence of physical evidence, the prosecution’s case against Sawoniuk relied solely on eye-witnesses, including Blustein. Despite his denials, Sawoniuk was formally arrested in 1997 and charged with four counts of murdering Jews in late 1942 when he was a member of the Domachevo Schutzmannschaft, the pro-Nazi auxiliary police.
Echoing the sectarian bloodshed in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Sawoniuk was accused of killing men, women and children he had grown up with. One possible motivation was revenge for the humiliations he had suffered as the illegitimate child – he was known as “Andrusha the bastard” – of an impoverished washerwoman. “Scorned and shunned by his peers,” write the authors, “Andrusha’s only friends were younger boys, like Ben-Zion, who was three years his junior”. But even that friendship faded as the ill-educated Sawoniuk grew into a powerfully built bully.
When the Nazis entered Domachevo in the summer of 1941 and began recruiting local volunteers to do their dirty work for them, it was perhaps inevitable that angry loners like Sawoniuk would answer the call. “He had been the lowest of the low in the town’s hierarchy,” write Anderson and Hanson, “but when he put on the blue police uniform…for the first time in his life he became a man of authority, with the power of life and death over the townsfolk who had jeered at him.”
Of the four counts of murder that Sawoniuk faced, two were thrown out on the grounds that the witnesses’ testimony could not be trusted. The “unreliable” witnesses included Blustein who, the judge said, had contradicted himself by at first claiming he had inferred Sawoniuk’s guilt by what the latter had told him, and later that the defendant had made a direct admission. But two counts were allowed to proceed and, in a desperate effort to counteract the remaining witnesses’ testimony – that he had, for example, forced 15 terrified women to strip naked before shooting them with a sub-machine gun – Sawoniuk ignored the advice of his own lawyers and took the stand. The old man’s angry testimony is the high point of the book.
Sawoniuk aside (he died in 2005), the authors have interviewed most of the key players in this heart-rending tale and the result is a sensitive and well-balanced account of an extraordinary moment in British legal history. If at times the legal jousting is a little repetitive, the outcome of the landmark trial – in the balance to the end – is worth the wait.
He was accused of killing men, women and children he had grown up with