How Tony the ticket collector at London Bridge was exposed as a sadist who gladly slaughtered hundreds of his neighbours for the invading Nazis
OVER the years, hundreds of thousands of City commuters filed past the sour-faced ticket collector at busy London Bridge railway station but never gave him a second glance.
Tony Sawoniuk, an expat Pole, didn’t say much to anyone, no cheery ‘good mornings’ or ‘good evenings’. Nor did he look up from underneath his peaked cap as he checked their tickets and ushered the tide of humanity through the gates.
Perhaps, inside his head, he was reflecting that, in a past he was desperate to keep hidden, he had a lot of experience of donning a uniform and herding people . . . to their deaths.
He was not much liked. British Rail colleagues remember him as a misery guts — ‘morose, unable to make eye contact, surly and reluctant to hold any sort of conversation’, one recalled. ‘Silence prevailed. There was always something strange about him.’
None of them, however, had any inkling of the terrible secret their workmate was concealing — that he was a mass murderer who, during World War II, had rounded up Jews in his native Belorussia in eastern Europe and, as an SS auxiliary, butchered men, women and even small children in cold blood, gunning them down with a bullet in the head and tossing their bodies into mass graves.
After the war, he would somehow come to settle in Britain and, for more than half a century, escape responsibility for his crimes against humanity.
Until — as a compelling new book by Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson details — he was eventually tracked down and brought to justice in what was this country’s one and only ever war crimes trial.
In 1999, at the Old Bailey, after an exhaustive and unique 28-day hearing, the ticket collector’s own ticket was finally punched and he saw out the rest of his miserable life in prison.
His case is all the more shocking as a depressing insight into how the Holocaust happened.
Yes, the orders came from on high in Hitler’s vile anti-Semitic regime, but carrying them out depended on the complicity and the active involvement of countless ordinary individuals like him.
A small and insignificant man, Sawoniuk suddenly found himself — as the judge in his trial noted — ‘a lord and a master’ with the power of life and death over others in his community, and he used it with bestial ruthlessness and unremitting cruelty.
SAWONIUK’S STORY begins in 1921 when he was born in the town of Domachevo. Today, it lies in the modern state of Belarus, but in the years between World Wars I and II it was part of Poland.
A relatively affluent holiday resort in the forest, straddling the railway line linking Warsaw and Moscow, it had a majority Jewish population who worshipped in its two synagogues.
Sawoniuk, though, was from the Christian side of the tracks and named Andrusha, ‘Little Andy’, a diminutive of the Russian Andrei, by his unmarried mother. She was a cleaner at a local school, his father most likely the headmaster, who then disappeared and left her penniless to bring up the boy on her own.
He grew up taunted as a bastard, a serious stigma in his Russian Orthodox community, and was shunned by his peers.
Home was a one-room log shack on the edge of town where his mother took in washing and as a youngster he himself earned a pittance by doing menial chores for rich Jews during the sabbath.
His schooling was minimal and he left at 14, virtually illiterate — yet another reason for people to look down on him. Then his mother died of cancer and he was completely alone and friendless.
But he had grown into a powerful youth, who got a kick from bullying smaller and weaker kids. He had a reputation for trouble, too — any petty theft or act of vandalism in the neighbourhood was laid at his door. He came to resent everyone and everything around him.
Meanwhile, the Europe in which he lived was descending into the political chaos that preceded the war, with Poland now divided in two — one half under German control and the other a satellite of the Soviet Union. Domachevo fell just inside the newly created Soviet sector, and for two years life went on there pretty well unchanged.
Until in June 1941, Hitler broke his peace pact with Stalin and his army rampaged eastwards. Within an hour, German troops had overrun the town.
Three days later, the SS arrived, and a rabbi and 40 other Jews were marched to the river, where they were forced to dig a pit, lined up beside it and shot. It was just the start. The Holocaust had come to town. But the SS found itself stretched to the limits, with so
As a teenager, he got a kick from bullying smaller children