How a British Rail employee was put on trail for war crimes
As featured in The Sunday Telegraph
Saul David from the Sunday Telegraph describes The Ticket Collector from Belarusby Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson as a heart-rending tale, written in a sensitive and well balanced account of an extraordinary moment in British legal history.
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 Nazi-occupied 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…. continue reading