The Ticket Collector from Belarus by Mike Anderson tells the story of Britain’s only war crimes trial which took place in 1999. The defendant in the trial was Andrei Sawoniuk who had immigrated to the UK after WW2 and spent his life working on the railways until his retirement. He was a racist, bad tempered, old man with few friends but the state also said that he was a war criminal who had been responsible in his native Belarus for rounding up and killing Jews on behalf of the Nazis.
The book starts by telling the story of two young men in a small but thriving Belarus town which had a high Jewish population. Sawoniuk came from a background of extreme poverty and abuse. When the Nazis came this provided him with an opportunity to gain status and to exercise a cruel streak and thus he rose in importance and enjoyed misusing his power. Ben-Zion Blustein was one of a large family of Jews living in the town who saw his family rounded up and murdered by the Nazis and their local helpers. He eventually joined Russian Communist resistance fighters (see The Bieliski Brothers reviewed here for more details of this aspect of the war) and after the end of hostilities migrated to the new state of Israel. The use of these two stories enables the author to give a good picture of what was happening in the area at the time.
The book then examines the trial in depth. This is the only trial in British history where the judge and jury were taken out of the UK to see a crime scene for themselves. They travelled with some press members of Belarus to meet witnesses and view the landscape. The trial which followed involved a large number of Belarussian witnesses, many now very elderly, recounting things that had happened over forty years previously. The defendant then took the stand to deny everything and in doing so he did himself few favours.
This is a fascinating book although I did think that some of the details about the trial evidence were a little dry and I might have preferred it had the author summarised a bit more. But, the majority of the book was interesting and informative. It is written in an accessible style and doesn’t avoid hard questions about whether the trial was fair given the length of time since the offences. The contrast between the experiences of the two men who had known each other was particularly effective. Highly recommended.
Anne Is Reading 