The Ticket Collector from Belarus

An Extraordinary True Story of Britain's Only War Crimes Trial

Mike Anderson, Neil Hanson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781398503298
• eBook ISBN: 9781398503281
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

'Brilliantly gripping' Sunday Times; 'Compelling' Daily Mail; 'Heart-rending' Sunday Telegraph; 'Excellent' The Times;'Engrossing' Independent The UK's only war crimes trial took place in 1999 and had its origins in the horrors of the Holocaust, but only now in TheTicket Collector from Belarus? can the full story be told. TheTicket Collector from Belarus tells the remarkable story of two interwoven journeys. Ben-Zion Blustein and Andrei Sawoniuk were childhood friends in 1930s Domachevo, a holiday and health resort in what is now Belarus. During the events that followed the Nazi invasion in 1941, they became the bitterest of enemies. After the war, Ben-Zion made his way to Israel, and 'Andrusha the bastard' to England, where he found work as a British Rail ticket collector in London. They next confronted each other in theOld Bailey, over half a century later, where one was the principal prosecution witness, and the other charged with a fraction of the number of murders he was alleged to have committed. There was no physical evidence, just one man's word against another, leaving the jury with a series of agonising dilemmas: Could any witness statement be trusted so long after the event? Was Andrusha a brutal killer, a hapless pawn or a scapegoat? And were his furious protests a sign of guilt or the justified anger of an innocent old man? Mike Anderson was gripped by the story, and so began his quest to find the truth about this astonishing case and the people at its heart.As he discovered, it was even more remarkable than he could ever have imagined.

CHAPTER 1

The story of Great Britain’s first and only successful war crimes trial is also the tale of the intertwined lives of two men. Childhood friends in Domachevo, they were on opposite sides after the German invasion, with one fighting against the Nazi atrocities that the other was helping to inflict. For over half a century after the war, they lived thousands of miles apart, each unaware that the other had even survived, but fate was to bring them together again, in Court 12 of the Old Bailey in London, in February 1999, where one would face possible retribution, while the other sought some vindication at last for the suffering and loss he had endured.

Ben-Zion Blustein was born in Domachevo, then part of Poland, in 1924. His father died from TB when Ben-Zion was just ten months old, and with his older sister and, later, a sister and little brother seven and eight years younger than him, he was raised by his mother, Shaindel, who ran a grocer’s shop, and his stepfather, Noah, a furrier. One of his first memories was of his mother wrapping him in a thick wool blanket, putting him on a sledge and pulling him through the snow to the schoolhouse so that the rabbi could begin teaching him Hebrew. She asked him first to teach Ben-Zion to say Kaddish – the prayer of remembrance for the dead – so that he could recite it over his father’s grave on the fourth anniversary of his death.

Belarus had been part of the Russian Empire until the October Revolution in 1917, and under the old Tsarist laws, Russian Jews had been forbidden to live in cities or agricultural communities, or own land. That forced them to move to villages and small towns like Domachevo where, since they were not allowed to farm, many became merchants, artisans and shopkeepers. They remained there after the Tsars were overthrown and Domachevo became part of the independent Poland, which existed briefly between the First and Second World Wars, and many grew to be relatively prosperous.

There was no ghetto then, no walls or barbed wire separating the communities, but the Jews, who formed the majority of the town’s population, lived separately from the Gentiles, in wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs to shed the winter snow, wide verandas at the front and neat gardens at the rear. On Friday and Saturday evenings, every family dressed in their best clothes and, in a Jewish equivalent of the Spanish paseo, promenaded along the main street to see and be seen, exchanging greetings with friends and neighbours, while their teenage sons and daughters swapped furtive glances.

There were two synagogues: the Great, in the marketplace where the wealthy businessmen and merchants prayed, and the Small, in a side street for workers and tradesmen. The two rabbis matched their congregations. Reb Yankel, who presided over the smaller synagogue, had the powerful build of his tradesman father. The other, Leizer Wolf, was a tall, thin, ascetic man who earned his living as a rabbinical judge and studied day and night until he was claimed by TB. His wife, a much smaller, stooped woman, took care of their more fundamental needs, having secured the monopoly of selling yeast for the challah, the traditional egg bread baked for the Sabbath.

On Sundays the inhabitants of all the neighbouring villages came to Domachevo to pray at the Catholic, Russian Orthodox or Lutheran churches. They wore their Sunday best clothes, but to save their shoes, they hung them around their necks and walked through the fields barefoot, only putting them on when they reached the town. After church, they sat on the edge of the verandas on the main street, cracking sunflower seeds, chatting and watching the passers-by, before returning to their home villages. When a wedding took place, a procession of horse-drawn farm wagons decorated with flowers and ribbons would make its way past, accompanied by accordion players, drummers and trumpeters, whose music and singing echoed through the streets.

Once a fortnight, there was a market in town, with farmers on wagons laden with vegetables, eggs, butter and cheese, and firewood gathered from the forest. They also set up pens of pigs, cattle and horses, jostling for space with the stalls of Jewish merchants selling oil, salt, sugar, paraffin, clothes, shoes, pots and pans, and sweets for the children.

There was no industry in Domachevo, but it was a beautiful town and a thriving resort. Straddling the main railway line linking Warsaw with Minsk and Moscow, it drew sufficient visitors from Brest-Litovsk, Bialystok and as far as Warsaw and Wolyn, 300 kilometres away, to ensure many of the permanent inhabitants made enough money to see them through the rest of the year.

The town was ringed by dachas built in the fringes of the forest, overlooking the lake and the river. There were several guest- and boarding-houses where people suffering from TB and other chest complaints came for the benefit of their health, but where many others – families, teachers, writers, intelligentsia, political party members and trade unionists – also came to enjoy a vacation. Domachevo was the summer home of the Grand Rabbi of Lebartov, and hundreds of his followers would come to him on the Hasidic High Holy Days. There were two holiday homes for Jewish orphans, children with various psychological and physical disabilities, and those who had been abandoned in the streets as babies so their mothers could avoid the shame of illegitimacy. They were given Yiddish names after the days upon which they were found: Sabadski for Saturdays, Nigelski for Sundays, and so on.

It was a far from wealthy region, but Domachevo was a relatively affluent place. There was a bank and a loans fund, two libraries, a small cinema, a literary club that held cultural evenings and discussions, and regular visits by touring Jewish theatre groups. A number of political parties – including Communists, Socialists, Zionists, the Zionist youth movement Gordonia, and the Socialist labour organisation known as ‘the Bund’ – jostled for position in a much more progressive and liberal environment than other, fiercely traditional Jewish towns in Poland and Belarus.

Although there was some anti-Semitism, notably in the school where Polish teachers openly discriminated against Jewish children, relations between the different ethnic groups were generally cordial, and the Jews employed many Belarusians, Poles and Ukrainians for menial labour. One of those was Andrei (‘Andrusha’) Sawoniuk. Born in 1921, he never knew who his father was. His mother, Pelagia, never revealed his identity, but local gossip, and indeed Andrusha’s half-brother, Nikolai, were less constrained. ‘People in the village said that my brother was the son of the schoolmaster. I think the same.’ Pelagia had worked as a cleaner at the school and for the headmaster, Josef Jakubiak, who left Domachevo soon after the birth.

Whoever the father was, he never acknowledged the child, nor his responsibilities to Pelagia, and Andrusha took the surname of his mother’s deceased first husband. Andrusha’s favourite hobby earned him the nickname ‘pigeon boy’, but he was more widely known as ‘Andrusha the bastard’. Illegitimacy was a considerable stigma, and he was relentlessly taunted by older boys.

Even by Belarusian standards, the family was desperately poor. They owned no land on which they could grow food and lived near the Provoslav Russian Orthodox church in a one-room house that was little more than a shack, with log walls, a thatched roof and an earth floor. Pelagia took in washing and Andrusha and Nikolai, nicknamed Kola, worked as Shabbat goys, chopping wood, lighting fires and ovens, fetching water from the well, feeding the horses and doing other chores forbidden to Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath.

Scorned and shunned by his peers, Andrusha’s only friends were younger boys, like Ben-Zion, who was three years his junior and probably flattered by the friendship of the older boy. Despite the age difference, they shared a school desk and became close friends. Andrusha had never had a father and Ben-Zion had never known his, and that must have strengthened the bond between them.

In summer Ben-Zion liked to take his morning wash in the stream that ran alongside Andrusha’s house, so they saw each other every day. Andrusha encouraged him to help with the pigeons he reared, showing him how to handle them and the squabs he reared from their eggs. They played in the fields and forest together, climbing trees and building dams on the stream. In spring they collected frogspawn from forest ponds and they swam in the river on hot summer days, inching out along a thick branch of a huge tree growing from the riverbank near the bridge, and then launching themselves outwards, making a huge splash as they hit the water several metres below. In the autumn they would go foraging for berries and nuts in the forest, until the first snowfall signalled the onset of the cruel Belarusian winter, when all the inhabitants retreated indoors.

The friendship began to fade as they grew older. Ben-Zion’s best friend was now Meir Bronstein, a boy of his own age, and he rarely saw Andrusha, who had left school at the age of 14. He was virtually illiterate, having only completed ‘six classes of general school’, which gave his peers another reason to scorn and denigrate him, but even those who pitied him tended to patronise him. When his mother died of cancer before the war, he was left even more friendless and alone. Even Nikolai had little to do with him. ‘He had his own life,’ Andrei Sawoniuk later said, ‘and he did not seem to care much about me.’ They had very different personalities. A female contemporary said, ‘Kola was very calm, as opposed to Andrei who was very pushy.’

He had grown into a powerful young man and began picking on those – both boys and girls – who were smaller and weaker than him. He gained a bad reputation around the town and, rightly or wrongly, the blame for any petty theft or vandalism tended to be laid at his door. When Ben-Zion’s mother warned him not to associate with Andrusha, the last traces of their friendship were at an end.

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The rise of the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s had been viewed with considerable alarm by the Jews of Domachevo, where older inhabitants were still haunted by the destruction of the town in the First World War. As the German armies advanced, the entire population had fled east, deeper into Russia, leaving almost all of their possessions behind. When they returned at the end of the conflict, their property had been looted and their houses burned to the ground; they had to completely rebuild their lives.

On 1 September 1939, the radio carried the news of the invasion of Poland, and within days German troops were in Domachevo. Most of the Jewish population fled to the surrounding villages but, after a few days, thinking that children would be safe, Ben-Zion and his friend Meir were sent back into the town to find out what was happening. They saw German soldiers in the streets and the local Poles and Ukrainians stripping the Jewish shops and houses, but the looting stopped for fear of Soviet reprisals when the Wehrmacht rapidly withdrew again under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.

The River Bug was now the frontier, with Domachevo just inside the Russian zone. The Soviet Union was thought to be all-powerful, yet when their troops arrived, Ben-Zion saw ‘soldiers in torn uniforms on horses which hardly moved, with old weapons. We could not believe our eyes; this was the famous Red Army?’

The Soviet system was at once introduced. The Radziwills, Polish aristocrats who had previously owned all the land, were dispossessed. Larger farms were collectivised, factories nationalised, capitalist occupations like merchant prohibited and tradesmen ordered to form co-operatives. Apprentices in trades such as tailoring were sent to work on the land ‘to cleanse them of bourgeois values’. Food became scarce and the daily breadline grew longer. The schools reopened, but now teaching in Russian rather than Polish although, unlike their predecessors, the Russians did not discriminate against the Jews.

The Soviet occupation lasted almost two years, during which Jews fleeing across the river from the German zone told terrifying stories of violence and massacre. At the beginning of June 1941, Ben-Zion’s family received a postcard from Jewish friends in the German zone. It read, ‘Be prepared! The slaughterer is on his way.’

On midsummer’s night, 21 June, Ben-Zion and his friend, Meir Bronstein, went to the cinema. They noticed a number of strangers in the audience but it was the first week of the holidays and summer visitors were nothing new, so they thought little more about it, even when one of the newcomers turned to look at them and said, ‘Isn’t this a great movie? Tomorrow you will see an even better one.’

The film, The Life of Bogdan Chmielnicki – ‘Chmiel the Wicked’ in Jewish folklore – was the story of the seventeenth-century leader of a Cossack and peasant uprising in the Ukraine, who slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in a series of terrible pogroms. It was a strange, unsettling choice for a town with such a large Jewish population.

When the two boys went outside, they found themselves in darkness. The street lights had all been vandalised and the telephone wires cut, isolating Domachevo from the outside world. Soviet border guards were patrolling the streets with tracker dogs and, fearful without exactly knowing why, the two boys ran for their homes. Only later did Ben-Zion realise that the strangers they had seen were fifth columnists and German saboteurs, who had disguised themselves as teachers at a conference and were using the cinema as their rendezvous point after wrecking the town’s infrastructure. They had evidently switched the film reels as a final cruel joke.

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In the early hours of the following morning, Sunday 22 June 1941, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ – the invasion of the Soviet Union – was launched. The largest invasion force in history: 3 million men with 600,000 motor vehicles including tanks, armoured vehicles, troop-carriers and artillery pieces, crossed the border on a battlefront that stretched almost 3,000 kilometres from north to south.

The sky over Domachevo was filled with wave after wave of aircraft flying east, as the ground erupted, pounded by bombs, artillery, tank shells and mortars. When Ben-Zion went outside, looking for Soviet soldiers who could tell him what was happening, he saw German ones emerging from the darkness. He ran home to tell his family that their worst fears had been realised.

Less than an hour after Operation Barbarossa had begun, the German 487th Infantry and 22nd Cavalry had swept aside the Soviet defenders – there had only been 40 guarding the bridge over the Bug River and they put up no more than token resistance – and occupied Domachevo. Constant explosions, machine-gun and rifle fire, shouts and screams provided the soundtrack to the elimination of the last shreds of resistance. Huddled together in their house, Ben-Zion’s family felt as much as heard the bass rumble of heavy armour as a succession of smoke-belching tanks ground relentlessly onward, their tracks shattering the neat paving of the main street. A lurid red glow lit up the sky as the wooden buildings went up in flames, destroying half the town.

Jews rendered homeless by the destruction were given shelter by family or friends. ‘We began to bury the dead and waited for what would happen next.’ Over the next few days, the sound of fighting diminished and then ceased altogether as the battlefront moved rapidly east. Every day Ben-Zion and his friends hid in the surrounding wheat fields to watch the columns of tanks, armoured cars, troop-carriers, motorcycles and lorries dragging artillery pieces behind them, as they rumbled across the bridge and roared through the town.

The initial occupiers of Domachevo were regular army and most did not appear to share the Nazi ideology. When Jewish families asked the medics in the German field hospital for help treating civilians wounded during the invasion, they performed a series of life-saving operations – but told them to beware the SS who would arrive in their wake.

In August 1941, Heinrich Himmler had declared that the attack on the Soviet Union would result in the extermination of 30 million Slavs, but the scope of the Generalplan Ost – the Nazi blueprint for the transformation of the whole of Eastern Europe and Russia – was even more ambitious; it foresaw the elimination of 50 million people. Three-quarters of the population of Belarus were destined for deportation, and the future of the Jews living there was to be even more bleak.

On the third day after the invasion, the first SS-Einsatzgruppe (operational group) appeared in Domachevo, ‘Angels of Destruction’ with skull symbols on their caps. According to Hitler, their commander, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, was a man who could ‘wade through a sea of blood’, and his men were no less ruthless. They were tasked with eliminating potential resistance leaders such as politicians, intellectuals, priests and rabbis, but also with targeting Jews, Bolsheviks, gypsies and the mentally ill.

Einsatzgruppe B – one of the four Einsatzgruppen sweeping through conquered Eastern Europe – had been given responsibility for Belarus and at once they began snatching and killing Jews in Domachevo, instilling terror in the rest. The first to be murdered was one Mendel Rubenstein, and Leibel Detkis followed on the same day, along with five others who were buried with him in the courtyard of his house.

The next victims were a barber, Herschke Greenstein, and his three sons, Baruch, Michael and Wolf. They were marched at gunpoint into the centre of the town and made to dig a grave for themselves. The SS shot the three boys and then forced their father to bury them. As he began to do so, blinded by his tears, Wolf, wounded but not yet dead, stirred and said, ‘Father, what are you doing? I’m alive.’ Greenstein pleaded with them but they forced him to carry on filling in the grave, burying the boy alive alongside the bodies of his brothers. When he had finished, as a final inhuman cruelty they did not kill Greenstein himself, condemning him to live with the terrible knowledge of what he had been forced to do.

The slaughter was not confined to Domachevo. Between 22 June and 14 November, Einsatzgruppe B killed 45,000 Jews across Belarus, but terror of the SS kept everyone off the streets, so no one knew exactly how many others were being annihilated. Some Jews managed to convince themselves that the killings were just the work of a few rotten individuals rather than a systematic slaughter, until Einsatzgruppe soldiers broke into the Rabbi of Lubartov’s compound. They marched him and 40 of his followers to the watermill on the edge of the town and forced them to load sacks of flour onto a wagon. Some were then harnessed to it like horses, while the others were made to push and manhandle it down to the river. The unpaved roads were full of potholes and the fierce summer heat made the ordeal even worse, but anyone who collapsed was kicked and whipped back to his feet. When they at last reached their destination, the exhausted men were forced to dig a pit and line up in front of it, whereupon they were all shot. When they heard about the massacre, the Jews of the to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Map of Domachevo Village, Belarus Site Plan
• Dedication
• Authors’ Note
• Epigraph
• Prologue – 16 February 1999
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• Chapter 35
• Chapter 36
• Chapter 37
• Chapter 38
• Chapter 39
• Chapter 40
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Picture Credits
• Copyright