Horrors of Holocaust detailed at Britain’s first Nazi crimes trial

LONDON, Feb. 15 (JTA) — In heart-breaking, numbing detail, the horror of the Holocaust was described for the first time in the austere setting of a British criminal court last week. And this week another British legal precedent was set when jury members traveled abroad for the first time to inspect the sites where the Jews of Domachevo — a prosperous spa village in Poland, now Belarus — were slaughtered. The guide to the sites of massacres in Domachevo — and a key witness in the trial — was 76-year-old Fedor Zan, who last week was brought face-to-face with his boyhood friend, Anthony Sawoniuk, now facing four counts of murder in Domachevo in 1942. Sawoniuk is estimated to have been one of about 300 Nazi war crimes suspects who found refuge in a labor-starved Britain immediately after World War II. He worked as a ticket collector for Britain’s nationalized railroad system. Now retired, he lives in a working-class district of London. He is being tried under 1991 legislation that permits the prosecution in British courts of Nazi war crimes suspects who committed their alleged offenses against non-British citizens on foreign soil under Nazi occupation. The trial is expected to last two months. According to the case laid out by the prosecution last week, the 77-year-old Sawoniuk was the illegitimate son of a washerwoman who worked for Jewish families in the village. As a boy, the court was told last week, he earned pocket money by collecting wood and lighting fires for Jewish families on the Sabbath. The court was told that when the Nazis occupied Domachevo in 1941, it had a population of 5,000, of whom 3,000 were Jewish. By the end of the war, the Jewish community had been destroyed. After the invasion, the court was told, 20-year-old Sawoniuk was the first to volunteer for a new police force that was established by the Nazis. By the time he fled the village with the retreating German army in 1944, he had risen to head the force. Dressed at his trial in a brown suit and supported by a cane, the silver-haired pensioner admits that he was a volunteer policeman at the time and that he had fled with the retreating Germans. But he denies the charges of murder. With clinical dispassion, however, prosecution counsel John Nutting contradicted his claim to innocence. Nutting told the court that on Sunday, Sept. 20, 1942 — Yom Kippur — 2,900 of the Jews of Domachevo were herded out of the ghetto, where they had been concentrated behind barbed wire. They were marched down a track, which became known as the “road of death,” to an area known as the sand hills. There, they were forced to strip and all were slaughtered. While the prosecution will not present evidence of Sawoniuk’s involvement in that massacre, it will, said Nutting, offer testimony by eyewitnesses — some still living in Domachevo — that over the following weeks Sawoniuk led the “search-and-kill” operation against Jews who had escaped the initial massacre by hiding in the ghetto or in a nearby forest. Although Sawoniuk has been indicted on just four counts of murder, Nutting alleged that between Sept. 19 and Dec. 31, 1942, Sawoniuk was responsible for killing 20 Jews. Sawoniuk, said Nutting, “was not only prepared to do the Nazi bidding, but carried out their genocidal policy with enthusiasm.” Fedor Zan, he said, will testify that he heard women crying on the outskirts of the village. When he went to investigate, he saw some 15 Jewish women of mixed ages standing in front of an open grave. Sawoniuk was standing behind the women armed with a submachine gun. “He ordered the women to remove their clothes and then shot them with the weapon,” said Nutting. “As they died, they collapsed into the grave.” Zan, who had known Sawoniuk since their school days, observed “the transition from schoolboy to policeman, from being just another youngster to being one of those exercising a ruthless authority over Jew and Gentile alike.” He had also seen Sawoniuk taking his own aunt and her family to their executions because of their suspected association with anti-Nazi partisans in the forest. The prosecution said that another witness, Alexander Baglay, will tell the court that he and a friend were taken to the sand hills five days after the main slaughter. They saw two Jewish men, each about 40 years old, and a Jewish woman, about 20, who were wearing the distinctive yellow stars on their clothing. Sawoniuk told them to undress. When the woman was apparently too embarrassed, Sawoniuk shouted at her until she complied. He then ordered the trio to face the ready-dug grave, took out his pistol and shot each in the head from behind. As he fired, he pitched the victims forward into the grave and then ordered the two young men, one of them Baglay, to fill it in and return the shovels to the police station. Before the war, said Nutting, relations between the Jewish majority and their Polish, Ukrainian and Belarussian neighbors “were generally peaceful and harmonious.” All that changed after the Nazi invasion: “It is apparent that Sawoniuk carried out his duties as a policeman conscientiously,” Nutting told the court. “He frequently searched Jews on their journeys in and out of the ghetto and if he found any forbidden item in the possession of a Jew, he invariably assaulted the culprit. “It is clear that the Germans had greater faith in Sawoniuk than in most of his colleagues in the police force. Not only did they promote him, but he was also permitted to carry a firearm at all times.” Nutting told the court that proof of Sawoniuk’s guilt was “irresistible” because he either was seen shooting directly or “because he was seen taking Jews to a place where they were habitually shot and returning without them, or because he boasted about the fate of his victim.” And he raised the question, likely to be the centerpiece of the defense, that “after such a long time maybe the witnesses’ memories are at fault.” “Or do they,” asked Nutting, “describe events which are literally unforgettable, which once witnessed would remain fixed in a man’s memory for his life?” The court was told that when Sawoniuk was first questioned by British authorities investigating war crimes allegations, he denied having served in the volunteer police unit and claimed to have been deported to a forced labor camp in Germany. But, Nutting added, the defendant no longer disputes that he served in the Domachevo police at the relevant time or that he left Domachevo in 1944 with the retreating Nazis. Sawoniuk had told investigators that anyone who accused him of killing Jews was “an idiot,” because the Jews had helped him by giving him food when he worked for them and that “he would not go against such people.” “No one can put a finger on me that I killed a Jew,” he said. “The people who gave you that evidence are liars.”