The Trial of Andrei Sawoniuk: Holocaust Testimony under Cross-Examination
| Author | David Hirsh |
| DOI | 10.1177/a020412 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE TRIAL OF ANDREI
SAWONIUK:
HOLOCAUST TESTIMONY
UNDER CROSS-EXAMINATION
DAVID HIRSH
Keele University, UK
ABSTRACT
Andrei Sawoniuk, a member of a Nazi-organized police outfit, led an operation in a
small town in Belorus in 1942–3 to kill the Jews who had evaded the main Nazi mass-
acre. He was found guilty, not of genocide or crimes against humanity, but of murder,
according to the War Crimes Act (1991) in a trial in London in 1999. This article
explores the ways in which the testimonies elicited were transformed from memoirs
of the Holocaust by the rules and norms of the trial process into legally admissible
evidence by the processes of cross-examination and of selecting what evidence was
suitable to be considered by the jury and what was not. The extraordinariness of the
events with which the trial was concerned accentuated the differences between
memoir and evidence. The key witnesses in the trial found ways to circumvent the
rules of the court and to speak directly to the jury.
INTRODUCTION
Andrei Sawoniuk, a member of a local Nazi-organized police outfit, led an
operation in a small town in occupied Belorus in 1942–3 to find and kill the
Jews who had evaded the main Nazi massacre. He was found guilty under
the War Crimes Act (1991) at the Old Bailey in London in 1999.
An issue which was always present in this trial was a marked contrast
between ordinariness and extraordinariness. Habermas has argued that
‘Auschwitz has become the signature of an entire epoch – and it concerns all
of us. Something happened there that no one could previously have thought
even possible’ (1991: 251–2). The Holocaust was an event so huge that it
changed the way human beings understand themselves and the world in
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200112) 10:4 Copyright © 2001
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 10(4), 529–545; 020412
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 10(4)
which they live. It consisted of horror on an unprecedented scale. The trial
of Andrei Sawoniuk, however, was routine and business-like. Sawoniuk
himself was in many ways unremarkable yet he became, for a period of a few
years only, a sadistic mass killer, before reverting to an invisible life as a
railway worker.
One issue which was central in his trial was the question of the admissi-
bility and non-admissibility of certain types of evidence. Some strong and
arguably illuminating documentary evidence was prevented from going
before the jury. The court required direct eye-witness testimony. The narra-
tives presented by the witnesses, particularly those presented by the Jewish
survivor who gave evidence, Ben-Zion Blustein, were acted upon and changed
by the rules and requirements of a criminal trial. In this article I explore the
ways in which memoir was transformed into testimony by the court. Many
Holocaust survivors have published memoirs of their experiences during the
genocide. There have also been projects to record the experiences of large
numbers of survivors in archives. That which can be accepted as evidence in
a criminal trial, however, is different from these memoirs. At least, it may start
as memoir, but the memoir is acted upon by the rules and norms of the legal
processes, particularly by the process of cross-examination and by that of the
sifting out of evidence which is deemed to be inadmissible; the trial process
is always striving to transform memoir into evidence. Giving evidence in any
criminal trial, especially for victims of the crime, must always be difficult.
Holocaust survivors are accustomed to being in control of the presentation
of their memoir and to being listened to by a supportive audience. For a sur-
vivor, the demand that the court makes, that it be allowed to take control of
the presentation of memoir, to challenge it and to transform it into what it
considers to be evidence, must be particularly difficult. Blustein resisted the
court’s mechanisms and tried to retain control over his own testimony.
The court had difficulty in bounding the extra-ordinary events and stories
which were given to it within the normal rules of criminal evidence. The jury
was influenced both by evidence which the court wished it to hear and also
by influences which the court wished to suppress. Otto Kirchheimer has
pointed out that:
Anglo-American adversary procedure organizes the trial as a battle of wits
between the prosecution and defense, with the judge acting as their referee, con-
stantly deciding what line of questioning and what material should be allowed
to enter the minds of the jury. Yet the judge’s authority in this respect may be
more official than real: a skilful lawyer will be able to make his point before his
adversary can open his mouth to object. The resulting wrangling on admissi-
bility and the judge’s ritual exhortation in summing up what points to disregard
– for example, the political loyalties of the defendant in an espionage trial – only
make the forbidden fruit more tempting to the jury than all the rest. (1969: 342)
The trial was a struggle between witnesses, the defendant, the defence and
prosecution lawyers and the judge for control over the information which
the jury would use to come to its verdict.
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HIRSH: THE TRIAL OF ANDREI SAWONIUK
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THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY ANDREI SAWONIUK
Sawoniuk was, in many senses, an ordinary man. Aged 78 at the time of his
trial, his hair was white and carefully barbered. He had a round baby face
with blue-grey eyes peering through his up-to-date glasses. He was always
dressed smartly, in a blazer, creased trousers and shiny shoes like the old
Polish soldier and British Rail ticket collector that he was. He limped with a
stick, but did not seem particularly fragile. He seemed to be a man who knew
how to look after himself. He sat in court next to his solicitors, not in the
dock, since he was on bail. He followed the transcript of the proceedings as
it appeared on the lap-top computer in front of him. He occasionally whis-
pered, rather loudly, perhaps because of his partial deafness, to his solicitors.
They seemed friendly and called him Tony. Not once in the whole trial did
he look to his right toward the press gallery, or, above that, the public gallery.
He was born in Domachevo, a small, ordinary town, which is currently in
Belorus, near Brest-Litovsk, and was just inside the Polish border of the old
Soviet Union. When he was born there on 7 March 1921, it was in Poland.
Domachevo’s main business was tourism. It had a spa and some hotels and
guest houses. Domachevo conformed to the ethnic division of labour which
was common in Eastern Europe. The town itself was almost entirely Jewish
while the surrounding villages where the peasants cultivated the land were
almost entirely non-Jewish. The Jews supplied goods and services to the
farmers, as well as to visitors. The farmers sold their produce to the Jews in the
market. As well as the Russian Orthodox church in Domachevo there was also
a Catholic church, where those who considered themselves Polish worshipped.
Sawoniuk himself was born and lived his childhood outside of the estab-
lished division of labour, or perhaps underneath it. His family did not have
land to tend and so they lived in the town itself. His mother made a meagre
living by doing laundry and other casual work for Jews, and when he was old
enough, he also worked for Jews, doing odd jobs when he could find them.
He never knew his father, and his mother died when he was a child. He was
regularly called a ‘bastard’ and was subjected to a certain amount of bullying
on that account. After his mother died he lived with his grandmother and
brother, Kola. For these reasons he must have experienced a certain amount
of alienation from the society in which he lived and in which he did not really
have an established place. He left school at the age of 14. He was known by
everyone in Domachevo simply as Andrusha, a diminutive of Andrei. Little
Andy. He was still known by this diminutive when he was the commandant
of the local Nazi-organized police force.
The German invasion of Russia started on mid-summer night, 1941 and
within hours had swept well past Domachevo which was one of the first small
towns it encountered. Within a very few days, the Germans had organized a
local police force which Sawoniuk and a handful of other local men joined
enthusiastically. He was 20 years old and had experienced two very difficult
years under Russian occupation. For the first time in his life he had a job, and
a place in the world.
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 10(4)
Sawoniuk has lived in Britain since 1946. He moved around a little, mainly
on the South Coast before settling in London, just off the Old Kent Road.
He worked for British Rail, and retired in 1986. He married twice after the
war, both short marriages, and had a son with his second wife, but they parted
shortly after his birth. In Britain he has been, as the police testified, ‘of good
character’. On 9 March 1999 he appeared in court no. 12 at the Old Bailey.
In many ways it was a routine trial. The defendants in the courts next door
were accused one of rape and the other of murder. There was no glass dock
to protect him from assassination. There was no simultaneous translation
apparatus in the court room. It was the usual British court room. Sawoniuk
was not accused of anything exotic or un-British like genocide or crimes
against...
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