How a ticket collector at London Bridge was exposed as a sadist

How a ticket collector at London Bridge was exposed as a sadist
How a ticket collector at London Bridge was exposed as a sadist

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of City commuters filed past the sour-faced ticket collector at busy London Bridge railway station but never gave him a second glance.

Tony Sawoniuk, an expat Pole, didn't say much to anyone, no cheery 'good mornings' or 'good evenings'. Nor did he look up from underneath his peaked cap as he checked their tickets and ushered the tide of humanity through the gates.

Perhaps, inside his head, he was reflecting that, in a past he was desperate to keep hidden, he had a lot of experience of donning a uniform and herding people . . . to their deaths.

He was not much liked. British Rail colleagues remember him as a misery guts — 'morose, unable to make eye contact, surly and reluctant to hold any sort of conversation', one recalled. 'Silence prevailed. There was always something strange about him.'

None of them, however, had any inkling of the terrible secret their workmate was concealing — that he was a mass murderer who, during World War II, had rounded up Jews in his native Belorussia in eastern Europe and, as an SS auxiliary, butchered men, women and even small children in cold blood, gunning them down with a bullet in the head and tossing their bodies into mass graves.

After the war, he would somehow come to settle in Britain and, for more than half a century, escape responsibility for his crimes against humanity.

Hidden past: Sawoniuk as a young man during the war

Hidden past: Sawoniuk as a young man during the war 

Until — as a compelling new book by Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson details — he was eventually tracked down and brought to justice in what was this country's one and only ever war crimes trial.

In 1999, at the Old Bailey, after an exhaustive and unique 28-day hearing, the ticket collector's own ticket was finally punched and he saw out the rest of his miserable life in prison.

His case is all the more shocking as a depressing insight into how the Holocaust happened.

Yes, the orders came from on high in Hitler's vile anti-Semitic regime, but carrying them out depended on the complicity and the active involvement of countless ordinary individuals like him.

A small and insignificant man, Sawoniuk suddenly found himself — as the judge in his trial noted — 'a lord and a master' with the power of life and death over others in his community, and he used it with bestial ruthlessness and unremitting cruelty.

Sawoniuk's story begins in 1921 when he was born in the town of Domachevo. Today, it lies in the modern state of Belarus, but in the years between World Wars I and II it was part of Poland.

In 1999, at the Old Bailey, after an exhaustive and unique 28-day hearing, the ticket collector's own ticket was finally punched and he saw out the rest of his miserable life in prison

In 1999, at the Old Bailey, after an exhaustive and unique 28-day hearing, the ticket collector's own ticket was finally punched and he saw out the rest of his miserable life in prison

A relatively affluent holiday resort in the forest, straddling the railway line linking Warsaw and Moscow, it had a majority Jewish population who worshipped in its two synagogues.

Sawoniuk, though, was from the Christian side of the tracks and named Andrusha, 'Little Andy', a diminutive of the Russian Andrei, by his unmarried mother. She was a cleaner at a local school, his father most likely the headmaster, who then disappeared and left her penniless to bring up the boy on her own.

He grew up taunted as a bastard, a serious stigma in his Russian Orthodox community, and was shunned by his peers.

Home was a one-room log shack on the edge of town where his mother took in washing and as a youngster he himself earned a pittance by doing menial chores for rich Jews during the sabbath.

His schooling was minimal and he left at 14, virtually illiterate — yet another reason for people to look down on him. Then his mother died of cancer and he was completely alone and friendless.

But he had grown into a powerful youth, who got a kick from bullying smaller and weaker kids. He had a reputation for trouble, too — any petty theft or act of vandalism in the neighbourhood was laid at his door. He came to resent everyone and everything around him.

Meanwhile, the Europe in which he lived was descending into the political chaos that preceded the war, with Poland now divided in two — one half under German control and the other a satellite of the Soviet Union. 

Domachevo fell just inside the newly created Soviet sector, and for two years life went on there pretty well unchanged.Until in June 1941, Hitler broke his peace pact with Stalin and his army rampaged eastwards. Within an hour, German troops had overrun the town.

Vicious: Mini-series The Winds Of War recreated scenes of Nazi soldiers about to massacre civilians in Belarus

Vicious: Mini-series The Winds Of War recreated scenes of Nazi soldiers about to massacre civilians in Belarus

Three days later, the SS arrived, and a rabbi and 40 other Jews were marched to the river, where they were forced to dig a pit, lined up beside it and shot. 

It was just the start. The Holocaust had come to town. But the SS found itself stretched to the limits, with so many Jews, Bolsheviks and Soviet prisoners-of-war to eliminate all over the falling Eastern Front.

So they hired in local help, police auxiliaries, to assist in the dirty work — a force known as the Schutzmannschaft (literally 'the guarding troops').

Initially, the auxiliaries watched, often reportedly drunk while doing so, but they increasingly took over the killing as some German soldiers, particularly those with families, became traumatised by shooting women and children.

In Domachevo, Sawoniuk was the first to step forward, seeing the German invasion as a career opportunity. 'He had been the lowest of the low in the town's hierarchy,' write the authors, 'but when he put on the blue police uniform, for the first time in his life he became a man of authority, with power over the townsfolk who had previously jeered at him.'

He got his own back in spades — literally — as more and more Jews were rounded up and made to dig their own graves.

Sawoniuk in 1948, as a young man

Sawoniuk in 1948, as a young man

Before the war, Sawoniuk had shown few signs of being anti-Semitic but now he not only adopted the Nazi creed with enthusiasm but went into overdrive. 'He rivalled the Germans in his cruelty,' one Jew who had known him before the war would later recall.

A clerk who worked at the police station throughout the occupation said that the Germans thought so highly of Sawoniuk they requested him in preference to any of the other Schutzmänner for round-ups and liquidation operations.

They also trusted him with a sub-machine gun when most of his comrades were issued with rifles.

Later, when the SS contingent in the town moved on, he was left in charge, and, like angels of destruction, he and his fellow auxiliaries would roam the ghetto looking for any pretext to beat up and kill Jews.

He was infamous for his cruelty, demanding a Jewish girl have sex with him and then slaughtering her when she refused.

A witness who would later give evidence to the jury hearing Sawoniuk's case recalled 'Little Andy' lining up 15 terrified women, forcing them to strip naked, then machine-gunning them in the back and kicking their bodies into a freshly dug pit.

 Many others saw him ushering whole families through the streets and along what became known as the Road Of Death to an execution site in sand hills just outside the town.

Many others saw him ushering whole families through the streets and along what became known as the Road Of Death to an execution site in sand hills just outside the town

Many others saw him ushering whole families through the streets and along what became known as the Road Of Death to an execution site in sand hills just outside the town

He was also said to have led a mopping-up operation in a nearby village, wiping out 54 children in an orphanage. He would apparently watch executions even when he was not taking part, just for the pleasure. 'He was an animal,' one local said.

And war crimes investigators who came to the town after the war could find no one who would disagree. All over Belarus, home-grown butchers like Sawoniuk were out-performing the SS in mass murder as the country suffered more than any other occupied region at the hands of the Nazis, its cities in ruins and thousands of villages destroyed.

The death rate of Jews was roughly 80 per cent, among the highest in Europe. Half the population were either killed or sent to slave labour camps. More than two million people died. And most met their violent end at the hands of local auxiliaries rather than the Germans, as 'Little Andy' and his ilk killed with merciless savagery.

But then the tide of the war turned, and, with Germany's defeat at the siege of Stalingrad, Hitler's forces on the eastern front went into retreat ahead of Russia's now rapidly advancing and unstoppable Red Army.

In the summer of 1944, Sawoniuk, savvy enough to know what his fate would be if he was caught, fled his home town. When it fell to the Russians shortly after, only 13 Jews remained alive.

He was also said to have led a mopping-up operation in a nearby village, wiping out 54 children in an orphanage. He would apparently watch executions even when he was not taking part, just for the pleasure. 'He was an animal,' one local said

He was also said to have led a mopping-up operation in a nearby village, wiping out 54 children in an orphanage. He would apparently watch executions even when he was not taking part, just for the pleasure. 'He was an animal,' one

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