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efr:ATHERWOOD
the
-
NEWER
isn't Always
Mission Fulfilled
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An Israeli Holocaust survivor's testimony was
crucial to Britain's first war crimes trial.
At Heathenvood, We'll
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ERIC SILVER
Israel Correspondent
Jerusalem
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B
en-Zion Blustein, the
teenaged lone survivor of a
White Russian Jewish fami-
ly, spent most of World War
II on the run — hiding in the forest
and fighting with the partisans against
the German occupiers and their local
collaborators.
In July 1944, when the Russians lib-
erated the area, he volunteered for the
Red Army. His unit was one of
the first to enter Maidanek, a
slave labor and extermination
camp where 360,000 prison-
ers, one-third of them Jews,
were starved, bludgeoned, shot
and gassed to death between
1942 and 1944.
"I can't forget what I saw
to this clay," said Blustein,
now a retired Tel Aviv build-
ing contractor. "There were
heaps of shoes, glasses, human
hair. I saw a group of inmates
in their striped clothing. I
started speaking to them in
Yiddish. One of them shuf-
fled toward me, a shadow of a
man. 'Nov I can die,' he
whispered, 'because I have
seen another Jew, who will be
able to tell the world what
liappened.
This February, 55 years
later, Ben-Zion Blustein kept
faith with that shadow of a
man. Blustein was the only
Jewish witness to testify in
Great Britain's first war crimes
Ben-Zion Blustein
trial, which ended last week
with a life sentence for 77-year-
slaughter of Domachevo's Jews. Blustein's
old Anthony Sawoniuk. He was con-
family hid in a hole they had dug under
victed of murdering two Jewish men
their
home. As the Nazis closed in, his
and a woman and shooting 15 women
stepfather took a lethal dose of mor-
with a submachine gun after ordering
phine. His mother, brother and sister
them to strip and face an open grave.
were caught and killed on the spot.
Sawoniuk, who served as a police
Only Ben-Zion escaped, though he
volunteer and then fled with the
was
soon captured and put to work with
retreating German soldiers from
a
handful
of other Jews grooming horses
Domachevo in Belarus, was also
for
the
German
soldiers. He never for-
implicated in, though not charged
got his mother Sheindel's parting words:
with, the murders of children and an
"If you come through, try to live a nor-
infant, as well as having taken part in
mal life. It's no shame for a man to cry,
a Yom Kippur massacre.
.
3 31
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Blustein had grown up with
Sawoniuk, the illiterate, illegitimate
son of a washerwoman, who settled in
Britain after the war and worked as a
railroad ticket collector. The Germans
captured Domachevo in June 1941.
Only a dozen survived out of a Jewish
population of 2,900. Blustein
described Sawoniuk to a hushed
London court as behaving "like a cruel
and lordly master" toward the Jews.
The war began in earnest for Blustein
on Yom Kippur 1942, when the
Germans and their allies started the