AEI efr:ATHERWOOD the - NEWER isn't Always Mission Fulfilled BETTER ► An Israeli Holocaust survivor's testimony was crucial to Britain's first war crimes trial. At Heathenvood, We'll Make You Feel at Home. ERIC SILVER Israel Correspondent Jerusalem The Heatherwood Retirement Community is a successful senior community that has been a strong part of Southfield since 1986. Southfield's Most bistinguished etirement Community Offers: r • Lunch available (7 days per tiveek) - something the others don't offer • Evening meal provided (7 days per week) • On site staffing 24 hours a day • Emergency pull cord in each apartment • Local transportation for errands & appointments • Full size apartment with kitchen • Weekly housekeeping & linen service • Personal care assistance available through on-site health care staff Heatherwood is owned & managed by Capital Senior Living — one of the country's leading retirement community corporations. For informatton, call Kathy Ostrowski: (248) 350-1777 22800 Civic Center Drive • Southfield, MI 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 GRAND OPENING APRIL 14, 1999! CENTURY THEATRE (ADJACENT TO THE GEM THEATRE) "HILARIOUS!"•CRITIC'S CHOICE• Los Angeles Times THE SMASH HIT MUSICAL SPOOF OF THE MOVIES! CENTURY THEATRE 4/9 1999 1 90? CENTURY THEATRE 313-963-9800 (248) 645-6666 333 Madisoh Ave. • Detroit, MI 48226 Call Nicole for groups of 15 or more (313) 962-2913. 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