- Cunning Folk – Adam L.G. Nevill - 8/10
- Bad Apples – Will Dean – 7/10
- The Winter Road – Adrian Selby – 6/10
- The Dark Place – Damian Vargas – 9/10
- Act of Oblivion – Robert Harris – 7/10
- The Tyranny of Faith – Richard Swan – 7/10
- The Game – Micah Richards – 8/10
- The Ticket Collector from Belarus – Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson – 8/10
It’s always a good discovery when you read a gripping account about a subject you know nothing about. I probably would have heard about the trial on the news at the time (1999), but I certainly didn’t remember the name Andrei Sawoniuk or know anything about his story.
This book was recommended on last year’s thread by
@Paladin when it was £9.99 on Kindle, but I managed to pick it up for a mere £0.99 and I’m certainly grateful for his recommendation. “Enjoy” is probably the wrong word for a book like this, but I find this type of account interesting as well as sobering.
Andrei Sawoniuk was accused of being a Nazi collaborator in Belarus and the horrors described in this book by the witnesses, particularly in those first few chapters that set the scene, are particularly gruesome. The story told by key witness, Ben-Zion Blustein, of how he escaped death and survived in the forest, joined the partisans and made his eventual escape to a life in Israel is by turns compelling and horrific.
The bulk of the book concerns the trial: the testimony and cross-examination of four key witnesses and Sawoniuk himself. If the subject matter wasn’t so grim, I’d say that one of those cross-examinations was laugh-out-loud.
Despite all the legal back and forth, the book is never boring, and as Britain’s only war crimes trial, featuring the only visit to foreign soil by a jury, it serves as an important and detailed historical record.
Following Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, one can only hope that we’ll see more of these trials in the next decade.
