58 No. 72 JUSTICE the Attorney General, whose consent for any prosecution was required by the Act. Consent was given and Serafinowicz was arrested and charged with four counts of murder. Even though he was 84, he was still deemed able to stand trial. Committal proceedings began in January 1996 and continued through the end of April. He was committed for trial at the Old Bailey on three charges of murder. In January 1997, before the case came to trial, the prosecution was abandoned because Serafinowicz had Alzheimer’s. Andrzej Sawoniuk. When the British police began interviewing Sawoniuk they had already collected a wealth of incriminating evidence through 431 interviews and 120 statements amassed over two years. The papers submitted by the police to the CPS ran to 90,000 pages of evidence. He was tried at the Old Bailey and charged with two specimen counts of murder of Jews in his German-occupied hometown. After an eight-week trial, Sawoniuk was convicted on both counts. The judge handed down a life sentence and recommended that he never be released. Sawoniuk died in prison six years later. Bizarrely, there is nothing in the chapter about that trial – the only one ever conducted under the 1991 Act and believed to be the first English case in which the jury travelled abroad to view the scene. The authors explained that the story of Sawoniuk had been covered extensively before, including in Anderson and Hanson’s book, The Ticket Collector from Belarus (2022), and the authors preferred telling untold stories. But if this book was intended for the general reader, excluding an account of the Sawoniuk trial was a real mistake. Stanislaw Chrzanowski. The initial report about Chrzanowski came from his stepson, who anonymously reported his suspicions to the Hetherington-Chalmers Inquiry. The Inquiry passed his name to the WCU, but the WCU dismissed the case because there was neither a direct allegation of killing nor any supporting evidence. In 1996, Silverman interviewed a woman in Slomin, Belarussia, who had seen her husband be driven away with others to the location where they were murdered by guards. One of the guards, she told him, was Chrzanowski (then known as Stasik), a local whom she knew. Since she did not herself see the shooting, she could not give eye-witness evidence. Silverman spoke with a local Catholic deacon who was nine years old at the time of the murder. The deacon explained that he and his friends had been only 30 yards away from the murder site and that Stasik was easily recognizable as one of the killers. However, we are not told what, if anything, Silverman did with that eye-witness report. Instead, we are provided with no less than fifteen pages about the murky post-war history, including speculation as to whether Chrzanowski was used by MI6 in the Cold War. Chrzanowski died in 2017. His stepson died only months later, the authors say, “the questions which had tormented him throughout his life unanswered.” Given the hundreds of cases investigated and the vastly greater number that would have justified investigation, the fact that the War Crimes Act 1991 resulted in only one conviction is manifestly a story of failure. “Those who opposed the bill felt that the outcome vindicated their view that it was a quest which the country should never have embarked upon” (p. 276). But in their Afterword, the authors suggest that it should have at least helped with the development of Holocaust awareness in Britain, since 1991 was also the year that the government decided that the Holocaust should be part of the National Curriculum for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds. In his book Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (2014), author A. Pearce wrote: “These two occurrences from 1991 – the War Crimes Act and the National Curriculum – changed the status of the Holocaust in British culture and society, helping to alter perceptions” (p. 272). The final sentence of the book says, “If the UK’s attempt to hold Nazi collaborators to account for their crimes tells us anything it is that there are some challenges beyond the capacity of the law to address.” There was nothing wrong with the law but, as the book shows, it could not be implemented effectively. n Michael Zander KC is Emeritus Professor, LSE. He gave an account of his career in a lecture at the LSE celebrating his 90th birthday ("Promoting Change in the Legal System – a Memoir" accessible on YouTube).
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