'Brilliantly gripping' Sunday Times; 'Compelling' Daily Mail; 'Heart-rending' Sunday Telegraph; 'Excellent' The Times;�'Engrossing' Independent
The UK's only war crimes trial took place in 1999 and had its origins in the horrors of the Holocaust, but only now in�The�Ticket Collector from Belarus?�can the full story be told.
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The�Ticket Collector from Belarus�tells the remarkable story of two interwoven journeys. Ben-Zion Blustein and Andrei Sawoniuk were childhood friends in 1930s Domachevo, a holiday and health resort in what is now Belarus. During the events that followed the�Nazi invasion in 1941, they became the bitterest of enemies. After the war, Ben-Zion made his way to Israel, and �Andrusha the bastard� to England, where he found work as a British Rail ticket collector in London.
They next confronted each other in the�Old Bailey, over half a century later, where one was the principal prosecution witness, and the other charged with a fraction of the number of murders he was alleged to have committed. There was no physical evidence, just one man�s word against another, leaving the jury with a series of agonising dilemmas: Could any witness statement be trusted so long after the event? Was Andrusha a brutal killer, a hapless pawn or a scapegoat? And were his furious protests a sign of guilt or the justified anger of an innocent old man?�
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Mike Anderson was gripped by the story, and so began his quest to find the truth about this astonishing case and the people at its heart.�As he discovered, it was even more remarkable than he could ever have imagined.�
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