In the mid-1980s, as Holocaust “awareness” bloomed in western societies, Britain woke up to the revelation that, for 40 years or so, it had provided a safe haven for refugees from eastern Europe whose participation in the genocide had rarely, if ever, come under scrutiny. It was a deeply uncomfortable awakening for a country that had prided itself in “standing alone” against Hitler’s tyranny.
The passage of the War Crimes Act 1991 raised the possibility of putting on trial those who had not been British citizens or residents at the time the crimes were committed. The outcome was the prosecution in 1995 of Szymon Serafinowicz, a Belarusian living in Banstead, Surrey, although his trial collapsed when the jury ruled he was mentally unfit, and the conviction in 1999 of one auxiliary policeman, Anthony (Andrzej) Sawoniuk, for murdering Jews in his native Belarus. By then, Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit had been mothballed, and political attention switched to enshrining remembrance, in the form of the first Holocaust Memorial Day.
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