I expect that very few readers here have heard of Helena Wolinska-Brus.
Here she is. A Polish Jewish woman (or even a Jewish Polish woman) who narrowly escaped death in the Warsaw Ghetto and went on to become a ruthless post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor, sending various Polish patriots to their murky deaths.
The Marxist Wheel of History turned. Poland's communist elite also turned against even the most loyal if not servile Jewish members in their midst. Thousands of 'Zionists' were effectively driven out of the country. Wolinska-Brus and her husband alas made it to the UK in the mid-1960s and stayed here until they died, enjoying benign liberal middle-class academic life in Oxford.
The one problem they faced was the end of communism and later attempts by the new democratic Polish authorities to extradite Wolinska-Brus back to Poland to answer for her Soviet-era misdeeds. Amazingly W-B used the argument that as a Jew she should not be returned to the “country of Auschwitz and Birkenau” where she would not have a fair trial.
Here is Anne Applebaum back in 1998 carefully if not generously describing her story and the case against her:
It is also true that she was a war hero of sorts: she escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, and later escaped again from a train headed for a concentration camp. “I slipped off and just walked away slowly,” she says. “I knew I would die anyway if I stayed on the train. But they didn’t shoot.” Eventually, she came to be in charge of the office of the General Staff of the People’s Guard, and was afterwards duly decorated by communist Poland, and, according to her husband, by communist Hungary as well.
It is also true, however, that many Poles deeply resent Jews who use their Jewishness as an excuse when they are accused of other crimes. Maria Fieldorf Czarska, the General’s daughter, says bitterly that she doubts Mrs Brus will ever come to trial: “she will say she is old, she will say she is ill, she will say we are anti-semitic.” ...
This Polish view matters, because it is Polish justice which is at stake. This isn’t an Anglo-Saxon debate, anymore than is the debate about the extradition of General Pinochet: the exploration of a totalitarian past isn’t a British passion.
One Polish government official formulates the problem like this: “Just because Jews were victims of crimes against humanity, does that mean they cannot be tried for crimes against humanity themselves?” That is not a British question, and few British people would ask it. But now it will be Britain’s problem to resolve.
In the end the many procedural hurdles that an extraditing state needs to overcome proved too high for Poland. HW-B battled away in the English courts and the case drifted to and fro depending on how zealous successive Polish governments were in pursuing it. The case crossed my desk when I was Ambassador in Warsaw and Radek Sikorski was Defence Minister - he made another push to effect a successful extradition before it was too late.
Eventually HW-B died in late 2008, and that was that.
This is an extraordinary story, when you think about it. Vigorous efforts continue to track down and bring to trial elderly Nazi war crimes suspects while they are still alive. I can't think of a case of a former communist monster being extradited to face justice.
As the HW-B case shows, in such cases the individual accused of crimes against humanity typically turn the tables, using liberal legal defences to fend off extradition and making the general case that after so much time any trial for events decades earlier in utterly different circumstances can not be substantively fair.
This trite appeal to 'fairness' argument may win some instinctive sympathy from the public, as well as benefit from active support from those who for one reason or another want to see Soviet crimes left quietly unearthed.
Yet we never hear much of the 'fairness' argument as delivered on behalf of the victims of such people by their surviving friends and relatives. Nor do we hear much about the value-in-itself of symbolic justice - the very fact that people like HW-B stand on trial and have to stare at the documents they themselves signed, describing their wicked deeds as servants of a wicked system.
