Nazi collaboration

In our family histories we all have ghosts, but few of us go in search of them and even fewer of us write about them. The French author Emmanuel Carrère discovered how devastating that search can be with his book My Life as a Russian Novel (2007). For two years he and his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an eminent historian of Russia and the steely secretary of the Académie Française, didn’t speak. Hélène’s aggrieved response to the publication of her son’s inquiry into the suspected status of her father, Georges Zurabishvili, as a collaborator of the Nazis during the second world war, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees, Sawoniuk ordered the women to strip naked, shot them in the back and kicked their bodies into a newly dug pit. Fifty-seven years later, Zan was one of a dozen witnesses to give evidence against Sawoniuk at the Old Bailey, at the only war crimes trial ever held in Britain.