New EU Extradition Rules May Put Ex-Prosecutor, 88, on Trial in Poland
So far, Polish officials haven’t succeeded in their efforts to extradite an elderly Holocaust survivor from the United Kingdom in order to try her for alleged misconduct as a prosecutor during the Stalinist era there, more than 50 years ago. But now, under a new legal structure that creates a unified extradition system for members of the European Union, it appears that British authorities will have to arrest Helena Wolinska-Brus, the 88-year-old widow of a well-known Oxford University professor.
Poland has been seeking her extradition since 1999. But, citing her advanced age, the British government has declined to cooperate, and she contends that anti-Semitism is also behind the efforts to prosecute her. Last year, however, Polish authorities tried a new approach: the European arrest warrant available to members of the European Union, and it appears that Britain will now have to arrest her, in a first step toward extradition, reports the Chicago Tribune.
By all accounts, Wolinska-Brus served valiantly in communist branch of a Polish resistance movement known as the Home Army, after the Nazis invaded Poland during World War II. Most of her family perished in the Holocaust, and she herself reportedly escaped from a train headed to the Treblinka concentration camp after being captured by the Nazis. She is accused, however, of having signed papers, while serving as a senior military prosecutor, after the war ended, that resulted in the hanging of a war hero in 1953 on political grounds.
According to Polish officials and historians, the Tribune writes, “Wolinska-Brus signed patently false indictments against senior Home Army officers already in prison. These officers were then given a quick show trial and executed.”
“I’m not saying she should sit in prison, no,” says Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, 82, a prominent Pole who also served in the Home Army during World War II, but in a different branch of it that advocated democracy and was allied with Britain and the U.S. Today he is an advisor to the Polish prime minister. He says he was sentenced to eight years in prison after the war based on a 1952 espionage indictment signed by Wolinska-Brus.
“But there is the value of social education [in trying her],” Bartoszewski says, “and historical truth requires that we do not put our heads in the sand.”
