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Wrestling With A Dark Past
It was in July 2020 as Britain was tentatively taking steps out of the first national lockdown response to Covid 19. An enquiry was received from a journalist seeking information about a man from the West Yorkshire town of Holmfirth, name of John Kingston. John was said to have been a wrestler and had died in March, 2018. Whilst the story that unfolded had little to do with professional wrestling it was a tale of a wrestler wrestling with a dark past.
Attempts to find any sort of wrestling link proved difficult at first until the connection was made. John Kingston had a short presence on our wrestling scene, limited to working for Max Crabtree in 1975 and 1976. The name on the poster was Kick Kick (sometimes Kwick Kick) Kingston. He was a man who had been quickly forgotten, even by those who had shared a dressing room, but there he was in the ring with Mark Rocco, Bert Royal, Alan Dennison and a handful of other well known names. He disappeared from our records seven months later in 1976.
There was little of interest in the wrestling, but elsewhere a sinister story emerged. John Kingston had been born in 1944, one of two children born to his mother and her first husband. It was a wartime romance, the marriage was short lived and the couple divorced shortly after the war ended.
In 1957 John’s mother married for a second time. Her new husband was Stanislaw Chrzanowski. He had been born in Slonin, now in Belarus, but at the time part of Poland. Slonin was taken by the Germans in June, 1941. Chrzanowski had fled Slonin in 1944, was captured as a Prisoner of War and joined the Polish army to fight in Italy. Or at least that’s the story he told. Following the war Chrzanowski had been invited to Britain by the Government under the European Voluntary Worker scheme, settled in Birmingham and met John’s mother in 1954 three years before their marriage. Teenager John and his sister were adopted by their new step-father.
All seemed well and Stanislaus appeared a genial man making good of the opportunities in his new country. John got on well with Stanislaw, admired him and considered him the father he had never had.
But all was not as it seemed. Stanislaw told his step son of stories from the war. They started as heroic tales of his life as a commander, but over time they changed and began to worry the youngster. They were not the usual stories a soldier might tell his son, but stories of adults being shot and children brutally murdered by hand. In graphic detail Stanislaus told of piling up bodies for burning. On one day alone 10,000 Slonin citizens were murdered. These were the atrocities he had witnessed. Only witnessed mind. Or at least that’s what he said. Increasingly disturbed by the revelations John began to suspect that his step-father was actively involved in Nazi atrocities.
John put such thoughts to the back of his mind. He brought up a family, worked as an electrician, a psychiatric nurse and dabbled in wrestling. But still he remembered the stories he had been told and photos he had seen. He became more and more inquisitive about what had been going on and found that Slonin citizens had been recruited to help in carrying out the killings. John had to discover if the unthinkable was thinkable. Could his step-father be a war criminal?
In 1996 he travelled to Chrzanowski’s Belarus home town of Slonin where thousands of Jews had been slaughtered. The horror unfolded. John collected further evidence that included eye witness accounts of Stanislaw Chrzanowski killing people. He was told that following the German invasion his step-father had worked for the occupiers shooting civilians and burying them in mass graves.
Back home John confronted Chrzanowski, even making recordings of their conversation, as he became convinced that his step father was guilty of war crimes. He sent his file to the Metropolitan Police’s War Crimes Department. Chrzanowski was interviewed by police who judged there was no evidence to bring charges.
Another two decades passed without anyone listening. Then John found an ally, a Shropshire journalist, Nick Southall. The journalist urged a British researcher, Doctor Stephen Ankier, to get involved. In 2017 war atrocity investigators in Germany asked for access to their evidence.
Although direct evidence of atrocities were not found it was established Chrzanowski had worked for the Nazis and there were sufficient grounds for British authorities to take action. Plans were made to raid Chrzanowski’s bungalow in Telford but he died of kidney failure in October, 2017 before the raid had taken place.
John Kingston died the following year on 12th March, 2018.
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