Trial after Russians’ party

Press, 11 June 1982, Page 4

Trial after Russians’ party

PA;,-. Auckland An accused man was stopped from telling the High Court at Auckland yesterday about his flight from the Nazi advance into Russia. Michael Galak; a cobbler, aged 52, .who ; was-born in Odessa in Russia, but who now lives in Pakuranga, was giving evidence against a charge of causing grievous bodily harm to another Russian immigrant at a party in Pakuranga on Christmas Day. 1981. ’ The Crown alleges that he stabbed Maria Shnayderman in the back a the knife. Defence counsel, Mr Kevin Ryan, said that Galak would tell the jury that he was

Jewish and had left Odessa for Siberia in the face of the German advance in 1941. When Galak entered the witness-box, he answered one question about his . flight to Siberia before Crown counsel, Mr Duncan Percv, intervened. Mr Percy said that the evidence was designed to elicit sympathy for the accused, and was irrelevant to the events at Pakuranga. ■Mr Justice Vautier said that he would not allow the evidence to continue unless it was relevant to psychiatric matters. Galak said that he had come to New Zealand with his wife and youngest child,

leaving two sons m me Soviet Union. He said that he had known Maria Shnayderman and her husband for several years. He had helped them as he, had helped many later Russian refugees. He ■ denied . that • their friendship had ceased after an incident last year between his daughter and the Shnayderman's daughter. At the Christmas party, attended by about 50 Russia'n immigrants, he drank six to eight half-litre bottles of Russian brandy, he said. He began to feel unwell and went home with his wife and another couple. They later returned to the pany and he remembered dancing

with his wife. “After that, I do not remember anything. I next remember being in a police car. I asked my wife why. She said I pushed a knife at Maria Shnayderman,” he said. Mr Ryan said that evidence would be given by Galak’s wife and son, now a doctor in Melbourne, that he was not a violent man. A brain scan since the incident had revealed a lesion between the “ventricles” of the brain. The defence would be that Galak could have been in the condition known as automatism at the time of the incident. The trial is continuing.