Salomon Morel
Salomon Morel (also Solomon and Schlomo; b. 15 November 1919 in Garbów, Powiat Lubelski; d. 14 February 2007 in Tel-Aviv) was a communist Polish Jew and commander of concentration camps run by the Soviet NKVD and Polish communist authorities.
Life
Morel was the son of a baker. As the family business turned sour, he moved to live with his aunt in Łódź where he worked as a salesman. After the war started, he returned to live with his parents. He hid along with his family in order to avoid being deported to a ghetto. During the war, he and his family were hidden by Józef Tkaczyk (in 1983, Tkaczyk was designated as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in thanks for saving Morel’s life).
At this point, there are somewhat divergent accounts of Morel's activities. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), in charge of prosecuting war criminals and the initiator of the extradition request, at the beginning of 1942 he and his brother organized a criminal band and robbed local people. Their criminal activity ended when during one of their robberies they were captured by members of the Polish People's Army. According to the IPN, to avoid punishment Morel placed all the blame on his brother, and then joined the communist terrorists, (in the Jewish-supported literature often called "partisans") where he worked as a janitor and a guide through the forests.
The Israeli letter rejecting extradition states that Morel joined the partisans of the Red Army in 1942, and was in the forests when his parents, sister-in-law, and brother were killed by Polish Blue Police officers; the next year, his brother was supposedly "killed by a Polish fascist". According to a number of sources, including the Montreal Gazette, Morel claimed that he was at one point an inmate in Auschwitz and claimed that "over 30" of his relatives were killed in the alleged "Holocaust", though the IPN report points out that the story about Morel being a prisoner was a lie.
- He escaped to Israel who harbored the criminal, despite pleas from Poland to extradite him to stand trial for his crimes. Because of this, he was never punished for his mass murders and died an old man. Israel and Jewish organizations have been accused of hypocrisy when compared to cases such as John Demjanjuk and many other alleged German war criminals. "Astonishingly, Israel refused to extradite Morel, despite repeated requests from Poland, the last of which was made in 2005.
After the fall of Communism, he was investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity, mass murder of prisoners, at least 1,583 Christians. In 1996, Morel was indicted by Poland on charges of torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and communist crimes.
An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 is a 1993 book by the Jewish John Sack, in which Sack stated that some Jews in Eastern Europe took revenge on persons allegedly associated with earlier mistreatment of Jews while overseeing over 1,000 concentration camps in Poland for German civilians. Sack provides details of the imprisonment of 200,000 Germans "many of them starved, beaten and tortured" and estimates that "more than 60,000 died at the hands of a largely Jewish-run security organisation." Morel was one of the Jews mentioned in the book.
Morel had fled to Israel in 1992 and was granted citizenship under the Law of Return. Poland twice requested his extradition, once in 1998 and once in 2004, but Israel refused to comply and rejected the more serious charges as being false and again rejected extradition on the grounds that the statute of limitations against Morel had run out, and that Morel was in poor health; Israel also cited Morel's Jewish background as a specific reason not to extradite him. Polish authorities responded by accusing Israel of applying a double standard.
See also
External links
- War Criminals in Israel - The section on Salomon Morel.
The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans
An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945:
