Salomon Morel

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Salomon Morel, passport photo taken in 1993
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Salomon Morel, passport photo taken in 1993

Salomon (also Solomon or Shlomo) Morel (born November 15, 1919 in Grabowo, Poland) is a Polish Jew, who, between February and November 1945, was a member of Communist State Security, known in Polish as Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, and the commandant of the Stalinist-era labor camp "Zgoda" in Świętochłowice, Poland.

Officially people held in the camp were political prisoners and German nationals, but most of them were civilians - both German and Polish, including women and children. Up to 1,695 people (out of 6,000 inmates who had passed through the camp during this period) died there, most during a typhoid outbreak, the circumstances of which were never properly investigated. Morel has been accused of causing these deaths by deliberately starving, systematically torturing and mistreating prisoners, and failing to maintain sanitary conditions.

In 1992, he fled to Israel after these accusations began to be publicized in the Polish media. He has refused to return to Poland where he is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel has rejected several Polish requests for extradition, the last one in July 2005.

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[edit] During the war

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 when the war broke out in order to avoid being deported to a ghetto. During the war, he and his family were hidden by Józef Tkaczyk. In 1983 Józef 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 IPN, in charge of prosecuting war criminals and the initiator of the extradition request, at the beginning of 1942 he and his brother organised a criminal band and robbed local people. Their criminal activity ended when during one of their robberies they were captured by members of the Communist Polish People's Army. According to the IPN, to avoid punishment Morel placed all the blame on his brother, and then joined the Communist partisans, where he worked as a janitor and a guide through the forests[1]. 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 killed by a Polish fascist. According to a number of sources, including the Montreal Gazette and the British Telegraph, Morel himself was at one point an inmate in Auschwitz, and over 30 of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust, though this is not listed in the IPN report. (Montreal Gazette, January 2, 2005, p A8)

[edit] Zgoda camp

Zgoda camp was set up by the Soviet NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, after the Red Army's 'liberation' of southern Poland. The camp was later handed over to the Communist Polish secret service, the notorious Urząd Bezpieczeństwa. On March 15, 1945, Morel became a chief of the labor camp. According to Jonathan Sack: "On the first night at Swietochlowice, when the first contingent of Germans arrived, at about 10 o'clock at night he walked into one of the barracks and he said to the Germans, 'My name is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family, I think they're all dead, and I swore that if I got out alive, I was going to get back at you Nazis. And now you're going to pay for what you did.'"

Current research shows that 1,695 prisoners died due to the epidemic of dysentery, typhus and typhoid fever which resulted from hunger and bad sanitary conditions in the camp, and that Morel not only did nothing to prevent the spread of their diseases but in fact created conditions to facilitate their spread. He is charged with creating unbearable life conditions threatening of biological annihilation, specifically starvation, torture and physical and psychological abuse. As early as 1945 Salomon Morel’s superiors from the Ministry of Public Security – Prison System Department affirmed his responsibility for the spread of epidemics and penalized him by placing him under house arrest for three days.

[edit] Extradition controversy

In 1998, an extradition request for Morel was rejected by Israel. A reply sent to the Polish Justice Ministry from Israeli authorities said that Israel would not extradite Mr Morel as the statute of limitations had expired on the crimes against humanity and war crimes. In April 2004, Poland filed another extradition order against Morel, this time with fresh evidence, upgrading the case to "crimes against humanity." In July 2005 this request was again formally refused. The response 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 bad health. Ewa Koj, a prosecutor with the Polish government-run Institute of National Remembrance, criticized the decision saying:

How can a statute of limitations run out on crimes against humanity? There should be one measure for judging war criminals, irrespective whether they are German, Israeli, or any other nationality.[2] .

The IPN prosecutor also said that the case could not be "swept under the carpet" and added: The Israelis are extremely efficient in pursuing people they have accused of such crimes - and they must accept that other nations want to do the same.

Morel himself states that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, dismissing the allegations as an "anti-semitic plot".

[edit] Reference

[edit] External links

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