1. Salomon Morel was an officer in the Ministry of Public Security in the Polish People's Republic, and a commander of concentration camps run by the NKVD and communist authorities until 1956.
21 Facts About Salomon Morel
1. 2.
In 1944 Salomon Morel became warden of the Soviet NKVD prison at Lublin Castle.
3.
Salomon Morel then worked as head of prison in Katowice and was promoted to the rank colonel in the political police, the MBP.
4.
Salomon Morel was dismissed during the 1968 Polish political crisis which saw the purging of ex-Stalinists.
5.
Polish authorities responded by accusing Israel of applying a double standard, and the controversy over Salomon Morel's extradition continued until his death.
6.
Salomon Morel was born on November 15,1919, in the village of Garbow near Lublin, Poland, the son of a Jewish baker who owned a small bakery.
7.
Salomon Morel's family went into hiding during World War II to avoid being placed in the ghetto.
8.
The Israeli letter rejecting extradition states that Salomon Morel joined the partisans of the Red Army in 1942, and was in the forests when his parents, sister-in-law, and one brother were allegedly killed by Blue Police.
9.
Solomon Salomon Morel's preferred method of torture was the ice water tank where prisoners would be put in with freezing water up to their necks until they died.
10.
Salomon Morel was accused of an extensive pattern of sadistic torture in John Sack's book An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, which contributed to publicizing his case in the Anglophone world in the 1990s.
11.
From February 1949 to November 1951 Salomon Morel was commander of Jaworzno concentration camp, a Stalinist-era concentration camp for political prisoners in Poland.
12.
Salomon Morel left the camp when it was turned into a camp for adolescent political prisoners.
13.
Salomon Morel continued working as commandant of Stalinist-era concentration camps until 1956.
14.
Salomon Morel was dismissed from his position in May 1968 in the wake of the 1968 Polish political crisis, which saw the purging of both Jewish officials and ex-Stalinists.
15.
Unlike most other Polish Jews, and although the Polish communist government pressured Jews to emigrate, Salomon Morel nevertheless chose to remain in Poland, and lived there as a retiree from the age of 49.
16.
In 1996 Salomon Morel was formally indicted of genocide by the Polish public prosecutor's office.
17.
In 1998, Poland requested that Salomon Morel be extradited for trial, but Israel refused.
18.
The charges against Salomon Morel were based primarily on the evidence of over 100 witnesses, including 58 former inmates of the Zgoda camp.
19.
The response rejected the more serious charges as being false, potentially part of an antisemitic conspiracy, and again rejected extradition on the grounds that the statute of limitations against Salomon Morel had run out, and that Salomon Morel was in poor health.
20.
Salomon Morel died in Tel Aviv on February 14,2007, seventeen years after the investigation and prosecution of him started.
21.
Salomon Morel was awarded medals by the communist Polish state, was prosecuted by the post-communist Polish state, and was defended by the Israeli state, though he had expressed no interest in moving to Israel until half a century after the war, and even then only after he started to fear prosecution.