Salomon Morel

Salomon Morel (November 15, 1919 – February 14, 2007) 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. After Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Morel and his family went into hiding to avoid being placed in one of the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. Both Salomon and his brother survived part of the war and Holocaust under the protection of a local Polish farmer, before joining communist partisans. In 1944 Morel became warden of the Soviet NKVD prison at Lublin Castle. During most of 1945, he was commander of the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice. In 1949 he was made commander of Jaworzno concentration camp and remained a commandant of numerous concentration camps until they were all closed down in 1956 following the Polish October. He then worked as head of prison in Katowice and was promoted to the rank colonel in the political police, the MBP. He was dismissed during the 1968 Polish political crisis which saw the purging of ex-Stalinists. Beginning in the early 1990s Morel was investigated by Institute of National Remembrance for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the revenge killings of more than 1,500 prisoners in Upper Silesia, most of whom were either native speakers of Silesian German or Polish political prisoners. In 1996, he was indicted by Poland on charges of torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and communist crimes. After his case was publicized by the Polish, German, British, and American media, Morel fled to Israel 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...