Adam
LeBor
The
Indepedent | December 29, 1998
An
extradition request by Polish authorities for an alleged former commander of a
Stalinist-era detention camp now living in Tel Aviv has been rejected by
Salomon
Morel is wanted by the prosecutor's office in the southern Polish city of
A
reply sent to the Polish Justice Ministry from Israeli authorities said that
The
demand by Polish authorities for Mr Morel's extradition is the second attempt
this month to bring back former Communist officials. The Polish military
prosecutor in
During
the 1950s Ms Wolinska worked as a military prosecutor in
Swietochlowice
was set up by the Soviet NKVD - forerunner of the KGB - after the Red Army's
liberation of southern
Stalin's
policy was to put Jews in charge of camps. Their experiences during the Nazi
Holocaust would mean that Germans and Poles held there could expect little
mercy. More than half of the 3,000 prisoners at Swietochlowice were murdered or
died there, according to PAP.
Dorota
Boriczek, a camp survivor, remembers Salomon Morel as a barbaric and cruel man
who, with his colleagues, was responsible for many killings of inmates. "I
knew Morel in the camp. He was a very brutal man. He was young then. He would
come in at night. We could hear the cries of the men then. They would beat them
and throw the bodies out of the window," Mrs Boriczek, now 68 andliving in
"I
was taken there when I was 14, with my mother. I still don't know why we were
there and I still want to know. They told us when we arrived, 'You are here,
and you are here to die, although nobody will shoot you, because ammunition is
too expensive'."
Conditions
in the camp were horrific, said Mrs Boriczek, who has begun a legal process in
"There
was nothing to eat, a hunger that you cannot imagine. We were lucky to have a
piece of bread once a day, nothing else, and water. Both my mother and I had
typhus. We were separated and I didn't know she was alive. I had a high fever
and when I opened my eyes, I was sleeping next to a lady from
Mr
Morel, born in 1919, lost much of his family in the Holocaust before joining
the partisans, in his case a Jewish military unit, according to John Sack, the
American author of An Eye for An Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge
Against Germans in 1945.
In
1995, 50 years after her imprisonment at Swietochlowice, Mrs Boriczek saw Mr
Morel in the
"I
hated him all my life and then when I saw him I saw an old, fat man. I could
see he was ill. I would even have given him my hand. I asked him why he did
these crimes. He told me I was lying and everybody loved him."
Mr
Morel refused to speak to The Independent. A man in Tel Aviv who identified
himself as Mr Morel's son said his father did not talk to journalists.