Salomon Morel was a Jewish-officer in the [Polish-Communist] Ministry of Public Security in the Polish People’s Republic & commander, Polish communist concentration camps, run by the NKVD until 1956. During most of 1945, Morel was commander of the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice.

When Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Morel & his family went into hiding to avoid being placed in one of the Jewish ghettos. Morel’s mother, father and one brother were killed by the Blue Police [se my blog post] during Christmas of 1942. Both Salomon and his brother survived part of the war under the protection of a local Polish farmer, hidden by Józef Tkaczyk, a Polish Catholic (Righteous Among the Nations, see my blog post), before Morel joined communist partisans - accounts of his WW2 and his families experience at this horrific time vary. Morel claimed that he was at one point an inmate in Auschwitz and over 30 of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1944 Morel became warden of the Soviet NKVD prison at Lublin Castle where many soldiers of the anti-communist Armia Krajowa (Home Army) were imprisoned and tortured.

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. Dorota Boriczek, an internee, described Morel as “a barbaric and cruel man” who often personally tortured and killed prisoners. Gerhard Gruschka, a local Upper Silesian of Polish descent, was imprisoned in Zgoda when he was 14 years old and wrote a book about his experiences, detailing the endemic torture and abuse in the camp. Morel was also 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 (2000) in 1945, contributed to publicizing his case in the Anglophone world.

Morel then worked as head of prison in Katowice and was promoted to the rank colonel in the political police, known as the MBP (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego). He was dismissed during the 1968 Polish political crisis which saw the purging of ex-Stalinists. 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.

Morel emigrated to Israel in 1992. In 1998, Poland requested that Morel be extradited for trial, but Israel refused. A reply sent to the Polish Justice Ministry from the Israeli government said that Israel would not extradite Mr. Morel as the statute of limitations had expired on war crimes.

In April 2004, Poland again filed another extradition request against Morel, this time with fresh evidence, upgrading the case to communist crimes against the population. Charges against Morel were based primarily on the evidence of over 100 witnesses, including 58 former inmates of the Zgoda camp.

In July 2005 this request was again formally refused by the Israeli government. 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 Morel had run out, and that Morel was in poor health.

Anne Applebaum (in 2012) describes Morel as: “a Holocaust victim, a communist criminal, a man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, a man consumed by a sadistic fury against Germans and Poles – a fury which may or may not have originated from his victimhood, and may or may not have been connected to his communism. He was deeply vengeful, and profoundly violent. He 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.” See Applebaum, Anne Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (2012).

Polish journalist Marek Łuszczyna published a book, Mała zbrodnia. Polskie obozy koncentracyjne (“The little crime: Polish concentration camps”) about Zgoda and other Polish concentration camps that operated after the war.