Pot Calling The Kettle

Allan Hall 7/11/05


An old Jewish man who took his own cold-blooded

revenge against

Germans for the

Holocaust will not be extradited back to Poland from Israel
The case of Solomon Morel, 86, is the only one in

Holocaust history where a Jew

stands accused of war crimes against Germans.

It has perplexed legal minds in both countries.

Poland says genocide is

genocide whether a Jew or a Nazi committed it, while

many Israelis

see rough justice in the 1500 German deaths for which

Mr Morel is

alleged to be responsible.

Now the Israeli Government has said that Mr Morel will

not be

sent back to stand trial in Poland under any circumstances.

Mr Morel, who came from the little Polish town of Grabowo,

claims he was an
survivor whose family was murdered by the Nazis during

World War II. A book, An Eye for an Eye, which

documents his

strange life,

claims his family was indeed liquidated, but by Poles who

collaborated

with the Nazis. It also says that he was never imprisoned

by the

Germans.By 1943 he was employed peeling potatoes for

Jewish partisan

brigade before escaping to the Soviet Union, where

he trained in the

gruesome interrogation methods of the NKVD,

Stalin political police,

before returning to Poland in 1945. He was then put in

charge by the

communists of a camp containing thousands of

German prisoners

including SS men, soldiers and civilians.John Sack,

the Jewish-American author of An Eye for an Eye,

claims Mr Morel,

as commandant of Swietochlowice Camp, morphed into

the kind of monster that would have been welcomed by

the Gestapo.
Sack's book, and a score of Polish books and newspaper

articles,

said he beat, shot, starved, tortured and killed with gusto

in the camp.
"I knew Morel in the camp. He was a very brutal man,"

survivor Dorota Boriczek said. "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."

In 1989, a Polish reporter found Mr Morel living in a part

of Katowice

assigned for former uniformed functionaries of communist

terror.
In the early 1990s,

the Main Commission for the

Investigations of Crimes Against the Polish Nation

started an official investigation of Mr Morel's activities in

the Swietochlowice Camp after witness articles appeared

in the press.

In 1994, Mr Morel sought political asylum in Sweden. .

This was refused. He then successfully sought sanctuary

in Israel.

Poland tried to extradite him seven years ago on torture

charges.

Israel refused. So prosecutors began preparing a genocide

case,

for which there is no statute of limitations.

Last week, they received a blank refusal from
Israel saying "there was no basis whatsoever" to extradite

Mr Morel.
THE KICKER-
A Polish prosecutor said

testimony from former inmates documented

Mr Morel's torture of at least 13 prisoners.

"There should be one measure for judging war criminals,

irrespective whether they are German, Israeli,

or any other nationality," the prosecutor said.
thank you brother fivel


amshinover lives in amshinov plus or minus a week