http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/holocaust-jew-accused-of-war-crimes/2005/07/10/1120934125780.html

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 to answer charges of genocide.

Holocaust Jew accused of war crimes



http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/holocaust-jew-accused-of-war-crimes/2005/07/10/1120934125780.html




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 to answer charges of genocide.

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 Auschwitz 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 a Jewish partisan brigade
before escaping to the Soviet Union, where he trained in the gruesome
interrogation methods of the NKVD, Stalin's 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.

"His favourite method of killing prisoners was hacking the skull of
his victims with a wooden leg of a chair," according to the book. "It
is quite possible that in Swietochlowice several thousand persons were
murdered by Morel and his men."

They would beat them and throw the bodies out of the window."
Camp survivorSack'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.

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.

Holocaust Jew accused of war crimes