- Poland is demanding the extradition from Israel of an
elderly Jewish man accused of the deaths of hundreds of Germans in a post-war
detention camp.
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- Solomon Morel, 86, faces charges of "crimes against
humanity" in relation to more than 1,500 inmates at a camp in southern
Poland, many of whom perished in "barbaric" circumstances.
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- The investigation is the first in Poland into a Jew accused
of retaliating against the Germans, and poses potentially awkward questions
for Israel about its attitude towards those allegedly involved in revenge
killings. Israeli officials turned down a previous extradition request
six years ago when there were suspicions that the case was politically
motivated.
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- Mr Morel, who fled to Israel from Poland in 1994 and
lives in hiding in Tel Aviv, was held in Auschwitz as a young man. More
than 30 members of his family were wiped out by the Nazis.
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- In November 1945, after the Soviet occupation of Poland
began, he was one of many Jews appointed by Stalin to supervise the brutal
"de-Nazification" camps, where up to 80,000 ethnic Germans are
believed to have died as a result of torture, starvation and typhus.
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- Stalin deliberately picked Jews as camp commandants in
the knowledge that they would show little mercy to the inmates.
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- According to John Sack, the late author of An Eye for
An Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Morel
made his desire for revenge clear from the first day the camp at Swietochlowice
opened.
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- In a television interview before his death earlier this
year, Mr Sack said: "On the first night at Swietochlowice, when the
first contingent of Germans arrived, at about 10 o'clock at night he walked
into one of the barracks and he said to the Germans, 'My name is Morel.
I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family, I think they're all dead,
and I swore that if I got out alive, I was going to get back at you Nazis.
And now you're going to pay for what you did.' "
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- In his book, Mr Sack, himself a Jew, describes in detail
the alleged atrocities committed at the camp: "The guards put the
Germans into a doghouse, beating them if they didn't say 'bow-wow'. They
got the Germans to beat each other; to jump on each other's spines and
to punch each other's noses, and hit the Germans so hard that they once
knocked a German's glass eye out."
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- Guards also raped German women and trained dogs to bite
off German men's genitals on command, he said.
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- Mr Morel is thought to have changed his name, although
his whereabouts are understood to be known to the Israeli authorities.
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- A request for his extradition by Poland in 1998 was rejected
by Israel on the grounds that the statute of limitations on the charges
had run out.
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- Prosecutors claim to have built up a stronger case, based
on fresh testimony from survivors in Poland and Germany, and have upgraded
the charges to crimes against humanity, on which there is no time limit.
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- The Polish public prosecutor leading the case, Eva Kok,
insisted that even though Mr Morel was a frail, elderly man, the claims
could not be "swept under the carpet". She added: "The Israelis
are extremely efficient in pursuing people they have accused of such crimes
- and they must accept that other nations want to do the same."
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- Ms Kok insisted that suggestions that the case was politically
motivated were an insult. "The prosecutors are not motivated by politics
and operate in the interests of the law regardless of who is in power,"
she said.
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- The Israeli Justice Ministry said it was "in the
process of examining" the extradition request.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
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