Salomon Morel - World War II

World War II

Morel's family went into hiding during World War II in order to avoid being placed in the ghetto. According to his own story of courage in the face of German occupation – that was told by Solomon Morel himself while in Israel ("mandolin with him... In his other fist was his Mauser") – Morel's mother, father and one brother were killed by Polish collaborators during Christmas of 1942. Solomon Morel and his brother Izaak survived the Holocaust hidden by Józef Tkaczyk, a Polish Catholic. In 1983, Józef Tkaczyk was designated as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for saving the Morel brothers.

The official Polish accounts of Morel's wartime activities however, differ substantially from his own story. According to the Institute of National Remembrance, at the beginning of 1942 Salomon Morel and his brother Izaak organised a criminal band to commit robberies in the surrounding villages. Their criminal activity ended when during one of their robberies they were captured by members of the Polish People's Army. To avoid punishment Morel placed the blame on his brother, and then joined the Soviet partisans in the Parczew area (see also Parczew partisans), where he worked as a janitor and a guide through the forests. His two brothers died during the war, one in 1943, another in 1945.

The Israeli mass media and government presented yet a different version of his life. The Israeli letter rejecting extradition states that Morel joined the partisans of the Red Army in 1942, and was in the forests when his parents, sister-in-law, and one brother were allegedly killed by Polish Blue Police. According to a number of media sources, Morel claimed that he was at one point an inmate in Auschwitz and over thirty of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

As the Eastern Front advanced, Morel and other communist partisans came out of hiding. In the summer of 1944, Morel organized the Citizen Militia in Lublin. Later, he became a prison commander at the Lublin Castle, where many soldiers of the anti-communist Armia Krajowa (Home Army) were imprisoned and tortured.