On the first night at Zgoda concentration camp, Solomon Morel walked into a barrack and told the German prisoners, “My name is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family, ...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.” If you want to read more about Jewish revenge against Germans, please see this.
Polish collaborators kill parents and his brothers
Morel watched from a haystack as his mother, father and brother were picked up by Polish collaborators. They wanted to know where Solomon and his other brother were. The mother wouldn't tell them. Then the Poles shot them dead one at a time. Morel watched with hay stuffed in his mouth so his cries would not be heard.
After that the Morel brothers were hidden in the pigsty and stable of a Polish neighbor, Jozef Tkaczyk. Solomon and brother Icek joined the partisans. Shortly thereafter, Icek was driving a horse-drawn sleigh with the partisans when he was killed by Poles. Ironically, Morel did not hate the Poles for murdering his entire family, according to John Sack, because they also had saved him.
"Harmful element in the prison administration"
After Soviet liberation, Morel began work in the militia of the Office of State Security. He was hired as a prison guard in Lublin. Within a month of his appointment, however, a report suggested dismissal of Morel as a “harmful element in the prison administration” because he did "not perform [his] duties conscientiously, [did] not attempt to comply with prison regulations, and behave[d] arrogantly…”
Morel was sent to work in Upper Silesia. Upon his arrival, the 26-year-old Morel -- considered a “harmful element in the prison administration” -- was put in charge of the concentration camp at Swietochlowice called Zgoda (“Harmony”). It was a sub-camp of Auschwitz.
The Zgoda camp was overcrowded. Its maximum capacity was estimated at 1,400-1,500 people. By March 1945 there were 1,062 in Zgoda. The population peaked in the summer of 1945, when it reached over 5,000 in August. Most prisoners were ordinary Germans. Very few were true Nazis. Only a handful were ever convicted of anything.
Morel brutalizes prisoners
Morel brought Jewish and Polish guards -- sometimes drunken -- into barrack 7 of accused Nazis or Hitler youth. It was called either the Deutsches Haus or the “brown barracks.” Morel had them sing Nazi songs and then he began to beat them. Depending upon his mood, he would use his bare hands, a wooden stool, a pistol butt or a truncheon. The guards beat the Germans with clubs.
Morel asked, “How many blows do you want?” If the answer was unsatisfactory, it was fifty blows. It was reported that the “ritual of the organized tormenting of prisoners took place virtually every night…” When using the wooden stool, Morel would beat prisoners until the stool broke apart. The corpses were left on the floor. At dawn, they were taken in a horse-drawn cart to a cemetery by the Rawa river where they were dumped into a mass grave.
A report about Zgoda states that, “Groups of prisoners brought to the camp were made to stand in the camp square for many hours, without food or drink, and sometimes in bad weather. Some prisoners spent at least a dozen or so hours in this state, and some as much as 72 hours.”
One "particularly cruel" method of abusing prisoners was to have them stand in two rows facing each other and beating each other. If someone refused or did so too weakly, he was beaten by camp personnel.
Hunger was pervasive in the camp. The "normal" ration was a slice of bread and watery soup with no fat content. Prisoners ate grass from the ground or scraps of food they found. They were given rusted tin cans for eating the soup. They was no soap and only cold water.
Epidemics and death in Swietochlowice
Poor sanitary conditions and substandard food rations led to an epidemic of dysentery, typhus and typhoid. The doctors vaccinated the camp personnel against typhus, but did not concern themselves with the prisoners -- "there was no delousing, no isolation of the sick."
During August, 632 prisoners died in Zgota. The camp personnel did not report all of the deaths. The official death toll is 1,855 because "that is the number of files of dead prisoners, including their death certificates." There are 1,581 deaths recorded in the Registry Office in Swietochlowice, most of which are signed by Solomon Morel.
According to testimony of Jozef C., a guard at Zgoda, in the absence of Morel, "...an officer acting as his replacement ordered...10 sick persons be taken to the hospital in Swietochlowice. They all had typhus...But when two carts carrying the sick prisoners were leaving the camp, Solomon Morel appeared in his car and ordered the prisoners to be returned to the camp."
Upon the liquidation of Zgoda, Morel was punished with "a three-day house arrest and a deduction of 50% of his pay for allowing the spread of the typhus epidemic...as well as for other distortions in running the camp."
Post-communist investigation into Zgoda
Investigations into the Zgoda camp began with a letter in 1989 (after the fall of Communism in Poland). Morel was interviewed in 1991. He fled to Israel in 1993. In 1995, the matter was given to the Prosecutor's office in Kattowice with a request "that charges be formulated against Morel." An indictment against Morel was prepared. In 1998, the Polish Ministry of Justice submitted to Israeli authorities an application for Morel's extradition to Poland. It was rejected because "under Israeli law, the crimes of which Morel was accused had lapsed under the statute of limitations."
After obtaining access to "many hitherto unknown documents" on Zgoda, the charges against Morel were changed to "Communist crimes against the population." A second request for Morel's extradition was submitted to Israeli authorities in 2004. Again it was rejected. The Israelis said charges were "anti-Semitic" in character. Morel died in 2007.
Sources
Response by the State of Israel to the application for the extradition of Salomon Morel and a report by Dr. Adam Dziurok and Prosecutor Andrzej Majcher on the subject of Salomon Morel and the history and operation of the camp at Swietochlowice-Zgoda.
Sack, John. An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945. Basic Books, New York, 1993.
The Commandant. Transcript of story on 60 Minutes, November 24, 1993.
An Eye for an Eye Corroboration.
de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice. A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950. St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994.
Eric Brothers - Eric Brothers' forthcoming book,The Berlin Ghetto, will be published by The History Press in the U.K. in 2012.
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