Genocide

depriving them of basic medical care and carrying out and sanctioning torture by his subordinates - including imprisoning prisoners in small cells filled with water, trampling them or making them stand for long hours, singing Nazi songs.

Morel was born in 1919 in the Polish village of Garbow. He was 20 when Germany invaded Poland and the Nazis began to round up Polish Jews. About 30 members of his family, including his mother and father, both brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins, died in the Holocaust.

In Christmas 1942, Nazi collaborators arrived at the family home while Morel and one of his brothers were out. His mother was forced to watch as her husband and son were shot dead before she was killed.

Morel witnessed the murders with his other brother, Yitzhak, from the top of a haystack in a field, before they fled and took refuge with a local family. Within a few months, the two brothers had joined the Polish Jewish partisans.

Morel’s brother was later ambushed and shot by Nazi collaborators while driving a sleigh for the partisans. Morel was eventually imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp. He moved to Israel in 1994, to flee Polish authorities.

Mr Kieres said Morel is believed responsible for at least 1,538 deaths at the camp.

Speaking after Israel’s rejection of the first extradition request five years ago, Dorota Boriczek recalled the almost commonplace brutality in the camp.

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

"I was taken there when I was 14, with my mother. I still don’t know why we were there, and I still want to know. They told us when we arrived: ‘You are here, and you are here to die, although nobody will shoot you, because ammunition is too expensive’."

Mrs Boriczek said conditions at the camp were barbaric. "There was nothing to eat, a hunger that you cannot imagine. We were lucky to have a piece of bread once a day, nothing else, and water," she said.

"Both my mother and I had typhus. We were separated and I didn’t know she was alive. I had a high fever and when I opened my eyes, I was sleeping next to a lady from Switzerland. I slept with her under one blanket. I was happy that she was dead, because that meant I could have her blanket."

The investigation against Morel is the only one in Poland against a Jew accused of retaliating against the Germans.

Polish historians generally agree that the communist government imprisoned 100,000 Germans, mostly civilians, who were deemed threats to the state. At least 15,000 died due to ill-treatment and the rest were freed by 1950.