Eliezer Gruenbaum

kapo in the Auschwitz concentration camp

Polish Army in France, and later joined the French Resistance

forced labor or carrying out administrative tasks.^[6][2] He survived the camp, and after the war he was accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany, and of "mercilessly beating inmates".^[6] He was also accused of murdering "tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners".^[2] He defended himself claiming that he only accepted the position at the request of other Jews, who wanted one of their own in the position, which was otherwise often filled by antisemitic non-Jewish people, including German criminals.^[6] Research based on analysis of his memoirs, however, concluded that he became a kapo due to "intervention by communists".^[3] At the end of 1943 Gruenbaum was moved from the concentration camps to work in coal mines in Jawiszowice, and finally ended in the Buchenwald concentration camp.^[4] After the war, in 1945, he was tried by a communist tribunal on charges of participating in violent beatings, but was shortly acquitted.^[2][3] He resumed his political activities, advocating for the communist takeover of Poland, but he was soon arrested again, in France, accused by fellow Jews of having been the “head of the Birkenau death camp.”^[3] In a trial that lasted eight months, he was acquitted again, because the French court concluded that "neither the accused nor the victims were French".^[3][4] As noted by Galia Glasner-Heled and Dan Bar-On, "Eliezer Gruenbaum was never formally convicted, but nor was he actually acquitted of these accusations".^[3] He was not welcomed in France, nor in Poland, where the communist party expelled him from his ranks.^[3][4]