July 1944 and became the temporary headquarters of the Soviet-controlled communist Polish Committee of National Liberation established by Joseph Stalin. However, on 2 April 1945, Felhendler was shot through the closed door of his flat as he got up to investigate a commotion in an outer room. Felhendler and his wife managed to escape through another door and made their way to Lublin's Św. Wincentego á Paulo hospital, where he underwent surgery, but died four days later. According to most of the older publications, Felhendler was killed by right-wing Polish nationalists, sometimes identified as the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic partisan unit. However, more recent inquiries, citing the incomplete treatment of the event by earlier historians, and the scant documentary record, have called into question this version of events. The only concrete document found by local Polish scholars is a record of Felhendler's hospital admission at Wincentego á Paulo describing the injury. Dr Kopciowski wrote that Feldhendler was likely shot in an armed robbery gone bad, because he was known locally as a budding gold trader. Meanwhile, as noted by Marcin Wroński, communist press in the Soviet-controlled Lublin routinely accused former AK and WIN partisans of common crime as part of ideological warfare. Felhendler's killing was one of at least 118 violent deaths of Jews in the Lublin district between the summer of 1944 and the autumn of 1946. Honours and awards Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta - awarded posthumously by President of Poland Andrzej Duda on 14 October 2018 during the commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the uprising in Sobibor extermination camp. Order of Courage of the Russian Federation – awarded posthumously by President of Russia Vladimir Putin on 17 July 2019. The award was presented by Putin to Leon Felhendler's great niece, Nitza Shahham, during the opening ceremony of the Candle of Remembrance memorial to the victims of the Leningrad siege on 23 January 2020 at Jerusalem. Felhendler in culture In the 1987 made-for-TV film Escape from Sobibor he was played by Alan Arkin. Felhendler's life in Lublin is mentioned in the 2005 book Wyjątkowo długa linia by Hanna Krall. It was written about tenants of a local tenement house, and nominated for the Nike Award. References 1910 births 1945 deaths People from Biłgoraj County People from Lublin Governorate Jews from the Russian Empire Polish Jews who died in the Holocaust Sobibor