[3] Tax records indicate that his personal income may have been relatively low, and he does not appear to have had an active role in local social or political organizations.

Conditions were extremely harsh in the town, which had not fully recovered from a devastating fire a few years prior and suffered from an epidemic of typhus in late 1941.

The few surviving records of his tenure in this position include letters to the offices in Kraków and Krasnystaw appealing for help setting up a soup kitchen.

However, on 16 October 1942, the entire remaining Jewish population of Żółkiewka was deported to the nearby Izbica Ghetto, including Felhendler himself.

[6] Upon his arrival at Sobibor, Felhendler was selected for labour due to the intervention of a cousin who told the Germans that he was a skilled carpenter.

[7] The uprising, which took place on 14 October 1943, was detected in its early stages after a guard discovered the body of an SS officer killed by the prisoners.

The city was taken by the Soviet Red Army on 24 July 1944 and became the temporary headquarters of the Soviet-controlled communist Polish Committee of National Liberation established by Joseph Stalin.

According to most of the older publications, Felhendler was killed by right-wing Polish nationalists,[9][10][11][12][13] sometimes identified as the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne,[14][15] an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic[16][17][18] partisan unit.

[19] The only concrete document found by local Polish scholars is a record of Felhendler's hospital admission at Wincentego á Paulo describing the injury.

[20] Meanwhile, as noted by Marcin Wroński, the communist press in the Soviet-controlled Lublin routinely accused former AK and WIN partisans of common crime as part of ideological warfare.