The Current24:00Meet Josef Lewkowicz, the 96-year-old Nazi hunter
Josef Lewkowicz survived the slaughter of six different concentration camps during the Holocaust — and then set about hunting down the escaped Nazis who killed his family and countless others.
It wasn’t long before he came face-to-face with Amon Goeth, the Nazi commander of the Plaszow concentration camp — where Lewkowicz himself had been brutalized.
“When I saw him … [he was] lying on the ground, on the dirt, dressed like a beggar, half of his [former] size,” said Lewkowicz, who survived six concentration camps during the Holocaust.
“I recognized him right away … I saw that murderer’s face, I knew it very, very well,” he told The Current’s guest host Susan Ormiston.
Now 96, Lewkowicz was just a teenager when he was sent to Plaszow, the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where thousands were murdered. Goeth was the camp’s commandant, whose murder and brutality became infamous, and was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the film Schindler’s List.
WATCH | Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth. Warning: This video cotains upsetting scenes:
Lewkowicz details some of Goeth’s atrocities in his memoir The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter, co-authored with Michael Calvin.
He writes that Goeth would kill people for looking him in the eye, or for walking too slowly. On one occasion, Goeth pulled a prisoner called Shlomo Spielman out of a line-up.
‘[Goeth] said in German, ‘I cannot take it. A Jew looking so handsome’ — POW, POW, POW. Gave him a few bullets,” Lewkowicz said.
When the war ended, Lewkowicz was enlisted by the U.S. to hunt down and identify the prominent Nazis he had encountered. He knew that Goeth had been initially arrested, but then slipped away, so he set about combing the prison camps in search of him.
At a prison camp at Dachau, only months after the war ended, a soldier directed him to the man he was looking for.
Lewkowicz said his blood started to boil as he approached Goeth, who was crumpled on the ground in an ill-fitting soldier’s uniform.
“I said, ‘You don’t get up from the floor?’ and kicked him a few times and then started punching him,” he said.
“And I called him all the names that he used to call us. I remember them.”
‘Save your bullet, he is dead’
In the decades that followed the war, Lewkowicz worked to help other survivors — as well as rebuilding his own life. He worked as a diamond dealer in South America, and married and raised a family in Montreal, where he was a pillar of the Jewish community. He now lives in Jerusalem.
He’s mindful that he’s lived a long and fruitful life that was denied to the millions who died in the Holocaust, including his own family.
“My mother, my siblings, my uncles, my whole family were brought there … into those chambers and gassed them,” he said.
Lewkowicz himself came close to being killed by Goeth in Plaszow, where the teenager had been assigned to construction work. One day he and another prisoner were dismantling a wall. Goeth was nearby, watching as Lewkowicz climbed up and threw bricks down to the other man.
When the man failed to catch one of the bricks, Goeth shot him.
“Then he asked me to come down, and he took his gun,” Lewkowicz said. He remembers Goeth pointing the gun directly at his head.
He has no memory of what happened next, but woke up a few days later covered in cuts and bruises. He went to see Wilek Chilowicz, the chief of the camp police, who would often give Lewkowicz small amounts of food in exchange for him shining his boots.
“He told me the story that Amon Goeth was to shoot me, so [Chilowicz] beat me up. I fainted and fell on the floor and didn’t move,” Lewkowicz said.
“And he said to Amon Goeth, ‘Save your bullet, he is dead.'”
Goeth lost interest and left, and Chilowicz had Lewkowicz’s unconscious body dragged away.
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‘Amon, tell me, why did you do this?’
When the war ended and Lewkowicz was liberated, he worked with the U.S. military police to track down SS officers at large. He was young, spoke four languages, and had first-hand experiences of some of the men the Allies were trying to find.
He said that when people hear the story of how he found Goeth in that prison camp, they often ask why he didn’t shoot him there and then.
“I say, ‘Shooting him would be giving him a reward for his deeds. No, not so easy. Let him suffer a little bit,'” he said.
“Bring him to court, bring witnesses … what else can you do to a guy that has on his conscience tens of thousands?”
He told The Current that “anger takes you nowhere, anger is not the answer.”
Goeth was tried for war crimes in Poland, and sentenced to death. He was hanged in September 1946, not far from the site of the Płaszów camp.
Before he was executed, Lewkowicz visited Goeth in his cell.
“I put my arm over his shoulder and I said … ‘Amon, tell me, why did you do this and why did you do that?'” he said.
“‘Who asked you to do it? Tell me. Tell me, we are two together here, just one man to another.'”
Lewkowicz wanted to see if Goeth felt any remorse. But the Nazi never responded to his questions, never said a word.
“I came to the conclusion that he would have done it again.”
Fighting a rising evil
For decades, Lewkowicz didn’t speak about his experiences of the Holocaust.
“I wanted to forget. I didn’t want to look back. I just wanted to look at the future because the back was terrible, fearful, demoralizing,” he said.
His adult children urged him to share his story, but he was finally convinced by Rabbi Naftali Schiff, head of the not-for-profit Jewish Futures.
“He insisted, ‘You have to tell the story. People have to know what happened,'” he said.
When Lewkowicz asked him why, he says Schiff responded, “‘Because we have to tell this story again and again in order that it should never happen again.'”
Now, he sees his story of survival as a way to commemorate the millions who were murdered, as well as a way to fight the rising antisemitism around the world.
“The Holocaust was so well documented all over the world, and there are deniers running around and denying it,” he said.
“We have to fight that evil. We have to do everything possible.”
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