A Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of half a dozen different concentration camps before going on to become a Nazi hunter after the war, has passed away at the age of 98.
Josef Lewkowicz was just a teenager when he was sent to Płaszów camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust, when more than 150 members of his family perished.
After the war, he “dedicated his life” to rounding up SS leaders and bringing them to justice, which included his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Płaszów, Amon Göth – the infamous camp commandant who was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the 1993 film Schindler’s List.
President Herzog with Josef Lewkowicz, Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, and Rabbi Schiff on a JRoots trip to Israel
In 1946, Lewkowicz tracked down Göth and then solicited further identification of him by former inmates of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in order to bring him to trial in Poland.
He later recounted finding Göth, the man who had brutalised and murdered countless fellow prisoners, in person: “When I saw him, [he was] lying on the ground, on the dirt, dressed like a beggar, half of his [former] size. I recognised him right away. I saw that murderer’s face, I knew it very, very well.”
Lewkowicz is also credited with rescuing hundreds of Jewish child refugees displaced during the war and living in orphanages and monasteries throughout Poland.
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The Survivor, a book recounting Lewkowicz’s remarkable story which has been translated into 12 languages, was published last year and is set for release in the USA on Holocaust Memorial Day next month.
He is also the subject of a documentary, The Survivor’s Revenge, produced by Jewish charity JRoots, which depicts his heroic actions in repatriating some 600 Jewish children. Lewkowicz himself attended the documentary’s premiere in London in 2019.
Charities JRoots and Jewish Futures, with whom Lewkowicz collaborated for many years, said he was a “father figure, a mentor, teacher and friend”, who will be “sorely missed by the tens of thousands of young lives he impacted”.
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Rabbi Naftali Schiff, the chief executive of Jewish Futures and co-founder of JRoots, who was also the documentary’s executive producer, said “Reb Yosef”, as Lewkowicz was affectionally called, had a “long, arduous journey involving the greatest challenges known to mankind; trials and tribulations of the highest magnitude that he bore with courage, bravery, faith and commitment, with an unswerving devotion to Yiddishkeit and life itself.
“When he first became ill, the first thing he said to me was, ‘Naftali, we’ve done some good things together, but we’ve only just started, promise me you’ll continue. So many young Jews don’t know who they are. We must show them.’
“I remember once, he was surrounded by a JRoots group of high school students and there couldn’t perhaps be a greater ‘revenge’ for Reb Yosef than dancing together with this younger generation with a new Sefer Torah completed on the grounds of that accursed place of evil.”
Joseph Lewkowicz died on the evening of December 26 in Jerusalem.
