Josef Lewkowicz
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Josef Lewkowicz (15 March 1926[1] – 26 December 2024) was a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter.
Lewkowicz was born in a shtetl in southeast Poland in 1926. At the age of 13, he witnessed the Nazi occupation of Poland. By the time he was 16, he had been separated from his mother and siblings, whom he never saw again. Together with his father, Symcha, Lewkowicz was requisitioned for forced labor and entered the concentration camp system in 1942. His father later died at Auschwitz.[2]
Lewkowicz was sent to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Kraków, in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland. The camp was then under the command of Amon Göth, later known as the "Butcher of Płaszów", whose brutality was depicted in the film Schindler's List. Lewkowicz later recounted that Goeth would kill people for looking him in the eye or for walking too slowly.[3] Lewkowicz would ultimately spend time in six different concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Mauthausen.[2] He was the sole survivor of his family during the Holocaust.[4]