Josef Lewkowicz, a Holocaust survivor who became a world-acclaimed Nazi hunter, died on Dec. 26. He was 98 years old.
As a teenager, Lewkowicz was sent to the Płaszów camp outside Krakow in Nazi-occupied Poland at the beginning of World War II and the Holocaust. He would ultimately survive six camps in total while in captivity and was the sole survivor of his family.
After the end of the war, Lewkowicz worked with the U.S. military to track down and identify SS leaders who had disappeared.
His most notable case was bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, SS commandant Amon Goeth, the “Butcher of Płaszów.” Goeth, played by British actor Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List,” was known for excessive and random brutality, even for a Nazi.
“I recognized him right away,” he told “The Current,” a current affairs program affiliated with CBC Radio One, in 2023. “I saw that murderer’s face. I knew it very, very well.”
In addition to his work hunting down Nazi officers, Lewkowicz is credited with rescuing roughly 600 Jewish refugee children displaced during the war who were living in orphanages and monasteries throughout Poland.
In the years that followed, Lewkowicz acknowledged that he was reluctant to talk about his experiences of the Holocaust. Instead, he worked to help other survivors while rebuilding his own life.
He worked as a diamond dealer in South America, then married and raised a family in Montreal, where he became an active member of the Jewish community before moving to Jerusalem.
It was at the urging of his children that he began to share his story publicly.
In 2019, Lewkowicz was the subject of the documentary “The Survivor’s Revenge,” produced by JRoots, a charity with which he collaborated for many years.
Lewkowicz’s book, The Survivor, was published in the United Kingdom in March 2023 and has since been translated into 12 languages. It is slated to be released in the United States on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, 2025.
