THE NAZI-HUNTER’S TALE

Teenage death camp inmate Josef Lewkowicz feared he would die when its commandant, Amon Goeth, held a gun to his head and threatened to pull the trigger.

But, in an extraordinary twist of fate, he survived and turned Nazi hunter, bringing Goeth to justice at a post-war tribunal.

Now, 80 years later, launching his autobiography, The Survivor, at an event in London (above, top right and below right), he recounted how close he had come to death. “It is one miracle to have survived the war in the camps. But I can tell you every day I had miracles,” he said.

Born in south-eastern Poland in 1926, after the Nazis invaded Lewkowicz was orphaned and forced to endure the brutal conditions of Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. He was then transferred to Płaszów under the command of the increasingly unhinged Goeth

later immortalised in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List as a rifle-wielding psychopath executing Jews at random.

“When you saw him from afar you started shaking, Because, you never knew his crazy mind,” the 96-year-old Lewkowicz recounted.

He recalled how, on one occasion, Goeth shot one of his friends merely because he considered him too handsome for a Jew.

Determined for justice, after the war Lewkowicz (above left, in US military police uniform) was given the go ahead to begin tracking down SS leaders and helped find Goeth hiding in Dachau. “When I found him he was lying on the floor like a dog,” he said.

Goeth was arrested and later convicted of war crimes. He was hanged in 1946. Lewkowicz moved to South America to begin a new life.