Holocaust survivor watched starving prisoners ‘roast and eat a dead child’ during time in five death camps before getting his revenge on ‘cruel’ guards years later as a Nazi hunter
- Polish-born Josef Lewcowicz – now 93 – says that he has seen ‘so much cruelty’
- He watched on as starving people roasted the body of a dead Russian boy
- Josef then trained as a policeman and set about searching for Nazis in hiding
Josef Lewkowicz, 93, standing at the entrance of what was once Ebensee concentration camp
A Holocaust survivor watched starving prisoners ‘roast and eat a dead child’ during his time in five death camps before getting his revenge on ‘cruel’ guards years later as a Nazi hunter.
Polish-born Josef Lewcowicz – now 93 – was just 14 when he was given his first job of shovelling human bones into a wheelbarrow at the Płaszów concentration camp in Poland.
It marked the start of three years of misery as he was shipped through five different concentration camps as a teenager.
During that time – in which Nazis killed all 150 members of his family – he saw starving prisoners butchering and eating a dead boy and watched guards make prisoners jump off cliffs.
While being held captive in Ebensee – a concentration camp in Austria – Josef recalls how conditions became unbearable as he watched on as starving people roasted the body of a dead Russian boy.
He told The Sun: ‘A young Russian boy died and there was a few of the Russian people went and cut off his whole behind, and made a fire with branches and dry wood, and roasted human flesh, and ate it.
‘I had seen so much cruelty that nothing surprised me anymore.’
This picture of prisoners in Ebensee, believed to have been taken by an SS officer, shows Josef circled
Josef added that he has chosen to share his harrowing story in a bid to preserve the truth for generations to come.
He then made it his life mission to hunt down Nazis who went into hiding after the war, saying: ‘I have to get after those Nazis who tortured us, that made our days miserable, killing us, beating us, hanging us.’
Josef trained as a policeman and set about searching large prisoner of war camps and interrogating captured German soldiers about where SS officers had fled to.
Emaciated prisoners sit outside the hospital barrack in Nazi Germany’s Mauthausen concentration camp during World War II
One day, he found Amon Göth – an Austrian Nazi office who ran Plaszow concentration camp in Poland – hiding under a false name in Dachu concentration camp.
Shortly before Göth was executed for his war crimes, former prisoner Josef went to see him in his cell where he told him: ‘You are the worst – there is nothing like you.’
Years later, Josef says he is dismayed by the rise of antisemitism around the world once again.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission is currently investigating allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party.