Surviving six death camps, Yosef Lewkowicz touched the lives of thousands and kept reinventing his own

Photos: JRoots– Joseph Lewkowicz archives

Yosef Lewkowicz, who passed away on Chanukah at age 98 and was one of the last adult witnesses to the Holocaust, kept reinventing his life. After surviving six labor and death camps, he became a Nazi hunter, went on to build a family in South America and Canada, and then, at 88, restarted again in Jerusalem and touched the lives of thousands on trips back to Poland, as he urged an unabashed recommitment to authentic Yiddishkeit

When Reb Yosef Lewkowics was niftar on the second night of Chanukah at the age of 98, the Jewish People lost one of the last adult witnesses to the Holocaust. Lucid and articulate until his last days, Reb Yosef was a living testament to the unimaginable atrocities for a generation both distanced by time and plagued by doubts as to the very truth of the Holocaust narrative. And his mission wasn’t only to pass on a historic account, but to strengthen eternal Jewish values that are the only real guarantee of ongoing survival against the odds.

Reb Yosef, who moved from Montreal to Jerusalem’s Arzei Habirah neighborhood ten years ago after his wife passed away, was the only surviving member of his large family, most of whom were murdered in the Belzec death camp in 1942. He spent the last stage of his life testifying to all he went through and witnessed — something he sublimated for years until his adult children encouraged him to open those old wounds. And then, he was unstoppable.

Within the framework of my own 30-year-long project to capture the spiritual legacy of survivors, I’ve spent countless hours interviewing, filming, and redacting Reb Yosef’s experiences, values, and life lessons. I had the privilege of introducing him to our JRoots tours, thereby opening Reb Yosef’s persona to thousands of people — young and old, frum and secular — in addition to facilitating dozens of press interviews and TV appearances (with both Jewish and non-Jewish journalists). His story and persona were so compelling that we decided to bring it to international publication in book and documentary form. Both the book, The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter (translated into 12 languages) and the documentary, The Survivor’s Revenge have met with huge interest and reader/viewer popularity.

Reb Yosef, who was still an excellent communicator with a remarkable memory and driven energy well into his late 90s, lived through six years of forced labor and concentration camps. Born in the village of Dzialoszyce, Galicia, and then moving with his family to the epicenter of Jewish Krakow at the age of eight, he was bar-mitzvah age when the full force of the Holocaust changed his life forever. His ordeal included the brutality of Plaszow, Auschwitz, Mielec, Amstetten, Mauthausen, and Ebensee.