The Survivor, How I Made It Through Six Concentration Camps And Became A Nazi Hunter, Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin, Price Waldman, narrator.
Once Josef, like most children, enjoyed a happy life with a mother, father, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and he was happy. Then the Germans turned against the Jews and everything changed. Small in build and barely a teenager, he spent years in Concentration Camps. While he managed to survive the horrors of the war, neither his father nor his mother, nor his siblings nor his other relatives, that were shipped off to "work" camps, pretending to be resettlement camps, were able to survive the torture, starvation, and horrendous living conditions they were forced to face. They died, as so many of his friends and others died, too. While I considered myself well-read on the subject of the Holocaust, reading Josef's story illustrated how much I didn't know about the barbarism. Because he passed through so many of the camps and worked so many details under so many evil people, he witnessed a far broader picture than that painted by other survivors' stories that I have read. His memory, too, though having lived nine plus decades, is still very much intact and fact filled. I have discovered that as much as I’ve read about the Holocaust, there is always so much more for me to discover and relate so that the memory of that horror remains alive to prevent it from occurring again. Today, after the massacre committed by Hamas against the Jews, it is even more important. Like Hitler, these same kind of barbarian monsters, in a different costume, want to remove Jews from "the river to the sea", simply because they are Jews.
The idea that dogs were set upon people like the lions of days of yore, or that sadists used cigarettes to set the beards of religious men on fire, laughing as they screamed in pain and terror, the fact that so many of the Nazis killed Jews for their simple pleasure, as if they were not human, and that so many so-called good Germans were unaware of what was going on, only indicates that they pretended ignorance since the scale of the slaughter and the magnitude of the property they stole, defies the reality of their innocence. They stole the property of the Jews as they were being taken and slaughtered, so did they really believe they were simply being moved to a new location, and did they really believe that was an honorable, decent thing to do?
Today, we are witnessing a rebirth of this same hateful antisemitism, and once again I am shocked by the blatant hateful behavior that is occurring without a blanket condemnation by so-called decent people who demand respect for themselves. Hateful people of a certain belief system are spreading lies and instigating violent behavior about and against the Jewish people, once again. Although the blood libel was a lie, as was The Protocols of Zion, many lies like that are still being spread and are believed by the ignorant and often, the evil.
After a genocide was committed against Israeli citizens on October 7th, 2023, the media and evil, dishonest mouthpieces have instead called the Israelis the murderers, even though they are simply fighting a war against those who tried to wipe them out. Held to a different standard by a world with many haters of Jews, they are once again being falsely attacked. This must end and the corrupt liberal media must stop supporting those who are encouraging the violence and hatred toward innocent people because they are afraid these same violent people will attack them too. They are all cowards.
During the Holocaust, Jews were piled into cattle cars, left in them to starve, to die of thirst or to suffocate, and the world showed little interest. When doors were finally opened, out of more than 150 people jammed in, only 20 living people might emerge. No one blinked. The victims were forced to remain with the stench of the dead and their waste without relief. These atrocities committed against the Jews have been forgotten and have been largely ignored. In this book, the heinous story is rebirthed, as it must be, with a fervor and depth and breadth that I have never read before. The Holocaust is covered from tip to toe, with all of the warts and foibles, and it must be read by everyone. Lewkowicz describes his suffering and ordeals, and in doing so he exposes the truth about man's inhumanity to man. Mengele, the doctor of death, so often written about, is not covered, instead, the entire hateful process of the attempt to destroy a people is laid bare from tip to toe as the heinous behavior of those who supported Hitler, lived under Hitler's rule, or like those today, simply were filled with hate and jealousy and greed, hating the Jews for no reason that makes any sense are completely exposed as the inhuman beasts they were and may still be. Anyone who denies the Holocaust is equally hateful, and those in our government who support the cause of those who still want to eliminate the Jews from "the river to the sea" are equally demented and hateful and should be removed from positions of power. Their microphones should be destroyed.
During the Holocaust, the Jews were forced to stand in mud to their waist, to jump off cliffs into quarries, to watch their loved ones tortured and slaughtered, were beaten to death, hung upside down for hours, work in factories for "good Germans" who supposedly didn't know what was going on though they witnessed the Jews in rags who were starved, worked to death and dying. They were slaves, as they had been thousands of years before, so those who hate them who are demanding their own justice and reparations, because they once had families that were slaves, should be ashamed of themselves for showing so little compassion and comprehension about an irrational hate that still causes such barbaric behavior.
This man whose story we should all be forced to read, relates the story as he lived it, and he wants you to be there with him to witness it, live it with him, and keep it alive for history, so it will never happen again, even though it did, to some comparative extent recur on 10/7/23 when barbarians came into Israel, a place Josef lived, and cooked babies in ovens, raped and mutilated young girls by cutting off their breasts and used them as footballs, murdered concert revelers in cold blood, burned victims alive, took grandmothers and others hostage, those working for and hoping for peace with these same enemies, just because they were Jewish. Shamefully, he had to witness that event before his death at 98, in 2024, even though he had tried so hard to teach others about the Holocaust to avoid such an event again. Tell your children, tell your friends, and force your enemies to learn about and face their barbarism, to stop those who hate in the
In spite of all he witnessed, lost and lived through, in spite of the Nazi hunting, the recovery of the Jewish children given up by parents to save their lives, though they lost their own, he remained faithful, kind and hopeful. He was and still is an inspiration and model for us all.