The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter - The Sunday Times Bestseller

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The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter - The Sunday Times Bestseller

The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter - The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Josef’s entire family had been murdered so there was no family with which to reunite. Therefore he chose to move on to his next calling to locate the many dislocated Jewish/Polish children and reunite them with their rightful families. In the tradition of The Boy in the Woods and By Chance Alone, The Survivor is an unbelievable yet true story of one man's endurance and his determination to not only survive the Holocaust but to bring to justice those who perpetrated great crimes against humanity. It’s easy enough to think that the Holocaust is simply a relic of the past; that it belongs only in history textbooks or in museum displays. Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. Noble, Holcomb B. (September 4, 1997). "Dr. Viktor E. Frankl of Vienna, Psychiatrist of the Search for Meaning, Dies at 92". The New York Times. p.B-7 . Retrieved 22 May 2012. Five stars for shear content and a stern but hopeful ending. These memoirs are so rare and fragile.

Foreword to Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, Hans Weigel, Penguin, München, 2009, ISBN 978-3328102779 (reprinted from 1977)

Frankl identifies three psychological reactions experienced by all inmates to one degree or another:

The following day, Hitler died by suicide. Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945. German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people. From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces.

People in Auschwitz

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years. Many SS men had escaped arrest or detection in the end-of-war chaos, but some found prisoner-of-war camps the best place to hide: by acquiring a different uniform and mingling with another group or regiment, they might not be detected. Dachau, after all, held 30,000 Germans and it was impossible to interrogate each and every one. That was where Lewkowicz began his search, and after about a week, he approached a group of ordinary German soldiers. “Are these all your men?” he asked the officer. “Most, but not all,” was the reply. “There is a stranger who wasn’t with us.” The officer pointed to a cowering figure in a filthy uniform several sizes too small. As Lewkowicz approached, he saw it was Göth, and flung himself on his former tormentor, screaming and lashing out. Later that year, 1946, Göth was tried and hanged.

No one expected the Germans to arrive with such speed and without a shot being fired, writes Josef Lewkowicz of September 8 1939. In the small town of Działoszyce, southern Poland, where the teenage Josef and his parents lived, the persecution began immediately.Lobstergirl wrote: "Jarmila wrote: "Hi,can anyone recommend me the books that are dealing with the problem of post traumatic stress of holocaust survivor? tx" Often Josef was asked to go through the clothing of those already dead, looking for gold, watches, jewelery, and anything else of value that the Nazis could take. He helped push bodies into the ground for mass burial, knowing that at any moment, he could become the next victim. He did raise the ire of some commanders including one of the most brutal men Amon Goeth, known as the Butcher of Plaszow. He killed without conscience, even a group of Jewish women who had washed his car, but not to his satisfaction. He shot them and although still alive, he asked others to add more bullets to their bodies to kill them. In the classic movie Schindler’s List, Ralph Fiennes played the part of Goeth, only offering a small part of the man’s true evil nature.

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe. Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death. In a group therapy session during a mass fast inflicted on the camp's inmates trying to protect an anonymous fellow inmate from fatal retribution by authorities, Frankl offered the thought that for everyone in a dire condition there is someone looking down, a friend, family member, or even God, who would expect not to be disappointed. Frankl concludes from his experience that a prisoner's psychological reactions are not solely the result of the conditions of his life, but also from the freedom of choice he always has even in severe suffering. The inner hold a prisoner has on his spiritual self relies on having a hope in the future, and that once a prisoner loses that hope, he is doomed.

Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz 

At only sixteen years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one. Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.



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