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. 

At first, Jews were forbidden to form groups in the street, and pushed off pavements by Nazi patrols. They were ordered to clean the streets and beaten on the slightest pretext; their shops were looted, their private gold, silver and jewels confiscated. Some were arrested, and disappeared. Finally, in August 1942, it was announced the town would be made “Jew-free”. From then on, no other title than The Survivor would have been possible for 96-year-old Lewkowicz’s memoir (co-written with Michael Calvin), some of which makes for almost unbearable reading.

Sixteen thousand Jews were rounded up. With a languid flick of his whip to the right or left, an SS officer decided who would live and who die. Josef (now 16) and his father lived; the rest of his family, though none of them knew it yet, were being sent straight to their deaths. After marching, hungry and exhausted, through the night, the prisoners in the “living” group were sent to what became a slave labour camp of 23,000 in a Kraków suburb – the first of the six camps Josef survived. (In Kraków itself, by the end of March 1943, only 7,000 of the city’s 68,000 Jews remained.)

Beatings, starvation and other ill treatment became so routine that between 8,000 and 10,000 died. Their fellow prisoners were ordered to strip the clothes from the bodies and search the seams for any hidden valuables. Conditions worsened further when the camp, Płaszów, was taken over by Amon Göth, a 6ft 4in sadist who randomly shot people for target practice and made prisoners watch the public executions of their fellows. “There were so many ways to die that we were enslaved by the task of surviving,” writes Lewkowicz. Once Göth put his revolver to Lewkowicz’s head. “So this is how I am going to die,” he thought – but he woke up in the camp hospital. A kapo (a senior prisoner put in charge of his fellows) had knocked Lewkowicz unconscious and told Göth to save his bullet. Even so, the writer recalls, “I knew better than to linger in hospital. The SS doctors were known to administer lethal injections to patients.”

One day in 1943, his father disappeared – to die, as Lewkowicz would later discover, in another camp, Flossenbürg. Next, after Płaszów, selected prisoners were taken to Auschwitz, including Lewkowicz, and of the 60 people crammed into his cattle truck, only 20 finally emerged. At Auschwitz, much of young Lewkowicz’s work was clearing away bodies for disposal in an incineration pit.