
The Survivor
How I Made it Through Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter
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Narrated by:
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Price Waldman
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By:
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Josef Lewkowicz
About this listen
“Sobering, unforgettable reading. This is a standout of its kind.” – Publishers Weekly
“A riveting, deeply moving memoir. The writing is descriptive and dramatic, preserving Lewkowicz’s deep emotions.” – Jewish Book Council
This is the remarkable story of Josef Lewkowicz—Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who became a Nazi hunter.
When Nazi forces entered Kraków, Poland in 1939, unexpected and unresisted, Josef Lewkowicz's life became a nightmare overnight as he and his family were rounded up and sent to concentration camps across German-occupied territory. It wasn't long before Josef found himself face-to-face with SS kommandant Amon Goeth, whose brutality was made infamous by the film Schindler's List.
As Josef struggled to survive the violence, horror, and degradations of one prison camp after another—his journey eventually spanning continents and taking him to the limits of human endurance—he was kept alive only by his faith and his profound sense of justice.
A harrowing but ultimately uplifting glimpse into a pivotal moment in history, The Survivor is the story of one man's survival and pursuit of justice against all odds. The story of resilience and tenacity, and a desire for revenge redirected as a yearning to build a better future for humanity.
"I am ninety-seven and ready to meet my God whenever He calls me. . . I have seen terrible things: ritual hangings, casual shootings, unspeakable cruelty. . . I endured hunger, beatings, and torture in six camps and managed to prevail so I could bring a monster to justice."
In this memoir, Josef Lewkowicz shares a poignant and gripping account of his life, capturing the indomitable spirit and enduring soul—the neshama—of the survivor. It is a testament of the resilience of the human spirit and a tribute to those who defied the darkest moments of our history.
Photos of the author and the events that took place in the book can be found in the audiobook companion PDF download.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2025 Josef Lewkowicz (P)2025 Harper HorizonListeners also enjoyed...
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- By Alice@Wonderland on 10-01-24
By: Magda Hellinger, and others
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Five Chimneys
- A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz
- By: Olga Lengyel
- Narrated by: Jennifer Wydra
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Olga Lengyel tells, frankly and without compromise, one of the most horrifying stories of all time. This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization.
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Five Chimneys
- By Grannie Annie on 04-03-19
By: Olga Lengyel
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Sabina
- In the Eye of the Storm
- By: Bella Kuligowska Zucker
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the memoir written by Bella Kuligowska Zucker, the only person in her family to survive the Holocaust. In September 1939, Bella was a carefree teenager living in Poland when the German army struck. She was rounded up with her friends and family and sent to a series of grim Jewish ghettos. After loved ones were separated and lost through the war years, Bella survived by changing her identity. After finding the birth certificate of a Catholic girl five years her senior, she became Sabina Mazurek. Then she went into the eye of the storm, Germany.
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Alone without family
- By Nancy F. on 04-17-25
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The Great Depression: A Diary
- By: Benjamin Roth, James Ledbetter - editor, Daniel B Roth - editor
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1920s, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer fresh out of the army. He settled in Youngstown, Ohio, a booming Midwestern industrial town. Times were good—until the stock market crash of 1929. After nearly two years of economic crisis, it was clear that the heady prosperity of the Roaring Twenties would not return quickly.
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fantastic grasp of empirical analysis of investing in the stock market.
- By Christopher Tatum on 03-30-25
By: Benjamin Roth, and others
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Into the Forest
- A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love
- By: Rebecca Frankel
- Narrated by: Natalie Pela
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, they trekked across the Alps into Italy, where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.
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Great story with an added benefit
- By Scottsville Stu on 12-30-21
By: Rebecca Frankel
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The Daughter of Auschwitz
- My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope
- By: Tova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.
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Very interesting and well told
- By Tracy F. on 03-31-23
By: Tova Friedman, and others
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First One In, Last One Out
- Auschwitz Survivor 31321: A Memoir
- By: Marilyn Shimon
- Narrated by: Sarah Borges
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The horrifying true story of one of the first eight men to enter Auschwitz. Growing up in New York, Marilyn Shimon often visited her uncle in California. She saw his scars, gaped at his 31321 tattoo and listened to his horrific stories of surviving the Holocaust. However, she could not relate to the suffering he endured or understand the significance of his accounts until now.
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Horrible narrator
- By Rachel Comegys on 09-06-24
By: Marilyn Shimon
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Cold Crematorium
- Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
- By: József Debreczeni, Paul Olchváry - translator, Jonathan Freedland
- Narrated by: Laurence Dobiesz
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go “left,” his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the “lucky” ones, he was sent to the “right,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution.
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Learned so much more about the Holocaust
- By Jerseygirl on 02-03-24
By: József Debreczeni, and others
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I Am Juden
- Undercover in the SS
- By: Stephen Uzzell
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 16 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Inspired by the life of forgotten hero Haim Michael Klar, the number-one Amazon Charts best seller I Am Juden is the triumphant, epic tale of one man's incredible courage and resistance during the 20th century's darkest days. Jozef Siegler leads a perilous double life as an SS officer in the Krakow Ghetto and ultimately Auschwitz. His story is a tightrope walk through the Holocaust unlike any other. Nazi by day and Jewish resistance agent by night, any false move would result in instant death and exposure of his friends in the underground.
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A Riveting Tale of Courage and Resistance
- By Anonymous User on 06-27-24
By: Stephen Uzzell
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Ghosts of Hiroshima
- By: Charles Pellegrino
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase—a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not
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The Forgotten Names
- A Tale of Heroism and Reclaiming Identity in Nazi-Occupied France
- By: Mario Escobar
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Five years after the highly publicized trial of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” law student Valérie Portheret began her doctoral research into the 108 children who disappeared from Vénissieux fifty years earlier, children who somehow managed to escape deportation and certain death in the German concentration camps. She soon discovers that their rescue was no unexplainable miracle.
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Heartbreaking and Heartwarming
- By K. on 10-11-24
By: Mario Escobar
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Realm of Ice and Sky
- Triumph, Tragedy, and History's Greatest Arctic Rescue
- By: Buddy Levy
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.
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a great book, read by a good naratator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-27-25
By: Buddy Levy
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I Escaped from Auschwitz
- The Shocking True Story of the World War II Hero Who Escaped the Nazis and Helped Save Over 200,000 Jews
- By: Rudolf Vrba, Alan Bestic, Sir Martin Gilbert - foreword, and others
- Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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April 7, 1944 - This date marks the successful escape of two Slovak prisoners from one of the most heavily-guarded and notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, fled over 100 miles to be the first to give the graphic and detailed descriptions of the atrocities of Auschwitz. Originally published in the early 1960s, I Escaped from Auschwitz is the striking autobiography of none other than Rudolf Vrba himself. Vrba details his life leading up to, during, and after his escape from his 21-month internment in Auschwitz.
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Best story from the Holocaust I’ve ever read!
- By Chuck812 on 01-10-21
By: Rudolf Vrba, and others
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The People’s War
- Unheard Stories: Life on the Battlefront and at Home in World War II
- By: John Willis
- Narrated by: John Willis, Christine Kavanagh, Rosina Aichner, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In The People's War, John Willis unearths untold stories of everyday bravery, moments of terror, and tales of life-affirming community, that guide us through the years of the Second World War. From soldiers in North Africa and prisoners of war in East Asia, to evacuees in the British countryside and women in the factories, The People's War is a truly ambitious and comprehensive journey through a devastating and pivotal period of our history, as you've never read before.
By: John Willis
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The Winter Child
- By: Carly Schabowski
- Narrated by: Naomi Frederick
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Poland, 1943: Please don't do this! Her shrill cry pierces the night air, the screams breaking the silence of the falling snow. But the man she calls to does not turn, vanishing into the darkness with a child clasped in his arms.
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Love this author's books!
- By andrea l on 06-01-24
By: Carly Schabowski
May we never forget……
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A vital book you must read.
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The Survivor
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No words for my emotions
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Every word
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So much history
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Vivid Depictions You Will Not Forget
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Questions
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The honesty & accuracy of this Holocaust survivor!
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Too Much Post War
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