JOSEF Lewcowicz was just 14 when he was given his first job of shovelling human bones into a wheelbarrow at Płaszów concentration camp.

It marked the start of three years of misery as the Polish-born teen was shipped through five brutal concentration camps, where he saw starving prisoners butchering and eating a dead boy and watched sick guards make prisoners jump off cliffs.

Today Josef is haunted by his nightmarish experiences throughout the Holocaust, which saw Nazis kill all 150 members of his family.

"I had seen so much cruelty that nothing surprised me anymore — shooting, hanging, beating…" he tells Sun Online.

Born in 1926, Josef was just a child when Hitler’s forces came crashing through the cities of Poland in 1939.

“The Nazis began marching in the streets and singing songs against the Jews," Josef says.

In one early incident, he saw a group of Nazis set fire to the beard of an elderly Jewish man for their amusement.

By 1942, Nazi troops had segregated people across Poland and moved Jewish people into controlled ghettos or concentration camps.

In some camps, they were stripped of their clothes and possessions before being forced into slave labour.

While in others, they were murdered immediately on arrival — gassed to death as part of the Nazis’ sickening ‘Final Solution’ genocide of the Jews.

At one point, Josef found himself in a group of 17,000 Jews when they were rounded up and ordered to form a line.

"At the head of the line, there was one SS man with a whip playing the role of God," Josef tells us.

This man split Josef’s group into three: 14,200 were sent to an extermination camp to be gassed to death, 2,000 elderly were shot dead there and 800, including Josef, were sent to Płaszów camp for slave work.

It was here, at the age of 14, he was given the job of digging up an old graveyard to make way for the prisoners' barracks.

Josef also speaks about his fears over the recent surge in anti-Semitism.

He also tells the of the incredible moment when as a Nazi hunter he cam across Amon Goeth, the butcher of Plaszow, immortalised by Ralph Fiennes in Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List.

Read more here:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1040325...

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