JOSEF LEWKOWICZ recalls finding and confronting the Nazi butcher immortalised ... trends now

Thirty years ago, the monstrously sadistic Nazi camp commandant Amon Goeth was immortalised on film in Steven Spielberg's multi-Oscar-winning Schindler's List. Powerfully depicted by Ralph Fiennes, this account of his shocking brutality appalled viewers the world over. Now, in a devastating new book, a man who suffered terribly at his hands, witnessed his heinous crimes against others - and vowed retribution - tells his first-hand story of the man known as the Butcher of Plaszow.

I am 96 years old, and ready to meet my God whenever He calls me. Yet despite my great age, I am haunted by a dream that I simply cannot erase from my mind after eight decades.

In my recurring nightmare I am being pursued by Amon Goeth, the notorious Butcher of Plaszow. He screams that he will kill me because I stumbled into his room when he was eating, or some such minor incident. I cower in the shadows to save myself.

Sometimes, Goeth materialises as one of the many distorted Nazi faces in my mind, swooping towards me like birds of prey.

There is another dream, though. In this, my favourite dream, I am sitting round the dinner table with my family in our home village in south-east Poland. My father, a grain trader by profession, is supervising grandparents, aunts and uncles. I have been giving my three younger brothers rides on my beloved tricycle.

I see our beautiful, kind mother approaching with steaming plates of food: chicken soup, stuffed fish and cheese pastries. But to my sadness, when I look round the table, I realise that nobody has a face. They are silhouettes, ghosts at the feast. I simply can't remember what they look like.

Once the Nazis rounded them up, I never saw them again. My mother and brothers were sent to their deaths by a random flick of a German officer's whip, while my father and I were consigned to a living hell in the labour camps. Around 150 people in my adored extended family were consumed by the Holocaust.

They did not live long enough for me to know them. They did not live long enough for me to know myself.

I was just 16 when Amon Goeth arrived at Plaszow, the death camp my father and I had been forced to help build on the site of two Jewish cemeteries south of Krakow. With our bare hands we had constructed our own prison.

An Austrian by birth, Goeth had risen swiftly through the ranks of the SS. He was 6 ft 4 in tall, with a hard face, a gravelly voice and a twisted vanity.

His terrifying reputation was established on his first day in charge, when he ordered us to assemble on the camp's Appellplatz, where we held roll call. He stood on a box, barking, boasting and lecturing. I barely registered his words. To me, he was the embodiment of evil, the personification of fear and death. As if to prove a point, he shot dead two Jewish policemen as we watched.

It was bad, bad, bad. Goeth killed randomly, incessantly, casually. He was often drunk, but took psychotic pleasure in his absolute power, brandishing his pistol, leaving bodies in his wake wherever he walked.

We learned quickly to scatter and hide when Goeth was near. He would kill people for looking him in the eye, for walking too slowly, for serving his food too hot, or for no reason at all. He used a high-powered rifle to shoot random prisoners in our barracks from the windows of his office, for target practice.

Imagine, then, the impact this monster had on those of us who lived daily with his murderous brutality. Imagine my sense of horror and helplessness when, one day, Goeth arrived at a site where I was helping dismantle a high perimeter wall. He stopped and stared as I prised out a brick and threw it carefully down to my workmate. It was a simple process, repeated countless times during a 14-hour working day. But, petrified by the commandant's presence, my companion made the fatal mistake of dropping the brick.

Goeth immediately shot him in the head without a word or a flicker of emotion, and then looked upwards to where I was positioned on top of the wall. He ordered me to throw him a brick, promising to catch it, but deliberately let it fall to the ground.

'Komm runter!' ('Come on down!'). He was suddenly screaming. The wall was about 15 ft in height. In a panic I slid down the sides, cutting open my arms and legs. Goeth raised his revolver until it was about two inches from my face, and pointed it between my eyes. So this was how I was going to die.

I woke up in the camp hospital two days later with no recollection of what had happened. My body was swathed in bloodstained bandages. My face was swollen, my torso badly bruised, and my skin was raw.

I was ravenous and in pain. But I knew better than to linger in bed. The SS doctors were well known for administering lethal injections to hospital patients. I preferred to take my chances in our barracks, a wooden hut into which hundreds of inmates had been stuffed, where I rested as best I could.

The mystery of my miraculous survival was solved by chance when I came across Wilek Chilowicz, one of Goeth's henchmen.

'Ah!' he said in mock surprise. 'You're alive. Do you know what happened to you?' My ignorance, and the chance to show off to those around him, pleased him no end. 'Goeth was about to kill you, so I started beating you up,' he told me. 'You fell unconscious, so I told him to save his bullet because you were already dead.'

He was a cruel and vicious man, but for some reason I benefited from a hint of humanity.

I have often thought that we would have been better off had Plaszow been officially regarded as a concentration camp, as it later was. These operated on the principle that only Hitler had the ultimate power over life and death. Camp commandants had to send telegrams to Berlin, requesting permission to conduct executions, and providing details of the intended victims.

But Plaszow was a lawless place. It was no surprise that people took desperate measures. Food became a deadly weapon to be used against us. When bread was found in a clerk's drawer, Goeth had him and the four other workers in the administration office sent to a shooting range and killed.

It was meant to scare and demoralise us, but I'm almost ashamed to admit that Goeth's more crazy, spontaneous acts of cruelty - such as making a boy with diarrhoea eat his own excrement before shooting him - had greater impact.

Sometimes I hoped I was mistaken, that my imagination had got the better of me. But I was there. It did happen. Even after nearly 80 years I still bear the scars from Goeth's two dogs, Rolf and Ralf, which he had trained to attack prisoners on command.

During interrogations he would set these hounds from hell, a Great Dane and a German Shepherd crossbreed, on defenceless prisoners, strung up by their legs from a hook in the ceiling. We heard their screams across the camp as they were torn limb from limb by these terrible creatures.

I'm conscious that giving too many examples of depravity may dilute their impact, but some deaths are too shocking to ignore. One poor soul was summarily shot at morning roll call because Goeth he decided the man was too tall. As he lay dying, the beast urinated over him in a show of malice and contempt.

The women were treated

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