Levkovich’s List: The Montreal diamond dealer who captured notorious Nazi war criminals writes his next chapter

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Jose Levkovich sits at his dining room table, surrounded by family photographs, in Jerusalem. He’s dressed smartly in a crisp, blue button-down shirt and black pants, an outfit the one-time Montreal businessman picked out for an earlier speaking engagement at a school.

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The conversation shifts to his son, Tuvia, better known around Wall Street as Tobias Levkovich, the Citigroup chief equity strategist who was a revered figure among the stock market crowd, and a regular guest on CNBC, CNN and other money talk shows.

“He was a tremendous mind, a brilliant mind,” his father said, before falling silent.

His son was struck by a car at 6 a.m. on Sept. 1, not far from his home in Woodmere, Long Island. A family man and avid Canadiens hockey fan, he died a month later from his injuries and is buried in a cemetery on Jerusalem’s outskirts.

His father visits him there. Once upon an earlier life, the now 95-year-old made a name for himself, too, as a diamond dealer, a dabbler in housing developments and an arm-twister and friend of Israeli politicians.

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On the diamond end, Levkovich delights in telling the story of a gem-dealing Argentinian playboy named Mario and a famous would-be client — Olga Khokhlova, a.k.a. “Mrs. Pablo Picasso” — who got away.

Levkovich was a good talker — he still is — and a quick study. Before he moved his young family to Montreal, he built a diamond business from a table in a Buenos Aires restaurant. Customers would come, sit and haggle. The money was good. Business grew.

Enter Mario, another Buenos Aires diamond merchant with business in Spain, and a reputation for wooing the ladies. He came to Levkovich on behalf of a client, “Mrs. Picasso,” who was looking to unload seven of her estranged husband’s paintings for $2,000 each.

Mario placed seven photographs of the seven art works on the table in front of Levkovich.

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“What did I see in them? Nothing,” he said, breaking into a smile. “Listen, who is a prophet: those seven paintings today could be worth hundreds of millions.”

Equally incalculable are the odds Levkovich would be sitting at home on a Tuesday evening, talking about (almost) rubbing shoulders with a famous artist.

Jose Levkovich, born Josef, is a Polish Jew and the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. He was 18 when he was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp. He wasn’t much older when he went to work for the Americans hunting down war criminals.

It is a past he did not speak of to his children, Tuvia, Sheila and Ziggy. “I didn’t want them to know,” he said of the horrors he witnessed. But as he pushed into his 90s, and at his children’s urging, he began to write everything down, initially in a memoir for family, and presently in a work-in-progress book aimed at a wider audience.

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“I am constantly busy,” he said.

Levkovich speaks at universities and schools, and to community groups and companies. He has led a dozen or so educational trips to Auschwitz. The pandemic has upset his calendar somewhat, but he never says “no” when asked to speak, and he never asks for anything in return, beyond the hope that people will listen.

“Surviving was a miracle,” he said.

Surviving was a miracle

Levkovich was just a boy when a German tank rumbled down the street in Kraków, Poland, where he was playing with some friends. A soldier popped out when it stopped to ask the wide-eyed kids where the nearest pharmacy was.

“He wanted to buy some Nivea Cream,” he said.

It was an innocent first brush with the enemy. But before long, other memories began crowding into the frame: three Nazis lighting an elderly Jew’s beard on fire and laughing as he screamed; being herded into a field with his parents, three younger brothers and thousands of their Jewish neighbours, and hearing the rattle of machine guns after the older people were marched into the trees; getting separated into two groups and seeing his siblings and mother, Sheindl, for the last time.

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His father, Simcha, would live, only to die later at the hands of the Nazis. Levkovich moved from concentration camp to concentration camp as a slave labourer. He worked in salt mines, hauled granite blocks from quarries and collected the dead in Auschwitz. Days ended with a scrap of bread and a lice-ridden bunk to collapse into.

“You would feel your skin crawling,” he said.

One of his jobs was helping to destroy two Jewish cemeteries on the outskirts of Kraków to make way for Płaszów, a new slave labour camp. It was a horror show of a place, made vivid to modern movie watchers by Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film.

Amon Göth, the Nazi camp commandment, was the privileged son of a German publisher. (Ralph Fiennes was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the commandment). But Levkovich knew Göth up close. He had two Great Danes he would sic on the inmates. His right hand still bears the scars.

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“When he passed by, you would start to shiver,” he said. “To kill people, this was a toy to him.”

More brutal stories emerge. Levkovich and another man were ordered to disassemble a column, brick by brick. They were not to drop any bricks. When a brick dropped, Goth shot Levkovich’s partner. He then told the teenager to throw him a brick, and let it fall.

“I thought I was dead,” he said. He was beaten unconscious instead.

If I survived, and millions didn’t, there must be a reason

And then, one day, it was over. Levkovich remembers a Jewish-American soldier giving him candy. He wolfed it down, not realizing it was chewing gum. He was 18.

“If I survived, and millions didn’t, there must be a reason,” he remembers thinking.

He found purpose in writing a list. Göth and several other Nazis’ names were on it. He approached the Americans and volunteered to help hunt them down. They gave him a military police uniform, a white helmet and a jeep.

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“I interviewed Göth’s family, his friends,” he said. He searched old barns, quiet villages, following every lead until they led him to a German prisoner of war camp. Göth had disguised himself as a regular soldier. He seemed diminished, defanged, pathetic.

“I beat him. I kicked him. I spit in his face. I called him all the names he had called us,” Levkovich said.

Göth never uttered a word. He was later convicted of war crimes and hanged to death near Płaszów.

Levkovich caught other Nazis, their names now blurred with the passage of time. He also caught up with Oskar Schindler, the Płaszów area factory owner who saved his Jewish slave labourers from deportation to the Nazi death camps. Schindler wanted the Nazi hunter to vouch for him.

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“He asked me if I could find him a bottle of schnapps,” Levkovich said. “Schindler was not a war criminal. He was what he was, and the people who worked for him survived.”

Levkovich created his next list while working with the Polish communists to find Jewish orphans, whose parents had hidden them in monasteries, churches and among Christian families as babies to keep them from being killed. Six hundred of those orphans eventually found homes with Jewish families in what became the state of Israel.

“I have met some of those children. They are now in their 80s,” he said.

Levkovich could have remained in Europe, and he was also encouraged by Jewish leaders to get a formal education and be among the vanguard that would build Israel. But what he ached for was family.

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“I was all alone in the world,” he said.

Not quite, it turned out. A great-uncle had moved to Buenos Aires before the war and posted a message to a Red Cross board at a displaced persons camp seeking news of Levkovich’s parents.

Their son answered with a letter and soon boarded a ship for South America, where he worked for his relative for a spell. But it wasn’t the right fit, so he struck out on his own, reinventing himself as a diamond dealer.

Diamonds weren’t the only game in town. Levkovich took a pass on buying cheap real estate in New York City, since he felt it wasn’t a good deal at the time, and instead bought cheap real estate in Montreal, which turned out not to be such a good deal over time.

In Bogotá, Colombia, however, his non-business-related stock soared just as soon as he met Perla Lederman. “She was my life,” he said.

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Levkovich wanted a family. He and Perla built one together. They were married in 1954 and moved to Montreal after the birth of their second child.

“I wanted my children to have the education I never had,” he said.

The diamond business came with him to Canada, and he opened a cutting and polishing factory in Cuba. (No, he never met Fidel Castro).

“They made money, and I made money,” he said.

Alas, a mutually agreeable arrangement fell apart after the Cubans replaced the factory’s diamond expert with a Communist party functionary.

But Levkovich persisted, trading in precious stones, making buying trips to Antwerp and partnering with five other Montrealers to build apartments in Jerusalem. He wound up losing a bundle there when Israel devalued its currency in the mid-1980s in an attempt to stem runaway inflation, but, on balance, he came out ahead.

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Besides, at his age, what does it really matter? There are more important things than making money. Scrolling through his smartphone, Levkovich pauses on images of his kids, grandkids and great-grandkids. There is a young Tuvia, holding his son. His revenge upon Göth and the Nazi death merchants is reflected by the life he created.

The phone rings. It is his daughter, Sheila. A few years after Perla died, Levkovich informed his adult children he would be moving to Jerusalem. Alone. He was 88.

“They all tried to talk me out of it,” he said. “But the whole city here is my friend.”

That is not entirely an exaggeration. Les Glassman first met Levkovich a little more than a year ago. Glassman is a dentist by day, and a keen historian/genealogical researcher by nature, who rapped on the old man’s front door asking to hear his story.

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“Jose is a remarkable person,” Glassman said. “There is no bitterness there.”

A reporter recently asked the dentist if he would visit his friend — who doesn’t do that well with overseas phone calls because of his hearing — with some questions in hand from the Financial Post. He agreed to film the conversation.

“Jose is a hero,” Glassman said.

Now, Levkovich is grieving the loss of a son, whose very existence was an improbability, a miracle seeded in a remarkable story of human survival.

He speaks easily about his miscalculations and regrets. He had his Auschwitz inmate tattoo removed in Colombia because he was young, “stupid” and felt ashamed of it. The scar remains, but it is a decision he wishes he could undo.

He doesn’t view himself as a hero, either. He’s a survivor and every year, fewer like him remain, so he answers the door when someone knocks.

“Here we are,” he said. “We do what we can. We tell what we tell, whatever we know.”

Financial Post

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