One Who Came Back: The Diary of a Jewish Survivor

Literary Nonfiction. Jewish Studies. Memoir. Translated from the German by Hilda Reach and Merrill Leffler. ONE WHO CAME BACK is Josef Katz's account of his four years of daily terror in Riga, Kaiserwald, Stutthof and numbers of smaller Nazi labor camps. Liberated in 1945, he began writing his diary in pencil in Germany in 1946, finishing it a year later in New York where he arrived with his wife Irene, also a survivor of Riga. "Every incident, every experience, every horror is exactly as it occurred," Katz wrote in his original German introduction. The diary remained in a drawer until the Herzl Press published the book in 1973 in an English translation by Hilda Reach; it was published in German in 1976. A number historians such as Martin Gilbert (The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy) and Leni Yahil (The Holocaust) have referred to the book's significance as a primary source for understanding what slave laborers endured in the Nazi camps. This edition adds a map and foreword by Herman Taube, author of 20 books of fiction and poetry.