In December 1941, the SS deported twenty-three-year old Josef Katz from his home in Lubeck, Germany, to the Riga ghetto in Latvia. Over the next four years, he and thousands of other Jews were subjected to unrelenting brutality in intermment ghettos and concentration camps. One Who Came Back is an unflinching account of Katz's coming through each day's terror and its constant threat of death. Liberated in 1945, and surviving a death march back to Germany, he began this diary in 1946, finishing it a year later in New York where he arrived with his wife Irene, also a survivor of Riga. One Who Came Back has been acknowledged by historians, including Martin Gilbert and Leni Yahil, as a significant contribution to our understanding of what slave laborers endured in Nazi camps during World War II.

Translated by: Hilda Reach
Foreword by: Herman Taube