The Arrival: I Sought God in Hell

By Mietek Weintraub

Narrated with frequent flashbacks of significant events from the past, this memoir is a lucid, powerfully authentic, and vividly depicted account of a 17-year-old boy who survives the starvation and trials of the Lodz Ghetto—including witnessing a public hanging—only to be sent with his mother to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. Mietek Weintraub recalls, in scrupulous detail, being separated from his mother upon arrival at Auschwitz; the brutal murder of the chief of the Lodz Ghetto police force by a kapo; the demise of the eldest Jew in the ghetto, “King” Chaim Runkowski; and the wanton cruelty of the SS and their kapo underlings. He also describes his struggles with his trust in God as his time in the labor camp progressed. This is the unflinching and unforgettable story of one man’s struggle to survive the Holocaust.