Lothar Orbach was just 14 when the Nazis began rounding up Berlins Jews. When the Gestapo came for Orbachs mother on Christmas Eve 1942, they escaped with false papers and Orbach entered Berlins underworld of divers. He was eventually betrayed and sent to Auschwitz, on the last transport, in 1944. This coming of age story is a story of hope in the very heart of darkness.
Now in book form, this is the intensely moving first-person account of "the Auschwitz Memoirist's extraordinary manuscript" described in Philip Roth's Patrimony: A True Story. This is the true story of a young man born at the wrong time in the wrong place. Lothar Orbach's family proudly traces its German heritage back to the fifteenth century, but that is no help to a Jewish boy coming of age in Hitler's Berlin. At the center of this world gone mad is Lothar, outwardly a cagey, amoral street thug, inwardly a sensitive, romantic youth, devoted son, and increasingly religious Jew, clinging to his humanity and his belief in God but letting his irrepressible spirit soar while underground.