THERE IS A WAY TO FREEDOM: A True Story of Survival and Resistance inside a Nazi Concentration Camp

The rattling alarm echoed through the barracks like the grinding of rusted gears, jolting Edgar from restless sleep. The cold clung to his skin as he swung his legs over the wooden bunk and reached for his striped jacket and pants. The fabric was stiff, the seams rough against his skin.

A low murmur filled the barracks, men stirring, adjusting their caps. Edgar touched the patch sewn onto his chest—24814. His name had been stripped from him the moment he had arrived, back in the fall of 1940. Here, in this place, Edgar was a number, nothing more.

“Move it,” barked the room elder, stepping over bodies that hadn’t yet risen. “Roll call in two minutes.”

Edgar forced his feet into shoes stiff with dried mud and shuffled toward the door. Outside, the morning fog curled around the barracks, softening the brutal angles of the camp. It might have been beautiful if not for the knowledge of what lay behind the mist.

The prisoners formed rows of ten, backs straight, eyes forward. Thousands of men in striped uniforms stood in silent formation, waiting. The SS officer’s hobnailed boots crunched over the gravel—the sound sharp in the hush. The count began, a ritual of bureaucracy and power. When it ended, the command came: “Arbeitskommando! Move!”

Edgar fell into step, marching with the others toward the outer gate of the camp. As they passed the red-roofed building on their left, the words painted across it loomed over them in bold white letters: THERE IS A WAY TO FREEDOM.

Edgar Kupfer with his 1,800-page diary after being liberated from the Dachau, 1945

He had seen the sign countless times, its cruel irony unmistakable. Below it, a list of virtues: Obedience. Order. Honesty. Diligence. Love of Fatherland. He thought of Wagner, the prisoner who had pointed it out to him on his first day in Dachau.

“Memorize these golden words,” Wagner had said, his voice bitter. “They’ll teach you everything here—with the whip, the boot, and the hunger.”

The column of marching prisoners moved through the camp’s gate toward their worksite—a factory that made screws for German warplanes. Edgar’s breath formed pale clouds in the cold air. As the prisoners neared the outer road, two covered trucks rumbled past, their canvas flaps barely concealing the figures inside. Russian prisoners of war. The tarp shifted, revealing flashes of pale faces, wide eyes in the darkness.

A silence settled over the marching prisoners. They knew where the trucks were headed.

At the Präzifix factory, Edgar took his place at his workbench. The typewriter keys felt familiar beneath his fingers, the rhythm of his work almost a comfort. Then the first shots rang out, distant but unmistakable. Edgar stiffened, his fingers hovering above the keys. Another volley followed—sharp cracks swallowed by the wind.

He had seen men die before. Plenty of times. The first time, Edgar had reached out instinctively to help, only to be pulled back.

“You mustn’t,” another prisoner scolded him. “You can’t save him. If you try, you’ll be next.”

Now, a couple years later, Edgar stared at his hands, at the typewriter, at the meaningless lists he was meant to compile. Outside, the executions continued. Inside, Edgar turned to his diary. He forced his fingers to move, to press letters onto the page, forming words the world would one day read.

At night, when the barracks were silent except for the shallow breaths of exhausted men, Edgar wrote. By the dim glow of a contraband candle, he scribbled each word onto the paper, his hand steady despite the cold. This diary was more than pencil on paper—it was defiance, a testament to everything he had seen, everything the Nazis had tried to erase.

“Last night,” Edgar wrote in mid-February 1943, “comrades spoke to me about writing. They expect me to write a book, a book that says everything, illuminates everything clearly, hides nothing.”

He had resisted at first. What if he wasn’t strong enough? What if his words failed to capture the weight of their suffering? But he knew the truth had to be preserved. If he didn’t write it, who would?

One day, at the factory, the risk nearly caught up with him.

A sudden rattle at the door. The duty corporal.

Edgar’s pulse pounded in his ears. He shoved the diary under a pile of paperwork and snatched a blank sheet of carbon paper. The door shook again. Then it swung open.

“What are you doing?” the SS man barked.

Edgar blinked, forcing his breath steady. The typewriter sat in front of him, empty. A fresh sheet of carbon lay beside it. He lifted it casually.

“Copying a poem,” he said. His voice felt foreign in his throat.

The corporal eyed him. The empty typewriter. The single sheet.

Edgar held his breath.

Then, with a grunt, the man turned away. The door slammed shut.

Edgar exhaled shakily. Two seconds slower, and his diary might have been found. And then—his work, his life, and possibly the lives of those he wrote about—would have been over.

*****

By October 1944, Edgar’s diary had grown too large to hide, so he turned to Otto Höfer, a fellow prisoner he trusted without question.

“We have to hide it,” Edgar whispered to him. “For good.”

Otto led him to the screw factory’s materials hall. Beneath stacks of steel rods, he had prepared a small space. The only place in the factory that never changed, never shifted. Together, they wrapped the pages in oil paper, then aluminum foil, then cloth. Each layer was another barrier against decay, against time.

Edgar knelt as Otto lifted the iron bars. The hole was just big enough.

He placed the bundle inside. The weight of his own words felt heavier than steel.

Otto sealed the floor, smoothed the cement, and covered the patch with iron bars.

When they stood, it was as if nothing had happened. But beneath them, the truth lay waiting, buried in the “womb of the earth.”

If Edgar died, the words would remain.

If he lived, the world would learn the truth.

*****

The train slowed to a halt. The murmurs spread through the packed car: Dachau. He was back where his imprisonment had begun. Edgar hardly recognized Dachau as salvation. To him, the Nazi’s first concentration camp had been a place of fear, of suffering. Now, after his time in Neuengamme, near the German port city of Hamburg, it felt like a cruel kind of homecoming.

He stepped onto the platform, his limbs weak, his body nothing more than a hollowed frame of what it had been. The guards barked orders, but the blows that once rained down in greeting did not come. Instead, old Dachau prisoners—men he once knew—greeted them with something like kindness.

“Man, Kupfer, is that you?” Gustl Dillmann stood before him, shaking his head in disbelief. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Edgar could barely nod. He did not recognize himself either.

Later, in the bathhouse, he stripped alongside the others, his bones jutting like jagged edges beneath his sagging skin. He stepped beneath the warmth of the water. It was the first true comfort he had felt in months. When he finally stepped in front of a mirror, he froze.

The man staring back was not Edgar Kupfer. He was something else—something skeletal, a phantom of the person who had entered Dachau years before. His once-proud frame had been devoured by starvation, by suffering. He remembered the first time he had seen a prisoner like this, shuffling, hollow-eyed, barely human. A Muselmann, as they were known. And now, the Muselmann stared back at him.

He turned away from the reflection, ashamed.

*****

In Dachau, rest meant death.

Upon his return to the camp, Edgar was assigned to Block 11, the so-called Invalid Block. The men there did not work. They waited. And then, they disappeared. Rumors whispered through the camp—transports were coming. Not to another camp, but to oblivion.

One day, the camp doctor arrived, flanked by SS officers. The men were ordered to strip. Edgar’s ribs pressed against his skin as he stood in line, trying to control his breathing. The doctor barely looked at them, waving some to one side, marking others for transport.

The scribe, Ackert, nudged Edgar as he passed. “Stay put,” he whispered. “Don’t let them see you.”

Edgar stepped back into the shadows, his heart hammering. He watched as the marked men were herded away.

Days later, he learned their fate. They were gone. The Invalid Block was emptied.

If he had stepped forward, he would have been among them. He would have been shipped off to his death, his body turned to ash.

Instead, he lived. And now that he was to live, he decided, he must write.

*****

Having survived unspeakable brutality in Neuengamme and a selection in Dachau, Edgar took a new lease on life and began keeping his secret diary in November 1942. In the confines of the Präzifix factory, where he worked as a clerk, Edgar found a fragile sliver of space to record the truth. With discarded index cards and stolen scraps of paper, he began what he knew would be the most dangerous act of his life.

“If they find this,” he wrote in his first entry, “I will be dead.”

And yet, he wrote. He wrote not just to remember, but to fight the creeping numbness that had taken hold of him and his fellow prisoners.

For many, desensitization had settled into Dachau like a thick fog. No story, no act of cruelty could shock them anymore. The suffering was so pervasive, so all-consuming, that it had become mundane. The weight of brutality had dulled the men’s senses, made them immune to horror.

“I feel compelled, I feel: I must write, write now, write now,” Edgar recorded.

Some nights, the weight of it all nearly crushed him. He could feel his soul growing numb, a thickening shell forming around his emotions. The hippopotamus skin, as he called it. Apathy was survival, he was told. To care too much, to feel too deeply, was a death sentence. And yet, Edgar knew he had to fight against that. If he lost himself completely to numbness, even survival would mean nothing.

Others had begun to notice his strange habits—his long hours bent over his desk, the occasional glances to ensure no one was watching. “My comrades think that I am secretly and furtively writing a poem,” Edgar recorded. “If they knew what I was really writing about, they would burn the pages out of fear.”

Edgar had a duty—to those who had died, to those who still suffered, and to those who would come after. If even one person could read his words and understand, then perhaps Dachau would not be erased.

*****

The infirmary at Dachau was not a place of healing. It was a place of quiet horror, where suffering was studied like a science and death came not as an accident, but as an experiment.

Edgar had learned early on that the Revier, the so-called hospital, was to be avoided if one wished to live. The infirmary was a trap—a place where prisoners were examined not to be treated, but to be selected. Some were deemed fit to work, others fit to die.

Those who entered the Revier often never returned. He had seen the skeletal figures with bandages crusted in dried pus, their bodies so ravaged by starvation and illness that they no longer looked human. The nurses, hardened prisoners themselves, tore the bandages off without care. The SS officers strode through the rooms, assessing, pointing, marking men for transport.

And then there were the experiments.

Edgar had first heard of them in whispers. Phlegmon injections. Malaria trials. High-altitude pressure chambers. Ice-water immersion. He had dismissed the stories at first, because what man could be so cruel as to deliberately drown another in a frozen tub of water, just to see how long he could survive? What doctor could take the strongest of men, strap them into a chamber, and watch as their lungs collapsed from simulated altitude?

But then he met the men who had returned. The few that had lived. Their bodies told the story—limbs twisted from unchecked infections, faces swollen from forced exposure to disease, minds shattered by the pain.

One night, a comrade pulled the blanket from Edgar’s head. “They took my friend,” he whispered. “A priest. We grew up together. He was taken for the phlegmon experiments. Twenty-four of them have died already. He knows he will die too.”

The priest had smuggled out a final note. It did not beg for help. It did not ask for salvation. It simply asked that someone tell his family, so that they might prepare for the inevitable.

Edgar clenched his jaw as he wrote. He had to survive, not for himself, but for them. For every man who had been strapped to a gurney and injected with a disease that would rot him from the inside out. For every prisoner who had been frozen in ice water until his blood slowed to nothing. For every woman who had been used like an object, her body forced into experiments that served no purpose but cruelty.

*****

By December 1942, Edgar had spent two Christmases in Dachau. The first, in 1940, had been a cruel reminder of everything he had lost—cold, hunger, and a mockery of celebration by the SS. The prisoners were forced to admire a large Christmas tree set up in the roll call square, its glowing lights meant to serve as propaganda rather than comfort. There was no warmth in it, no joy—only the knowledge that beatings and executions continued beneath its silent glow.

Two years later, in 1942, the celebration was different. Not because Dachau had changed, but because the prisoners had learned how to create their own moments of solace. Edgar was asked to write Christmas poems, and so he did, secretly composing verses to bring his comrades a fleeting sense of normalcy. He even received a small branch decorated with makeshift ornaments—a rare token of kindness in a world designed to strip the prisoners of all sentiment.

On Christmas Eve, the prisoners were allowed an unusual indulgence. They attended a film screening—though the images flickering on the screen felt foreign, a reminder of a world that no longer existed for them. Later, in the barracks, small trees decorated with whatever could be found stood in front of every window, smuggled in piece by piece. In hushed voices, they sang, shared tiny morsels of food, and, for a moment, allowed themselves to remember what it meant to be human.

Then came the morning. At 7 a.m., naked and shivering, the men were ordered out of bed and marched to the bathhouse for disinfection. Their coats were gassed for lice, the chemicals burning their eyes and throats as they attempted to endure. Christmas was over.

*****

One morning, Edgar was summoned. The head of operations at the Präzifix factory had a visitor—Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer. It was an unusual event. Prisoners weren’t often called for meetings with such men, and even less often were they addressed with civility.

“You’re Kupfer?” Hoffmann’s companion asked. “Weren’t you in Stuttgart?”

Edgar hesitated. “Yes.”

“Then we know each other.” The man extended his hand—an almost unimaginable gesture. Edgar shook it warily.

“I remember you now,” the man continued. “Willy Reichert, the humorist—you knew him, yes? He’s doing well, better than you. You should take care of yourself. You won’t always be here.”

Edgar nodded, uncertain what to say. Later, the engineer in charge of Präzifix informed him that there had been talk of his potential release. Edgar felt his stomach tighten. Release. The word should have filled him with hope. But he knew what it meant: enlistment. The German army was losing men faster than they could be replaced. Even prisoners could be “rehabilitated” if they were willing to fight for the Third Reich.

Edgar found himself shaking his head before he even spoke. “Please,” he told the engineer. “Pass along that I don’t want any efforts made on my behalf.”

The engineer stared at him, stunned. “You don’t want to leave?”

“Not under those conditions.”

It was better to remain a prisoner than to be made a killer.

*****

Edgar had come to Italy in 1937, to the island of Ischia, where he found purpose promoting tourism to his fellow Germans. The people of Ischia accepted him as one of their own, but the German authorities watched him with suspicion.

In 1940, his name was reported. Insufficiently supportive of the Nazi regime. Too independent. Too outspoken.

The telegram arrived on a warm September evening. It ordered him to report to the police in Naples, with his luggage.

His Italian hosts were distraught. Don Enrico, who brought him the message, looked ashamed. “Signore Kupfer, this is… unfortunate.”

Edgar forced a smile. “Better to know than to wonder.”

He packed, leaving behind the life he had built. The denunciation had done its work. He was a marked man.

In Innsbruck, Austria, Edgar sat before a Gestapo officer who asked him, coldly, why he had never embraced National Socialism.

“You had years to join,” the officer reasoned. “Why didn’t you?”

Edgar held his ground. “I have never belonged to a party. And I never will.”

The officer studied him for a long moment. “You are a German. Why do you resist your nation?”

“I resist murder,” Edgar said simply.

That was enough. He was sentenced. To Dachau he would go.

Now, years later, they were offering him a way out. A rifle in his hands. A uniform on his back. He had only to say yes.

*****

Winter 1942 brought more than hunger and cold to Dachau—it brought disease. Typhus spread like wildfire, infecting barracks, sending hundreds to the infirmary, and leaving men shivering in their bunks, their eyes hollow with fever. The dead cart rolled through the camp each day, carrying away those too weak to fight off the sickness.

At first, Edgar feared the outbreak like the others. But then, something changed. Orders came that the workers in the Präzifix factory would no longer march back and forth from the camp. Instead, they would live in the factory, isolated from the main barracks to prevent the disease from spreading further.

For Edgar, it was an unexpected gift. With no SS men watching his every move at night, he had something he had not had in years—privacy. While his comrades lay in their bunks, he would slip quietly into his small office, seal the cracks in the door so no light escaped, and write.

Each night, he risked everything. If an SS officer had caught him, it would most certainly mean death. But the compulsion to document what was happening, to record what he saw, what he felt, was stronger than his fear.

Edgar’s diary quickly grew too large to hide in a pocket. He found new places—behind a loose board in the floor, inside a hollowed-out curtain rod. He stacked supplies over his hiding spots, disguising the pages beneath boxes of pencils, rulers, and office supplies.

Meanwhile, the disease raged on inside the camp, taking more prisoners by the day. Edgar wrote about them, about the smell of sickness in the air, about the way the infirmary filled with men burning with fever, their bodies wasting away as the typhus devoured them. He wrote about the desperation, the way some prisoners welcomed the disease because it meant an end to their suffering. He wrote about the guards, their fear of contamination, their sudden reluctance to beat prisoners who might be infected. But most of all, Edgar wrote to remember. To ensure that if he did not survive, someone would find his words, someone would know what had happened here.

And yet, some nights, exhaustion overtook him. Edgar would sit at his desk, pencil in hand, and feel the weight of his own fatigue press down on him like the cold air outside. More than once, he thought about burning the pages, destroying the evidence, just so he could sleep without the burden of his secret.

But he never did.

Even as men died around him, even as the camp continued its slow, relentless work of grinding them down, Edgar kept writing.

*****

One day, Edgar was one of eight prisoners selected for an unusual task: traveling into the village of Dachau to complete construction work. It was a strange thing to leave the confines of the camp, even if only for a few hours.

As the truck rumbled through the gates and onto the open road, Edgar found himself staring out at a world that had once been familiar but now felt foreign. Houses with gardens, children playing, dogs barking in their yards. It was jarring. Life still existed beyond the barbed wire.

The village of Dachau itself was small, almost idyllic. A quiet market town, its streets winding past low houses with flower boxes in the windows. Atop a hill, the remains of a small castle overlooked the town.

Edgar and the others were taken to a house where they were to repair walls and lay pipes. Inside, the furniture was warm and well-kept—thick carpets, gilded picture frames, delicate porcelain cups. The kind of home he might have visited in another life.

At one point, Edgar found himself alone in the attic. He sat for a moment in an old armchair, running his fingers over the armrests. How good it felt to sit in a real chair. Nearby, a small teapot sat on a wooden shelf, and beside it, a framed photograph of a family.

Outside, he could hear laughter drifting over the garden wall. The voices of people who had no idea—or did they?—what was happening just two kilometers away. How could they live so peacefully with hell at their doorstep?

A whisper of conversation reached his ears.

“Quiet,” one man said. “If you say even the smallest thing, you’ll end up in the camp yourself.”

“It won’t last much longer,” another voice replied. “Everything has to come to an end sometime. The soldiers would have stopped long ago if the SS wasn’t standing behind them with machine guns.”

For a moment, Edgar let himself believe it. Maybe the war really would end soon. Maybe the world outside would wake up.

But as the truck carried them back to the camp, past the watchtowers, past the barbed wire, past the men waiting in the cold, the weight of reality settled back onto his shoulders.

The war might soon end. But not yet. Not soon enough.

Later that night, the sky was alive with movement. Edgar woke to the distant hum of engines. The barracks trembled, windows rattling with each explosion. A group of men gathered at the window, watching as streaks of light filled the air. Allied bombers. Anti-aircraft guns fired relentlessly, the sky flashing with bursts of fire. Edgar could just make out a plane caught in a searchlight, gliding like a silver dove as flares burst around it. For the first time in a long while, he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. The Allies were coming. The world had not forgotten them.

*****

“At Easter, I also celebrated my birthday,” Edgar wrote in his diary. “It was touching to receive a package with various items sent to me from the camp. I hadn’t been forgotten.”

For a moment, he allowed himself to be surprised. The block clerk, Ackert, had gone out of his way, gifting him a pair of Dutch wooden clogs painted white with red flowers, each decorated with a heart. Ackert even included a poem.

Edgar marveled at the kindness, at the small ways in which people held onto their humanity even in this place. Other comrades contributed what little they could—a few cut flowers, an apple, a single piece of toast. Someone even managed to procure a lighter for him. A lighter! Such a small object, yet one that spoke volumes.

The factory director’s wife secretly baked a cake, risking everything to do so, and sent it along with two tablespoons of coffee grounds. “It was more than a gift; today, it is a treasure, and most importantly: it clearly showed her attitude toward the prisoners—and that was the most beautiful gift.” Her husband, the director, gave him cigars, tobacco, and painted Easter eggs.

Later that night, as he lay in his bunk, exhaustion weighing on him, he reflected on the day. It had been, against all logic, the best birthday of his life.

*****

It started with an air raid. The camp was thrown into chaos, sirens wailing, searchlights cutting through the night. In the confusion, four Russian prisoners cut through the fence and vanished into the darkness. Their comrades covered for them at roll call, calling out their names, answering in their place. But eventually, the deception unraveled. The SS realized what had happened.

“All prisoners to the parade ground!”

Edgar had been through this before. He remembered the first time, when he had only just arrived in Dachau. Hours of standing, the cold seeping into his bones, the fear tightening around his throat. Now, he was numb to it, just like the others. They knew the routine: stand, wait, suffer.

The escapees didn’t get far. Three were caught after weeks on the run, starving, exhausted. They were dragged back to camp and beaten before being thrown into the bunker. Everyone knew what was coming next.

The entire camp was summoned to witness their punishment.

“They were tied to the bench,” Edgar recorded. “The block elders were forced to whip them. Some hesitated, but orders were orders. The SS stood watching, grinning, correcting the technique if the lashes weren’t hard enough. The Russians took the blows in silence, except for one, who whimpered after the tenth stroke.”

When it was over, the prisoners were dismissed, their evening soup waiting. But many left their bowls untouched. The fourth Russian was never found. Some said he had been shot in the woods; others whispered that he had escaped for good. No one knew for sure.

*****

“This morning at four o’clock, a young Czech cut his wrists,” Edgar recorded in his diary. “They found him an hour later and took him to the infirmary. If he recovers, he will likely face punishment for ‘self-mutilation.’”

Edgar had seen it before. The hopelessness. The silent surrender. Many prisoners judged those who tried to take their own lives, unable to understand how someone could give in when they themselves had suffered so much and continued to endure. But Edgar understood. He understood all too well. He had felt the pull of death himself, back in Neuengamme, after his bout with scabies. The exhaustion, the ceaseless hunger, the hopelessness that settled like a stone in his gut. What was left to hope for?

“I understand why people flirt with the idea of the fence,” he wrote. “A grasp at the electric wire, and it’s all over. Or they step through the line of guards—it cracks, a small pain, and then you’re free, dissolved into the unknown.”

Edgar had come close. He had stared at the possibility and felt no fear—only relief.

But something, some final tether, had held him back. You should try everything first. That small, quiet voice inside him had whispered it when all else seemed lost. So he had tried. He had reached out to comrades, sought out even the smallest gestures of kindness. A friend gave him a cigarette. A stranger played Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on the violin. The music cracked something open inside him, and before he knew it, he was weeping. And if he could cry, he could still feel. And if he could still feel, maybe, just maybe, he could still live.

Edgar stared at the page in front of him. His hands trembled slightly as he wrote, as he gave words to the despair they all carried. He had survived his own dark night. But how many more would be lost before the war was over?

*****

Edgar never thought he would see a stage inside Dachau, let alone stand on one. But somehow, even here, the prisoners found ways to create, to express, to resist in their own way.

“Yesterday,” Edgar wrote in his diary, “we organized a small evening of entertainment. There was acting and singing. Two short, wordless pieces were performed. I myself wrote the prologue for the event.”

A makeshift stage had been built in one of the machine rooms, covered with horse blankets. The factory director and his wife sat in the front row, alongside other guests, watching as prisoners performed. The event felt surreal, as though the camp momentarily transformed into something else, something human.

It reminded Edgar of the first show he had seen in Dachau—a small, improvised cabaret, where a Polish prisoner had sung “The Moor Soldiers.” That night, the audience had sat in rapt silence as the song echoed through the barracks, filling them with a kind of defiance. Later, he had been asked to participate in another performance. He had hesitated at first. Was it right to entertain in a place like this? But then he had seen what it did for the others—how, for a few moments, they could escape.

One of the most remarkable performances Edgar witnessed was a Polish ballet. “Five pairs in national costumes danced, their movements graceful despite their rags,” he wrote. “The backdrop was painted, the costumes handmade, and yet it could have been a scene from any grand stage. The Poles wept openly as they watched. For the first time in years, they saw themselves, their homeland, their culture, alive again.”

Cabaret nights became a ritual of resilience. Edgar would later perform himself, standing under dim lights, reading poetry and verses he had composed in secret. The laughter and applause that followed were unlike anything he had felt in years—proof that they were still men, still human, still capable of joy.

And yet, even in these moments, danger lurked. Once, an SS officer burst into a performance, forcing the prisoners to scatter. Another time, a singer’s voice was cut off mid-song by the command to return to their bunks. The world outside the performances had not changed; the cruelty remained. But within those stolen hours, the prisoners reclaimed something of themselves.

*****

It started with rumors. Then came the reality—1,800 Italians, newly arrived, standing in a mass on the parade ground.

“They came in uniforms—some from Greece, disarmed soldiers,” Edgar recorded in his diary. “They were not like other prisoners. They stood together in a heap, refusing to form ranks. When their names were read, no one answered.”

He heard whispers of defiance. The Italians smashed their own watches rather than surrender them. They tore up banknotes, destroyed their possessions rather than allow them to be confiscated. And when ordered to relieve themselves, they did so right where they stood, a final insult to the authority that had imprisoned them. It was clear: these men were not yet broken.

Edgar had been waiting for an opportunity to meet them. Surely, there must be someone from Ischia. And there was. A name was passed through the crowd, then a face. Francesco Chiaro, from Forio. He was thin, exhausted, his uniform hanging loose on his shoulders. But when he saw Edgar, recognition lit his face.

“He didn’t know me by name,” Edgar wrote, “but when I said I had lived on Ischia, his eyes widened. He was young when I had been there, stationed in Africa during my time on the island. But the connection was immediate.”

Francesco spoke of home—of the bombings in Naples, of hunger on the island. Potatoes, once fit only for pigs, had become a necessity. Rationed bread barely kept people alive. Edgar listened, drinking in every word like wine.

Francesco, in turn, was grateful. “It feels,” he told Edgar, “as if a brother has come to visit me.”

Edgar knew he had to help him. Through quiet negotiations, he secured Francesco a job as a room elder—a position that meant extra rations and protection from the worst of the camp’s hardships.

“Of course, it was unfair,” Edgar admitted, “but if I could help one person, just one, then I would.”

Days later, Francesco pulled Edgar aside. “When the war is over,” he said, “I will go back to Ischia. And you will come with me.”

Edgar smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe one day.”

He wanted to believe it. To believe that they would return home, that they would walk the streets of Forio again, that this moment—this nightmare—would not last forever. And in that moment, beneath the watchtowers of Dachau, hope felt possible.

*****

Despite all they were forced to endure, the prisoners prepared once again for Christmas.

“Everyone is already busy,” Edgar wrote. “There will be singing, playing, and performances. I had to write a small play—Stani gave me the idea. Now, I’ve been sentenced to direct it and play the role of the mother.”

As the day approached, the camp hummed with quiet anticipation. Hope, as fragile as candlelight, flickered among the prisoners.

On Christmas Eve, they gathered in the barracks. Edgar recited a poem:

We celebrate Christmas without ice and snow—

We celebrate Christmas, and it is as always—

In our hearts, deep sorrow grows, And a tear shimmers in our eyes.

When he finished, the SS officers in attendance remained silent. No applause. The prisoners, however, exchanged glances, their approval unspoken but understood.

That evening, Edgar and his friend and fellow prisoner Stani sat together in the dim light of a small candle. It was a quiet, private moment, a rare reprieve.

Later, the play began. Nobody knew their lines. Costumes were cobbled together from sacks. The aunt lost her belt on stage. And yet, as Edgar, playing the mother, called out to Stani, the returning son, something real took hold of the audience. Some were even moved to tears.

Afterward, music played. A gramophone—smuggled in through the kindness of a civilian worker—filled the barracks with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven. For a moment, they weren’t prisoners. They were simply men, listening.

*****

Edgar’s days in the Präzifix factory followed an unrelenting rhythm—twelve-hour shifts, the clatter of machines, the dull repetition of labor designed to break both body and spirit.

“The entire factory entrance is covered with large nets made of green ropes,” Edgar wrote. “From above, it must look like a patch of forest. Between the barracks where we sleep, poles hold up more nets, meant to resemble trees. A camouflage to fool Allied bombers.”

Inside, the atmosphere was thick with oil and sweat. The air smelled of metal filings, machine grease, and hopelessness. Edgar sat at his desk, recording shipments, tracking screws and bolts destined for war machines. He knew that each crate he cataloged would soon be used to build aircraft, to kill men he would never meet. The irony was not lost on him.

By night, he found solace in his diary. “I hide my pages beneath piles of steel—350 tons of it. A fortress of iron shields my words. But will they survive? Will I?”

The SS loomed always. “A stormtrooper walked through the plant today,” Edgar recorded. “A face like carved stone, eyes without warmth. The old prisoners whispered his name: Grunewald. A man who once beat prisoners unconscious for his own amusement. And now, he is back.”

Rumors of searches kept Edgar on edge. He had hidden his manuscript well, but fear gnawed at him. “If they find my words, I will not survive it.”

At times, his exhaustion became unbearable. “I think often of sleep,” he admitted. “Of rest. Of silence. I believe I will never leave this place.”

But then, a small moment would pull him back. A whispered joke among prisoners. A shared glance of defiance. A stolen cigarette. Tiny sparks of life within the machinery of death. The days ground on. Orders came. Men disappeared. The factory churned forward. And through it all, Edgar wrote. Because words were the only thing they had not yet taken from him.

*****

“There is something terrible in the air,” Edgar wrote in his diary. “It feels as if nature is holding its breath, as if a great storm is about to break over the world.”

By June 1944, the Allied invasion of France had begun. The world was shifting, but inside Dachau, the suffering continued.

Bombs rained down on Munich. The sky filled with the hum of Allied planes. For the first time, the SS trembled.

“The camp was bombed,” Edgar wrote. “Not the prisoner barracks, but the SS quarters. The payroll office was hit. A plane flew low and fired into the SS buildings. We think—perhaps it was a former prisoner. Perhaps someone had returned for revenge.”

More prisoners arrived—thousands upon thousands. They came packed in cattle cars, suffocating, starving. When the doors opened, hundreds were already dead.

“The barracks are overflowing,” Edgar noted. “Men sleep three to a bunk, stacked like firewood.”

And still, the cruelty continued. A Jewish prisoner was set on fire. Beaten men were left to die. An SS officer promised a meal to a prisoner who killed one hundred Jews.

Edgar recorded it all. The horror. The despair. The hope.

Then the leaflets came. Dropped from Allied planes.

“They knew about us,” Edgar wrote. “They knew where we were.”

But the war was not over. Not yet.

And in Dachau, the suffering continued.

*****

“At 1:12 a.m., the air raid alarm sounded,” Edgar wrote in his diary. “We headed to the woods as usual. Planes roared overhead, the sirens wailed. Then, suddenly—the whistling sound of falling bombs.”

Edgar and his comrades threw themselves to the ground. The forest erupted around them.

“I felt a sharp pain in my foot,” he continued. “Blood pooled inside my shoe.”

When the bombing stopped, Bocian, Edgar’s Polish friend, helped him remove his shoe. Edgar’s foot was torn open.

They carried him to the guard barrack, where chaos reigned—shattered windows, debris everywhere. The wounded moaned, some beyond saving.

“They carried me into the ambulance,” Edgar wrote. “Many hands reached out—‘Get well soon, Rau-Rau,’ they said.”

Edgar was taken to the infirmary, the dreaded Revier.

“They cut my pants open. My foot was swollen, the bones shattered. They strapped me down and counted to twelve. Then—blackness.”

When he woke, Edgar’s foot was bandaged. He was alive.

Pain gripped him for days. The infirmary was freezing. No coal—just scraps of old leather burned for warmth.

“Food is watery soup, bread once a day,” he wrote. “Everyone is losing weight.”

His foot healed poorly. The bones fused unevenly.

“I will always limp,” he realized. “But I am alive.”

“Tomorrow, I will be discharged,” Edgar wrote in February 1945. “Back to the barracks, back to the cold, back to hunger.”

He looked at his foot, at the scarred flesh.

“The war is not over,” he wrote. “Not yet.”

*****

By April 1945, the camp was unraveling. Food supplies were nearly gone. The barracks were overcrowded.

“The soup gets thinner and thinner,” Edgar wrote. “One loaf of bread now feeds eight men.”

The crematorium burned day and night. The morgue overflowed.

Then came the news: Augsburg had fallen. The Allies were 40 kilometers away.

“The camp is to be evacuated,” Edgar wrote. “But how? There are thousands of us. The weak, the sick—what will happen to them?”

The SS scrambled. They packed their belongings, loaded trucks, whispered of escape.

“The guards are leaving,” Edgar noted. “They don’t want to be here when the Americans arrive.”

Then the transports began. Nearly 2,000 Jews were taken. Their train still sat on the tracks. No one knew if it had moved.

“The SS says they’re being taken to Switzerland. I don’t believe it. I believe they’re going to their deaths.”

By April 27, the camp command had vanished.

“The SS is still here, about 100 men,” Edgar wrote. “The crematorium hasn’t been blown up—yet.”

Then, one final note: “We hear explosions. The front must be near. Soon, this will all be over.”

*****

“The gunfire is growing louder,” Edgar wrote on April 29, 1945. “It is close, so close.”

Outside, the camp trembled. The prisoners listened, their breath shallow, their bodies tense. Then came the first shout: “The Americans are here!”

Edgar’s heart pounded. He pulled himself up, moving toward the infirmary window. He saw them—the soldiers in olive uniforms, moving through the camp.

“Comrades ran past, shouting, waving, their eyes bright with tears,” Edgar wrote. “A priest kissed the hand of an American soldier. Others collapsed in sobs, unable to believe what they were seeing.”

The white flags waved over the camp, but the fear had not yet faded. Would the SS fight? Would there be one last massacre?

Then, the gate swung open.

“They are here,” Edgar whispered. “We are free.”

The Americans moved carefully, their rifles raised. They had seen the horrors outside the gates—the train filled with the dead, the bodies stacked in barracks. Some soldiers wept. Others turned their faces away, overcome by the sheer scale of it.

Prisoners surged forward, surrounding the soldiers, touching their arms, pressing hands to their chests, as if to reassure themselves that this was real.

“I saw comrades embracing,” Edgar wrote. “A Frenchman fell to his knees in prayer. A Polish prisoner, barely more than a skeleton, whispered, ‘Frei? Frei?’ And the soldier nodded. ‘Yes, you are free.’”

The guards who had not fled were rounded up. Some were shot on the spot, others dragged into captivity. Edgar remained in the infirmary, his injured foot keeping him from joining the rush. But comrades came to him, grabbing his hands, weeping in joy.

“I felt their tears on my skin,” Edgar wrote. “I tasted salt on my lips.”

The nightmare was over. The gates of Dachau had opened. At long last, there really was a way to freedom.

*****

A week after the liberation of Dachau, Edgar stood before the earth that had swallowed his words. This was his mission now.

“With much effort,” Edgar later wrote, “we removed the steel rods and broke up the cement. The cloth coverings fell away, rotted; the oil paper was decomposed; the aluminum foils were eaten away—the manuscripts themselves had become heavy, wet balls of paper.”

The American officers watched, fascinated, as Edgar pulled the pages from the damp earth. It was proof—undeniable, unerasable.

“I had not anticipated the groundwater,” Edgar wrote. “The rising water had soaked the paper, though I was able to dry and save almost the entire text.”

For a month, Edgar worked tirelessly in the camp, drying the pages, separating them one by one. The words—the truth—had to survive.

“The American officers provided me with space to save the manuscript,” Edgar recalled. “I built a drying facility and received assistance from a secretary. Stani worked tirelessly, drying the sheets and separating them. Only a few pages remained completely destroyed.”

One officer asked him, “What will you do with it now?”

Edgar looked at the fragile pages, the ink blurred in places but still legible. This was more than a diary. This was testimony. This was justice.

“I will tell the world,” Edgar said. “They must know what happened here.”

Edgar’s diary later played a crucial role in preparing the Dachau trials, which sought to hold former SS officers and camp personnel accountable. Excerpts from his writings, which detailed the abuses, events, and conditions within the camp, were included in an official American investigative report that provided essential evidence of the systemic cruelty inflicted on prisoners.

By the time the Dachau trials ended in August 1948, 177 guards and officers had been found guilty. Ninety-seven were sentenced to death. Fifty-four received life sentences. The rest were given terms of hard labor.

*****

After fully recovering from his injuries, Edgar Kupfer left Dachau and sought refuge at Schloss Haus in Regensburg. There, he dedicated himself to transcribing his extensive diary, preserving the harrowing details of his years in captivity. It was also in Schloss Haus that he wrote the foreword to his diaries, a testament to his determination to document and bear witness to the atrocities he had endured.

Longing to return to the place he had once cherished, Edgar traveled back to Ischia in 1952. However, he found the island changed beyond recognition. In 1953, his visa for the United States was approved, and he made the journey across the Atlantic. His move was reportedly facilitated by an American military officer and a professor from the University of Chicago. Yet the financial support he had anticipated never materialized, leaving him struggling to make ends meet. In a letter from 1960, he reflected on his disappointment. “My journey here in America was not particularly blessed with luck,” he confided in a friend. “I worked as a houseboy in a hotel, a night watchman in a department store, a dishwasher, a professional Santa Claus, and finally, as a doorman at a large cinema. My strength was probably already too depleted to endure all of this without intellectual stimulation from outside and without joy.”

Exhausted and disillusioned, Edgar made preparations to leave the United States. In 1961, he returned to Europe and briefly settled on Ischia before moving to Sardinia, where he had received a commission to write a travel guide about the island. Although he gathered materials for the book, he found himself unable to write. His creative paralysis tormented him. “Since 1945,” he wrote, “I haven’t been able to write, and this is probably my greatest suffering, or rather, it is the symptom of my great suffering, as if a bird could no longer sing. If I were a millionaire or a beggar, I would always write because it’s something I must do. But now everything has fallen silent for me, and it’s like being half-dead.”

In Sardinia, Edgar lived modestly in a small house near San Teodoro with several stray dogs and cats, whom he affectionately called his family. Over the years, he moved frequently, struggling to survive on meager royalties and a modest compensation payment from the German government for his imprisonment in Dachau.

Edgar never achieved any kind of fame for what he had endured. Unlike other Holocaust chroniclers who became widely known, Edgar lived out his final years in obscurity, his voice nearly forgotten. It wasn’t until six years after his death from complications due to heart disease, when Dr. Barbara Distel, the director of the Dachau Memorial Site, finally published in German Edgar’s Dachau Diaries—one of the most comprehensive and chillingly detailed testimonies of life inside a Nazi concentration camp.

In an era where Holocaust denial and historical distortion threaten the integrity of memory, Edgar’s work remains a defiant rebuke to those who seek to minimize, revise, or erase the past. His words remind us that silence is complicity, that truth is fragile, and that memory is a responsibility passed from one generation to the next. What Edgar risked everything to document is not just history—it’s a warning.