Escape from Dachau – A Story of Survival and Resistance

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a powerful evening conversation with Susan Servais, daughter of the late Kathe Mueller Slonim, author of Escape from Dachau: A True Story of Survival, Courage, and a Daring Escape in the Face of Unthinkable Evil. In this riveting program, we’ll explore one family’s astonishing true story of rescue and resilience in the face of Nazi tyranny.

Also joining us will be Dachau survivor Nate Leipciger who will tell his story and Dachau liberator Hilbert Margol a member of the 42nd Division who participated in the liberation of Dachau.

Nate Leipciger was born in 1928 in Chorzów, Poland, and was just eleven years old when the Nazis invaded and his life was thrown into unimaginable horror. After three years in ghettos, Nate and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and sister were murdered. He and his father endured slave labor, a death march, and imprisonment in seven different camps before being liberated by American soldiers at a subcamp of Dachau on May 2, 1945. They were the only survivors of their family. Nate immigrated to Canada in 1948, built a new life as an engineer. “We managed to survive the impossible,” he says. “The Holocaust did not just happen to us. It was done to us. And the world is responsible.”

PFC Hilbert Margol, born February 22, 1924 in Jacksonville, Florida, was drafted in 1943 and served with Battery B, 392nd Field Artillery Battalion of the famed 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division, alongside his identical twin brother, Howard. In April 1945 his unit became among the first American forces to enter and liberate Dachau concentration camp—Hilbert and Howard were stopped by a stench in the woods and discovered boxcars crammed with the dead, a sight that Hilbert describes as beyond anything he’d imagined. After his honorable discharge in April 1946, Margol dedicated much of his later life to public education, sharing his firsthand testimony to oppose Holocaust denial and ensure the horrors he witnessed are never forgotten.

The program centers around the daring 1938 escape from Dachau—Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp—by Kathe’s father, aided by his cousin, a former Reich official secretly born Jewish. Driving across Germany with forged Nazi credentials, Max Immanuel risked everything to save a family member from near-certain death. Their story, documented by Kathe Mueller Slonim before her death in 2021 and published posthumously by her children, unfolds moment by moment with cinematic intensity and heart-stopping stakes.

Susan Servais, who helped bring her mother’s manuscript to publication, will share behind-the-scenes insights into the making of Escape from Dachau and why the story matters now more than ever. As antisemitism rises globally and Holocaust memory grows more urgent, this book is both a harrowing history and a moral call to vigilance and courage.

Escape from Dachau is more than a Holocaust memoir. It’s a high-stakes story of deception, danger, and family loyalty in the shadow of the Nazi regime. Rich with historical context and illustrated with 30 archival photographs, it honors the bravery of those who resisted evil with ingenuity and heart.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!