Why would a man faced with death in three Nazi concentration camps not sign a document granting him his freedom? This is the true story of 107-year-old Leopold Engleitner. This seemingly ordinary man was given the choice between life or death, and he found the extraordinary courage to stand by his conscience. Refusing to take up arms in support of Nazi aggression and to salute “Heil Hitler,” his uncompromising stand put him and thousands of other Jehovah’s Witnesses directly in the crosshairs of the Third Reich. Hitler personally proclaimed: “This brood will be exterminated in Germany!” Like a “ladder” lowered into the “lions’ den” to which he was condemned, he was given a way out by the Nazis: in exchange for his freedom he was offered a document requiring him to renounce his faith and swear allegiance to Hitler. This-he refused. After surviving Buchenwald, Niederhagen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps, he weighed less than sixty-two pounds, but his will remained unbroken. Spotlighted by the perspective of others who also suffered, such as Renée Firestone, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor, and Gottlieb Bernhardt (former SS bodyguard of Adolf Hitler), who himself faced a crisis of conscience, Leopold’s story resonates with the power of conviction and hope. f not for a chance meeting with Bernhard Rammerstorfer, Leopold would have disappeared into the shadowed subtext of history; instead an enduring friendship formed between two men separated by more than sixty years and two World Wars. Together, they traveled more than 95,000 miles around the world promoting peace and tolerance. Their lectures took them to Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and Georgetown Universities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Library of Congress, as well as other noted institutions throughout the United States, Europe, and the Russian Federation.