Condemned to Live is a breakthrough to the subject of understanding the German common soldier, a private soldat. These gripping World War II memoirs portray the life, culture, and travels of Franz Frisch.

The remarkably candid photographs display the war’s devastation and death, but most striking are the people images: camp life, friends, enemies, and refugees. Using a popular Kodak box camera, Frisch shot pictures from 1939 in Poland, until 1943, when film became unavailable. He periodically sent the film to his mother to be developed.

Frisch was 19 years old when, in 1938, he was drafted into an artillery battalion from his hometown of Vienna, Austria. Serving nine years as a Panzer artilleryman, he fought on five fronts in the European war: Poland, France, the Soviet Union, Sicily, and Italy. In March 1945, he became an American prisoner of war and spent two years in captivity.

Frisch writes about the human interest subjects, mainly comrades and family, his personal war. He eschews Hitler’s grand strategies, field marshals, Panzer tactics, or recounting the war’s outcomes, all beyond his control. The narrative includes extensive remembrances of a private soldier’s small and volatile world, conforming to the level of authority and responsibility, viewpoint, and informality of the man who took the images. His American counterpart was immortalized as “G.I. Joe.”