​​David Koker from Amsterdam became one of the most striking chroniclers of life inside a Nazi concentration camp. He was arrested and deported to Kamp Vught, the SS-run camp near ’s-Hertogenbosch together with his parents and younger brother in February 1943. Soon after arriving, he began keeping a diary that recorded almost a year of the camp’s routines, deportations, and violence, but also the friendships, love, intellectual debates, and rare moments of beauty that persisted even under oppression.

​Koker wrote with unusual clarity and range. He described daily work details, the dread surrounding transports, and the brutality he witnessed, yet he also reflected on poetry, philosophy, and the landscape around Vught, whose heaths and forests he compared to Van Gogh paintings. His writing reveals an ongoing struggle to preserve humanity in a place designed to extinguish it. During this time he developed feelings for fellow prisoner Hannelore “Hannie” Hess, while exchanging letters with his girlfriend Nettie, a German-Jewish refugee hiding in Amsterdam. On 4 February 1944, he provided a rare Jewish eyewitness account of Heinrich Himmler’s visit to the camp.

​The diary’s survival is nearly as remarkable as the text itself. In February 1944, a civilian worker from the Philips workshop managed to smuggle the manuscript out of Vught and deliver it to Koker’s friend, the future critic Karel van het Reve. A few months later, in June 1944, David was deported east. During a transport to Dachau in early 1945, he died from exhaustion and cold at the age of 23.

​His brother Max survived Auschwitz and carefully preserved the diary after the war. Published in 1977 as Dagboek geschreven in Vught and later translated into English as At the Edge of the Abyss, it is now recognized as a classic of Holocaust literature, a rare testimony from inside a Nazi camp and a moving record of a young man’s determination to think, feel, and remain human amid terror.