KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Edwin Shifrin’s family knew he escaped from a Nazi prison camp during World War II, but it wasn’t until one of his children started digging into his wartime past that they learned the details.

Shifrin, 93, seldom discussed his wartime experiences, but he received a prisoner-of-war medal in February after his son Dan dug through news reports and his father’s military records and pieced together what happened.

Assigned to the Army’s 30th Infantry Division, 1st Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, Company C, Shifrin landed on France’s Normandy beach in June 1944 a week after the D-Day invasion and fought the Germans in battles at St. Lo and Mortain.

The Germans captured him on Aug. 7, and Shifrin was sent to Poland lockup Stalag IIIC, about 90 miles from Berlin. Telegrams to U.S. family members notified them he was missing in action.

Shifrin was among the camp’s roughly 1,000 prisoners, many of whom formed “an escape committee” and drew up a getaway plan.

Each morning when the Germans did a head count, a prisoner designated by the committee would hide, touching off what turned out to be a futile search by guards. The hiding prisoner would later quietly rejoin the others, but the befuddled guards would lower the next day’s head count by one.

On the second day, two prisoners would hide, touching off another futile search and getting the guards to lower the next day’s head count by one again. That continued with three and four prisoners hiding and the guards classifying them as escaped. Eventually, four men actually escaped, but the guards didn’t notice because they had already lowered the roll-call numbers to account for the prisoners who had hidden.