216 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazi regime
systematically murdered 6 million Jews. No artifacts
can convey the scope of this atrocity, but we rely
on material evidence to record, remember, and
understand the Holocaust. The two maps here were
drawn by a young Jewish boy at the end of the war:
the first documents his life in the concentration
camps, while the second traces his perilous journey
home after the defeat of Germany.
Michal Kraus was born in Czechoslovakia in 1930,
and at the age of eight he watched the Germans
invade his hometown of Náchod. The Nazis quickly
began to isolate and oppress Jews, expelling Michal
from school and forcing the family into a ghetto
in 1941. A year later the family was deported to
Terezín, a camp where 33,000 prisoners perished
from the brutal conditions alone; the Germans sent
90,000 more to extermination camps throughout
Nazi-controlled territories further east. Despite
the desperation at Terezín, the large population of
prisoners fostered a culture and sense of community.
Michal himself drew comics and portraits for the
young boys’ newspaper Kamarad.
In December 1943 the Nazis sent Michal and his
family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland; six months
later Michal’s mother was removed yet again, to a
camp at Stutthof. Michal’s father had fallen ill and his
condition worsened throughout the spring and early
summer of 1944. In July he was tortured and killed by
the Germans. For the next six months the fourteen-
year-old Michal remained at the camp; every day he
watched as new prisoners were sent directly to the
gas chambers. Over a million Jews were murdered at
Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945.
In the fall of 1944 Michal began to hear the sound
of Soviet and American planes flying overhead, and
by the following January the Soviets had pressed
the Eastern Front toward Auschwitz. The Nazis
responded by abandoning the camp and forcing
prisoners to march for three days in the depths of
winter to a train station sixty-five kilometers away.
Most of the prisoners froze to death or were killed
by German guards. Michal and others who survived
were crammed into an open railway car for four
excruciating days as it lumbered toward Austria.
HOLOCAUST
Michal Kraus, map of Austrian
concentration camps, and
“From Linz to Nachoda,” both
circa 1945–7
The map below marks the next five months of
Michal’s life, spent in concentration camps along
the Danube River. He remembered this as the worst
time of his life.
Michal’s first destination was the camp at
Mauthausen, which he knew as the site where
many of his fellow Czech Jews had been murdered.
He arrived there after a full week without food.
From Mauthausen he was deported to Melk, where
prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts to construct an
underground factory for the German war effort. The
labor alone killed some, while others were executed
once they proved too weak to work. Michal’s sole
source of hope was the occasional American air raid
above; he recalled how “gorgeous” it was “to behold
those avenging Allies, the large bombers glittering
in the rays of the sun.”