BETWEEN WAR AND ABUNDANCE 217As American forces pressed from the west and
the Soviets advanced from the east, Nazi brutality
continued. The Germans sent Michal and others
from Melk back to Mauthausen (along the green
line on the map at left), where prisoners began to
hear rumors of a German surrender. The rumble
of American bombers could now be heard day and
night. The Nazis relentlessly forced the prisoners
on another march (along the red line) of over sixty
kilometers to a dense forest at Gunskirchen. Those
who fell behind were executed.
Upon arrival at Gunskirchen, exhausted and
near death, Michal and his fellow prisoners were
sequestered for ten days without food or blankets.
On May 5 the sound of gunfire signaled the approach
of American troops, prompting the German guards
to abandon the area. Michal and other survivors
emerged from the forest to find themselves among
thousands of other prisoners in a uniformly desperate
condition. After four years of imprisonment, just shy
of his fifteenth birthday, he was free.
Now liberated, Michal thrilled at the sight of
American soldiers—both black and white—driving
tanks and convoys along roads that had imprisoned
him for so long. Everything he saw confirmed the
destruction of the Wehrmacht. But he was utterly
alone, nowhere near home, and immediately became
so sick with typhus that he was forced to remain in
Austria to recover. As soon as he regained his health,
he quite literally jumped at the opportunity to join
500 Czech and Slovak Jews heading home aboard a
convoy of trucks.
Michal drew the map to the left to record the
route of his long and perilous journey home in June.
At lower middle he marks the American military
presence in Austria (“Rakousko”), and the Danube
River in blue. Red ink marks his route home to
Czechoslovakia, bordered on the north by Poland
and on the east by the Soviet Union (“SSSR”). His
trek began on a steamboat up the Danube from
Linz through his two former concentration camps,
Mauthausen and Melk. In a terrible irony, he was
once again held at Melk while awaiting passage
home, this time guarded by the Russian rather than
the German army. While at Melk he was horrified to
see the ovens and other devices that the Germans
had used to murder prisoners just a few weeks earlier.
After the Russians released Michal from Melk, he
traveled by train through Vienna to Wiener Neustadt,
where he met other Czech refugees. Rail lines were so
badly damaged by bombing raids that Michal traveled
on foot over one hundred kilometers to the Czech
border at Bratislava. As he walked in a procession
that stretched for miles, he carefully avoided the
Russian soldiers who were plundering their way west
through Czechoslovakia.
In Bratislava Michal boarded a train that arrived
in Prague on June 28, 1945. It was only then that he
learned his mother had been killed in the camps.
When he finally returned to his hometown of Náchod,
at the upper center of the map, he began to compose
a diary to honor his parents and document the horror
he had survived. Over three volumes, he detailed
and illustrated the camps he had endured in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and Austria. His maps are a first draft
of history, a vivid and specific record of the geography
of genocide.
On his long walk home, Michal passed through
regions that would soon be contested in the
emerging Cold War. Just a few months after he
finished the diary in 1947, communists staged a coup
in Czechoslovakia. Soon afterwards Michal went to
Canada to complete high school, and from there he
studied architecture at Columbia University. After
traveling and working in Europe, in 1951 he settled
permanently in the United States with his wife.
Michal lost every member of his extended family
in the Holocaust except for an aunt and a cousin.