Drawing the Holocaust

Michael Kraus has recently retired from the architectural firm he joined in 1967. He enjoys traveling with his wife and often visits the land of his birth. He still speaks good Czech, as do the other survivors, with whom he remains in friendly contact.  Paul Wilson is a freelance translator, writer, editor, and radio producer. His translations have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Among his many book translations, We Are Children Just the Same, an anthology of writing from an underground newspaper published by teenaged boys in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin, won the National Jewish Book Award in 1995.

• Publisher's Introduction Author's Introduction Editor's Note Preface I. Ghetto Terezin, 1942-1943 Transport The Home in Hannover Barracks Danger! The Great Roll Call Departure The Journey II. Birkenau 1943-1945 Graveyard of the Victims of Nazism Family Camp B.II.b, December 1943-July 1944 Arrival Showers Daycare March 7th Arrival! Time Limit Ends, Danger Increases We Take Leave: The Liquidation of B.II.b Life Without Parents Men's Camp B.II.d The front draws closer Difficult Wandering III. Mauthausen The Second Camp Melk Back to Mauthausen Third Camp Tent Camp Gunskirchen The Big Day-May 7th, 1945-Liberation IV. Post-War Hardships Under the Care of the US Army Horsching Journey Home Camp in Linz By Steamboat on the Danube On Red Army Territory Transfer in Melk Journey by Train Wiener Neustadt On Foot to Our Homeland Home Again Bratislava Prague The Convalescent Home Notes Chronology of Events

I spent a year in the Terezín ghetto, but as bad as it was, it cannot be compared to a single month in Auschwitz or Mauthausen. Rather than taking time to describe Terezín, I will only briefly record the most important events, because I am writing this during a period in my life when time matters and I would rather describe in greater detail my experiences in the concentration camps."" - Michael Kraus, from the text