Prisoner B-3087

“I had always thought it would be fun to have a brother or a sister. That is, until I spent a few months living in my little apartment with five other kids.” 

As Yanek’s neighborhood is turned into a Jewish ghetto by the Nazi soldiers, multiple families are forced to live together in tiny apartments. This moment shows how the circumstances are changing Yanek’s character. Where once he idealized the thought of having a sibling, being forced to live crammed together with other children changes his mind. This is just the beginning of how the war changes even the most subtle parts of his personality.

“I was old enough that my parents couldn’t keep me inside all the time now. I took my mother’s place in line for our rations, and sometimes my father and I were pulled off the street to work outside the ghetto.” 

Yanek’s coming-of-age story occurs alongside the increasingly violent and oppressive Nazi regime that’s overtaken Poland. He grows older and desires independence, but the deadly circumstances unfolding around him limit his ability to seek the self-sufficiency that comes with adulthood. He is forced to work without pay instead of hanging out with friends and going to school, and there is always the constant fear of being murdered by the Nazis for no reason other than being Jewish.

“You are now responsible for your own sins, but also for your own goodness.” 

Yanek’s father speaks these words to him at his bar mitzvah, which is the Jewish ceremony in which a 13-year-old boy enters into manhood. His father’s words guide him as he is orphaned and forced between concentration camps. He endures constant tragedy, yet he still looks for moments to demonstrate kindness to the people around him.

“Now I am officially a prisoner, I thought. I almost laughed—in truth I had been a prisoner since the Nazis walled off the Kraków ghetto, but now I finally looked the part.” 

Yanek recognizes that he has been a prisoner of the Nazi regime ever since it took over his old neighborhood, but he officially becomes its prisoner when the Nazis force him to leave the only home he’s ever known. The Nazis control every aspect of his life after they remove him from the Kraków ghetto, and Yanek begins to understand that to be imprisoned is to be completely without freedom.

“You mustn’t let any of the other prisoners see you with it. They’ll try to take it. And don’t share it with anyone. Not if you want to survive, right?” 

Yanek finds the secret stash of money that his mother hid in her old coat, and Uncle Moshe warns Yanek to keep the money a secret. This advice makes their fellow Nazi prisoners appear as dangerous as the Nazi soldiers, and it goes against the advice that Yanek’s father gave him. He told Yanek to be good, and being good normally means sharing what he has with others in need. However, under the new circumstances created by the Nazi regime, being good is swept under the rug of survival. As much as Yanek hates seeing the people around him suffer, his uncle reminds him that the only way to survive is to look out for himself.

“I wanted to call out for him, but I knew that was suicide. Moshe had taught me: Do nothing to stand out. I had to be anonymous. I had to be no one, with no name, no personality, and no family of friends to care about.” 

Yanek realizes he’s truly alone after Uncle Moshe is murdered by the Nazi soldiers. His uncle taught him that the best way to survive is to blend in and remain unattached. If he sticks out too much, it will draw the Nazis’ attention to himself. If he becomes attached to his fellow prisoners, he will make mistakes that will likely get him killed. For Yanek, survival comes at the cost of extreme loneliness, as he can’t rely on the hope of friendship to see him through the darkest moments.

“Some mornings I could barely get myself up out of my bunk, and I had a hard time standing at roll call. Was this how it happened? Was this how a prisoner slipped from being a person to a Muselmanner?” 

The term Muselmanner is slang that describes the prisoners who are completely starved and exhausted. Muselmanners have essentially given up on living and are waiting to die. Yanek is being overworked and is starving at the hands of the relentless Nazi soldiers, and he wonders if the point will come when he’ll become a Muselmanner.

“I don’t know why I showed them. Not when you survived by looking out for yourself. Maybe it was because I’d wanted someone to help me when I had needed it. Maybe it was just that I would be lonely in there all day. But maybe it was that I just couldn’t keep the secret from someone else who could use the help too.” 

Yanek has been trying to live by Uncle Moshe’s advice to keep to himself to survive, but he feels guilty because he wants to help the people who are in need around him. When he finds a board near his bed and realizes that he can hide under it during the day instead of going to work, he can’t keep it a secret. He instead tells a few boys who are his age so they can hide with him. He acknowledges that it’s risky, but he’s tired of trying to survive alone.

“It was the Judenrat policeman. […] His head had been smashed in with a shovel, and the rest of his body was gashed and torn and bleeding.” 

The Judenrat police were prisoners whom the Nazis forced to police the other prisoners. They were despised by the prisoners because although they were forced into the role, many Judenrats abused their power. This man in Yanek’s work detail is murdered for being recognized as a former Judenrat, demonstrating the hatred that the other prisoners feel for him though they are all in the same situation.

“I was an animal to them, a pack mule. But beasts were never treated so poorly. Working animals were expensive. They had value. I was a Jew. We were lower than animals. They could kill as many of us as they wanted, and there would always be another trainload of us to take our place.” 

Before this moment, Yanek and a group of other prisoners are forced to move heavy stones from one end of a field to another. When they are finished, the Nazi soldiers tell them to move the stones back to their original position on the other end of the field. The work is back-breaking labor, and Yanek realizes that the Nazis are working him and the other prisoners to death for their own demented pleasure. There is no point to the work. The prisoners mean nothing to the Nazis; their lives and deaths are nothing but a game to them.

“I will fight back. I will kick the Nazis in the shins. I will run. I won’t go like a sheep to the slaughter!”

After Yanek realizes the Nazis are playing games with his life, he decides that he won’t let them easily kill him. He imagines that at the moment of his death he will fight back. Another prisoner has this same idea that evening and retaliates after a Nazi guard hits him. The guard shoots the man as well as the boy standing next to him in line. Yanek realizes that if he were to fight back against the Nazis, it will get other innocent prisoners killed.

“You won’t survive. None of us will. But if you stand under the exhaust vents, you won’t suffer as long before you die.” 

When Yanek and the other prisoners on the train realize they’re being taken to the death camp Birkenau, the man beside Yanek gives him this advice. This demonstrates the hopelessness that the prisoners feel as their time in the concentration camps drags on. Instead of looking for ways to survive, people like this man start looking for ways to suffer as little as possible. This moment also makes a distinction between concentration camps and death camps. While concentration camps claim to be camps for prisoners to work, death camps are places where prisoners are murdered in mass numbers.

“Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn’t have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing.” 

Yanek thinks about this as he’s waiting in what he falsely believes to be a gas chamber, although it turns out to be a shower. This moment reveals that his will to survive is built on the idea that the war will eventually end and he’ll be released from his imprisonment. He has always assumed that he will one day make it out alive. He suddenly thinks that if he’s going to die in the gas chamber, he might as well have died back at the ghetto because at least he would have avoided all this unnecessary suffering.

“After the shower, nothing seemed to matter as much to me. I know it was a game to the Nazis—kill us, don’t kill us, to them it didn’t really matter—but even so, I was glad I had made it through.” 

Yanek’s perspective changes after his experience in the showers. He believed he was going to die in that shower. When he instead lives, he emerges with apathetic will to survive. He simultaneously feels like nothing he does matters, but he wants to survive all the more because surviving means that he beats the Nazis. He realizes that wrong or right and hard work mean nothing to the Nazis because they murder prisoners without reason or logic. The Nazis are murdering them simply because they view them as less than human.

“I would scrub my body, I decided, each and every morning, no matter how cold it was, no matter how tired I was. I was alive, and I meant to stay that way.” 

Yanek decides to survive and overcome the Nazis at all costs. Part of his survival strategy is to take care of his body. All around him he sees his fellow prisoners forsaking their physical bodies because they have given up hope. Yanek takes care of his body and teeth to stay as healthy as he can and because it makes him feel human to maintain these routines.

“The Nazis loved having new prisoners who didn’t know what was coming. It amused them. I could only feel sorry for these new arrivals. They had no idea the waking nightmare that lay in wait for them.” 

By the time Yanek is forced into Auschwitz, he has been imprisoned by the Nazis for the entirety of his teenaged years. New prisoners arrive to Auschwitz, and Yanek feels sorry for their naivety. The new prisoners believe the Nazi guards who tell them that they can work hard to earn their freedom, and they look upon the seasoned prisoners with disgust because they are dirty and starving.

“One morning the man in the bunk next to me didn’t wake. I knew what death looked like by now. Death and I had become old acquaintances. We knew each other when we passed on the street. This man was dead, I was sure.” 

Seeing death is so common for Yanek that he comes to expect it. He isn’t surprised that the man who slept beside him died, but he is surprised by his own actions: He and another boy take bread from the deceased man’s pocket. This demonstrates the way that seeing constant death has changed Yanek. He went from being terrified of death to touching a dead man’s body for his own survival. Where death was once a sacred event that was accompanied by a funeral, it’s now become commonplace.

“Fred was the first person close to my age I’d met since hiding under the floors at Plaszów with Isaac and Thomas. I loved just talking again. Being human.”

Yanek and Fred become quick and close friends. Yanek knows his friendship with Fred goes against Uncle Moshe’s advice to remain anonymous and friendless, but the friendship gives him hope. Connecting with another person, talking about their pasts and families, makes him feel human again. Yanek considers his ability to maintain his humanness amid the constant dehumanization at the hands of the Nazis a priority; to maintain his humanity is to remember why he’s fighting so hard to survive and win against his captors.

“I had survived Plaszów, and Wieliczka, and Trzebinia, and Birkenau, and now Auschwitz. I was going to survive it all. I was going to live when the Allies liberated us. This I swore.” 

When Yanek is first imprisoned by the Nazis, he is terrified and does what he’s told to survive. However, as time progresses and he’s forced to endure relentless suffering by Nazi guards who punish him and the other prisoners for fun, Yanek grows angry. He uses his anger to fuel his survival. The angrier he gets at the injustice being done to him and the other prisoners, the more he wants to survive. To survive means he will beat his captors who tried so hard to kill him. This desire to survive is vital; Yanek knows that to give up hope is to resign himself to die.

“Not long ago, all these half-dead creatures around me had been people, I realized. Which of them had been doctors? Teachers? Musicians? Businessmen, like my father? Which of the boys had been students like me?” 

When Yanek was first imprisoned by the Nazis, he and the other prisoners were forced into matching jumpsuits and had their heads shaved. This made everyone appear similar, but this similarity is even more pronounced now that every prisoner is emaciated from starvation. Yanek tries to hold onto his humanity by imagining everyone’s individuality. As he wonders what people were like before being imprisoned, it helps him remember that he and the other prisoners are all unique people.

“Surely somebody else had to feel the same way. If I could just find someone to help me, if we shared the load, we would all make it, even this nameless boy.” 

During one of the death marches Yanek sees a young boy who is struggling to walk. Yanek knows that if the boy doesn’t pick up his pace, he will be shot by the Nazi guards in the back of the line. He puts his arm around the boy to help him walk faster, which in turn makes Yanek walk slower and depletes what’s left of his energy. He realizes that if everyone would come together to help one another, they would be much stronger as a whole than as weak individuals. He is disheartened that only one older man offers to help him.

“Had I ever really owned something so amazing as a tooth brush? Had I ever really lived in a world with such wondrous things in it? Even the simplest of possessions seemed like treasures now.” 

Yanek thinks back to his life before being imprisoned by the Nazis. The smallest things he had taken for granted, like a toothbrush, are now extraordinarily valuable. At this point, after being imprisoned for so long, he misses the minute details of normal life. He realizes that these little details that comprise a normal day are what build the foundation of humanity. He understands that it’s relationships and routines that make life normal and enjoyable. Without so much as a toothbrush to keep his teeth clean, it’s easy for Yanek to feel as if he’s lost his sense of self.

“The SS officers laughed at them and hit them with clubs while the Jews scrambled in the mud for their dinner. The animals in the zoo were never treated so badly.” 

A zoo is built in the middle of Buchenwald concentration camp to entertain the Nazi soldiers and their families. Yanek watches in horror as the animals are treated with more kindness than the Nazis have ever shown the prisoners. While the Nazi guards feed and shelter the animals, they throw meat at the prisoners so that they can watch them fight for their own amusement.