Prisoner B-3087
2013
- jews
- juvenile fiction
- history
- holocaust, jewish (1939-1945)
- holocaust survivors
- fiction
- gruener, jack
- children's fiction
- jews, fiction
- holocaust, jewish (1939-1945), fiction
The story
From Alan Gratz, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Refugee, comes this wrenching novel about one boy's struggle to survive ten concentration camps during the Holocaust. Based on the inspiring true life story of Jack Gruener. 10 concentration camps. 10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face. As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner -- his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087. He is forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another, as World War II rages all around him. He encounters evil he could have never imagined, but also sees surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror. He just barely escapes death, only to confront it again seconds later. Can Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will -- and, most of all, his sense of who he really is inside? Based on an astonishing true story. Based on the true story by Ruth and Jack Gruener. Ten concentration camps. Ten different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face."
What it’s like
Stark, unadorned prose that moves in short, hard sentences, the page often bare of decoration, with the cold and the hunger carried in concrete detail: barracks dark at dawn, thin soup, the grey weight of roll call, the numbers stamped on skin. Its vibe is bleak but steadily humane, a quiet dread that rarely lets up yet keeps finding small points of light, a stolen kindness, a friend's voice in the dark. The pace is relentless, one camp handing the boy to the next, so it reads in long unbroken stretches best suited to a clear afternoon rather than a tired late night. Violence is present throughout and not softened: beatings, starvation, executions and cruelty described plainly, with death arriving suddenly and without ceremony, though the telling stays on the boy's endurance rather than lingering on gore. The emotional arc follows a frightened boy hardening under pressure while holding on to who he is, ending in a hard-won and bittersweet sense of survival. Written for young readers and for adults drawn to Holocaust testimony in accessible form, especially those who want an honest account of endurance rather than a gentle story.
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