Gratz,
Alan. Prisoner
B-3087. Scholastic Press 2013 260p $16.99 ISBN 978-0-545-45901-3 ms Historical Fiction VG-BN
Based on the life of Jack Gruener, a
Holocaust survivor, this is the story of Yanek, a Jewish boy who
survives ten concentration camps, even after everything he has and everyone he
loves have been brutally stripped from him.
Tattooed with the identification “PRISONER B-3087,” Yanek learns to
survive at any cost.
Telling the fictionalized tale in the first-person voice increases the immediacy of this moving narrative. When Hitler invades Poland, Yanek has no inkling of what the future holds, having turned a deaf ear to Hitler’s radio broadcasts that boast of making Europe “Jew-free.” Yanek and his family adjust to having their neighborhood walled off, living in a ghetto, and eventually making their exodus to live in a rooftop pigeon coop in order to avoid Nazi death crews. When his parents are lost to Nazi “selection,” Yanek is on his own. He is thirteen years old.
Yanek’s struggle to survive rapidly becomes raw and brutal. He is rounded up, deported, and sent to the first of ten concentration camps. In each camp, Yanek narrowly escapes death; his harrowing experiences are related matter-of-factly, which lends a surreal, yet chilling, quality to the story. The episode in which Yanek hides under the floorboards of the prisoner barracks at Amon Goeth is especially harrowing, and actually happened to Jack Gruener. Against all odds, Yanek survives for six years, until the Allies liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
Author Alan Gratz was able to interview the “real-life” Yanek, Jack Gruener. With Gruener’s blessing, Gratz admits: “I’ve taken some liberties with time and events to paint a fuller and more representative picture of the Holocaust as a whole.” Both Gruener and Gratz felt this story was important to tell so that “the realities of the Holocaust....would not be forgotten.”
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Poland-Fiction. -–Hilary Welliver
Telling the fictionalized tale in the first-person voice increases the immediacy of this moving narrative. When Hitler invades Poland, Yanek has no inkling of what the future holds, having turned a deaf ear to Hitler’s radio broadcasts that boast of making Europe “Jew-free.” Yanek and his family adjust to having their neighborhood walled off, living in a ghetto, and eventually making their exodus to live in a rooftop pigeon coop in order to avoid Nazi death crews. When his parents are lost to Nazi “selection,” Yanek is on his own. He is thirteen years old.
Yanek’s struggle to survive rapidly becomes raw and brutal. He is rounded up, deported, and sent to the first of ten concentration camps. In each camp, Yanek narrowly escapes death; his harrowing experiences are related matter-of-factly, which lends a surreal, yet chilling, quality to the story. The episode in which Yanek hides under the floorboards of the prisoner barracks at Amon Goeth is especially harrowing, and actually happened to Jack Gruener. Against all odds, Yanek survives for six years, until the Allies liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
Author Alan Gratz was able to interview the “real-life” Yanek, Jack Gruener. With Gruener’s blessing, Gratz admits: “I’ve taken some liberties with time and events to paint a fuller and more representative picture of the Holocaust as a whole.” Both Gruener and Gratz felt this story was important to tell so that “the realities of the Holocaust....would not be forgotten.”
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Poland-Fiction. -–Hilary Welliver
