40 Fun Facts About Prisoner B-3087

Which author of Refugee and Grenade wrote Prisoner B-3087, a novel about a boy who survives ten Nazi camps?

Alan Gratz worked from the memories of the survivor and his wife, Ruth, who are credited alongside him. The real Yanek spent his later years telling schoolchildren what he had lived through.

In Prisoner B-3087, what rooftop structure does Yanek turn into a secret home for his parents in the Kraków ghetto?

A pigeon coop kept by an elderly neighbor became the family's refuge after a raid stripped their flat. They fitted bars across its door so nobody could force a way in from the stairs.

What survival advice does Uncle Moshe give Yanek the evening he arrives at Plaszów in Prisoner B-3087?

Stay anonymous was Moshe's rule: a prisoner the Nazis never notice is one they never single out. Yanek later bends it to befriend other boys, and feels less alone.

Which camp in Prisoner B-3087 has a zoo by its gates, built to amuse the SS men who run it?

Buchenwald's zoo was paid for by forced donations from inmates, and SS men were punished for mistreating its animals. In the novel, two officers who torment a deer are disciplined while prisoners starve.

In Prisoner B-3087, the top of the wall the Nazis build around the Kraków ghetto is shaped like rows of what?

Tombstones were the model for the wall's stone caps, a message the people sealed inside could read every day. Windows and doors that opened onto the rest of the city were bricked up.

At Gross-Rosen in Prisoner B-3087, Yanek is sentenced to twenty lashes because his uniform is missing what?

A button was all it took: he was laid over a log and made to count each stroke aloud. Thrown back into the barrack unable to move, he recommitted to living.

At Birkenau in Prisoner B-3087, what comes out of the showerheads when Yanek is sure he is about to be gassed?

Water came out, and men who had braced for gas cried with relief under the spray. Yanek concludes that to the Nazis their lives are a game, spared or ended on a whim.

Soldiers of which nationality free Yanek from the tenth and last camp at the end of Prisoner B-3087?

American troops arrived after hours of bombing, and one soldier asked Yanek his name and promised him the worst was over. He was sixteen and had been a prisoner for years.

Although Prisoner B-3087 follows the life of a real Holocaust survivor, the book is classed as what kind of work?

Historical fiction is the label because the author changed and added events to show more of the Holocaust than one life held. The real Yanek did pass through all ten camps.

What English name did the real Yanek Gruener go by in later life, as credited on Prisoner B-3087?

Jack is the name printed on the book beside that of his wife, Ruth, a fellow survivor he met as a girl in postwar Germany. They married and settled in Brooklyn.

Which Plaszów commandant in Prisoner B-3087 kills so casually that prisoners keep a daily tally of his victims?

Amon Goeth was the real commandant of Plaszów, and a witness said he shot at prisoners from the balcony of his house. In the novel he murders Uncle Moshe over a work report he dislikes.

Which SS officer, nicknamed the Angel of Death, sorts Auschwitz arrivals with a flick of a baton in Prisoner B-3087?

Josef Mengele was a camp physician who joined the selections, sending the fit to work and the rest to die. Yanek, waved toward the workers, watches a family split apart in front of him.

After a second death march in Prisoner B-3087, which camp becomes the tenth and last that Yanek is held in?

Dachau ran longer than any other Nazi camp, from 1933 until it was freed in the war's final days. Yanek reaches it starving after a march that took the prisoners back into Germany.

What do Yanek and other prisoners mine at Wieliczka, the second place he is sent in Prisoner B-3087?

Salt had been dug at Wieliczka for centuries, leaving chapels and statues carved deep underground. Yanek only learns where he is when a prisoner in the lift recognizes the walls.

What nickname do camp inmates give the brutal overseer who shares bread with Yanek on a death march in Prisoner B-3087?

Moonface was a fellow prisoner given power over the others, and he beat Yanek whenever he could. Asked for bread on the march, he held a knife to the boy's throat, then cut him a piece.

Where in the Kraków ghetto does Yanek's father hold a secret bar mitzvah for him in Prisoner B-3087?

In a basement of an abandoned building, with ten men gathered after curfew, Yanek became a man under Jewish law. Being caught would have meant death for all of them.

Under the new Nazi rules in Kraków in Prisoner B-3087, what symbol must Yanek's family wear on an armband?

The Star of David armband made every Jew in the city visible at a glance. Uncle Moshe sees at once what it is for: marking people out so they are easy to find.

In what kind of railway wagon are Yanek and other prisoners packed for journeys between camps in Prisoner B-3087?

Cattle cars carried Yanek from Trzebinia to Birkenau, packed so tightly that a dead man was left pressed against him. He kept going by stretching an arm out for a handful of snow.

Which German industrialist ran the Kraków enamelware factory where the real Yanek Gruener once worked?

Oskar Schindler shielded the Jews in his factory because the camp commandant profited from it. The real Yanek was moved away about three months before that protection began to save lives.

Which building on Yanek's street do the Nazis set ablaze early in the occupation of Kraków in Prisoner B-3087?

The synagogue burned with its holiest books inside, leaving even Yanek's hopeful father without words. It was where Yanek had been studying for his coming of age.

What business does Yanek's Uncle Abraham keep running in the Kraków ghetto, with Nazi permission, in Prisoner B-3087?

A bakery was useful to the Nazis, who let Abraham keep it open to supply their soldiers. After dark he made secret loaves for hungry Jewish families, with a towel under the door to trap the smell.

What job is Yanek doing in Kraków when the Nazis seize him and truck him to Plaszów in Prisoner B-3087?

Tailor work was meant to protect him, since useful workers were spared the round-ups. It was the reason he was taken instead: the camp's own sewing shop needed more hands.

Which boy from Yanek's old Kraków neighborhood becomes his closest friend at Auschwitz in Prisoner B-3087?

Fred got the only handshake Yanek had offered anyone since his uncle's death. When illness left him unable to rise for work, he was killed as Yanek looked on.

Which surviving relative does Yanek find after liberation, his only living family, at the end of Prisoner B-3087?

A cousin named Youzek, living with his wife in postwar Germany, was the one relative the war had left him. Yanek later left Europe to start again overseas.

On the final death march in Prisoner B-3087, villagers in which occupied country leave food out for the prisoners?

Czechoslovakia had been among the earliest countries Germany swallowed, and its people had no love for their occupiers. They set bread on windowsills and tossed scraps while the escorts shouted at them to stop.

In Prisoner B-3087, what are the prisoners called whom the Nazis put in charge of other prisoners inside the camps?

Kapos got bigger rations and gentler treatment from the SS in exchange for keeping order. They were so resented that many were lynched by fellow prisoners when the camps were freed.

Before the war in Prisoner B-3087, young Yanek daydreams of moving overseas to work in which business?

The movies were Yanek's passion, and he built his own slide projector from a lightbulb and lenses. An aunt liked to tell him he had a screen idol's looks.

What happens to Yanek's mother and father in the Kraków ghetto, leaving him to survive alone, in Prisoner B-3087?

They are deported in a mass round-up while Yanek hides in the shadows nearby, searching the column for their faces. He never sees them again.

On the death march to Sachsenhausen in Prisoner B-3087, what does Yanek do for an exhausted boy beside him?

Yanek helps him walk because the boy reminds him of a friend he lost, and stragglers are shot where they fall. He asks other prisoners to share the load, but most ignore him.

Which publisher released Prisoner B-3087 in 2013?

Scholastic also published the author's later war novels, among them Refugee, which won a National Jewish Book Award.

Reviewers likened Prisoner B-3087 to which memoir by Elie Wiesel, a teenager's account of Auschwitz?

Night was the comparison both Kirkus and the Jewish Book Council reached for, a sign of how dark this middle-grade novel becomes. Kirkus advised adults to read it before sharing it in class.

Which narrative point of view does Prisoner B-3087 use to put readers inside the camps alongside Yanek?

First person keeps readers inside Yanek's head, though he narrates looking back, as someone who already knows he will survive. It makes the horrors feel witnessed instead of reported.

Yanek's long winter death march in Prisoner B-3087 ends at Sachsenhausen, a camp just north of which German city?

Berlin lay about 35 kilometres south of the camp, whose town also held the office that ran the whole camp system. For Yanek it is a place of rock-breaking and bodies left in the yard.

At which camp in Prisoner B-3087 are the worn-out prisoners unexpectedly given a week off work to recover?

Bergen-Belsen gave the new arrivals a week of food and no labor, ordered so they would be fit to work again. Then a violent overseer made Yanek desperate to be sent anywhere else.

What child's toy does Yanek find hidden in his muddy bunk at Birkenau in Prisoner B-3087?

A wooden horse, worn smooth by play, tells Yanek that a child slept in the bunk before him and did not survive. Soon afterwards a father asks the barrack to stand for his son's bar mitzvah.

Which Kraków district, home to Yanek's family in Prisoner B-3087, did the Germans wall off as the Jewish ghetto?

Podgórze was chosen over Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, which the German governor thought too important to the city's history. Yanek's own street ended up inside the wall.

The bells of which Kraków landmark ring out in alarm as German troops arrive at the start of Prisoner B-3087?

Wawel Cathedral, where Poland's kings were crowned, sounds the warning while Yanek's family listens to the radio. Looking back, he says the family should have fled at once.

What does Yanek's mother secretly sew into the family's coats in the Kraków ghetto in Prisoner B-3087?

Money stitched into the sleeves was safe from the raids that emptied the flat. Yanek finds it only after his parents are gone, when he feels a lump in his father's coat.

What name is used in Prisoner B-3087 for the Nazi-appointed Jewish council whose police raid Yanek's home?

The Judenrat had to carry out German orders, and men who refused to serve were shot or hanged. One of its policemen strips the family's flat of valuables during a raid.

The camp where Yanek is finally freed in Prisoner B-3087 stood just outside which southern German city?

Munich is also where the freed prisoners were housed, and Yanek was lodged in a building that had been an SS barracks. He roamed its streets amazed that he could go where he pleased.