Prisoner B-3087
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40 free Prisoner B-3087 trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Prisoner B-3087 follows Yanek Gruener, a Jewish boy from Kraków who is ten when Germany invades Poland in 1939. Over the next six years he loses his home and his family and is sent through ten concentration camps, one after another. The novel is based on the life of a real survivor, which is a large part of why it is read in so many middle school classrooms. This quiz covers the whole book: life in the ghetto before the camps, the relatives and friends who shape Yanek, the commandants and overseers he learns to avoid, the two death marches, and the day the war ends for him. A few questions look at the real history behind the story and at how the book was written and received. It is written for students reading the novel in grades six to nine, and for the teachers and parents reading with them. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so it works as a reading check, a review before a test, or a set of notes on the book.
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Q 01Which author of Refugee and Grenade wrote Prisoner B-3087, a novel about a boy who survives ten Nazi camps?
Alan Gratz
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.
Q 02In Prisoner B-3087, what rooftop structure does Yanek turn into a secret home for his parents in the Kraków ghetto?
A pigeon coop
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.
Q 03What survival advice does Uncle Moshe give Yanek the evening he arrives at Plaszów in Prisoner B-3087?
Stay anonymous
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.
Q 04Which camp in Prisoner B-3087 has a zoo by its gates, built to amuse the SS men who run it?
Buchenwald
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.
Q 05In Prisoner B-3087, the top of the wall the Nazis build around the Kraków ghetto is shaped like rows of what?
Tombstones
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.
Q 06At Gross-Rosen in Prisoner B-3087, Yanek is sentenced to twenty lashes because his uniform is missing what?
A button
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.
Q 07At Birkenau in Prisoner B-3087, what comes out of the showerheads when Yanek is sure he is about to be gassed?
Water
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.
Q 08Soldiers of which nationality free Yanek from the tenth and last camp at the end of Prisoner B-3087?
American
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.
Q 09Although Prisoner B-3087 follows the life of a real Holocaust survivor, the book is classed as what kind of work?
Historical fiction
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.
Q 10What English name did the real Yanek Gruener go by in later life, as credited on Prisoner B-3087?
Jack
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.
Q 11Which Plaszów commandant in Prisoner B-3087 kills so casually that prisoners keep a daily tally of his victims?
Amon Goeth
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.
Q 12Which SS officer, nicknamed the Angel of Death, sorts Auschwitz arrivals with a flick of a baton in Prisoner B-3087?
Josef Mengele
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.
Q 13After a second death march in Prisoner B-3087, which camp becomes the tenth and last that Yanek is held in?
Dachau
Q 21What business does Yanek's Uncle Abraham keep running in the Kraków ghetto, with Nazi permission, in Prisoner B-3087?
A bakery
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.
Q 22What job is Yanek doing in Kraków when the Nazis seize him and truck him to Plaszów in Prisoner B-3087?
Tailor
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.
Q 23Which boy from Yanek's old Kraków neighborhood becomes his closest friend at Auschwitz in Prisoner B-3087?
Fred
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.
Q 14What do Yanek and other prisoners mine at Wieliczka, the second place he is sent in Prisoner B-3087?
Salt
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.
Q 15What nickname do camp inmates give the brutal overseer who shares bread with Yanek on a death march in Prisoner B-3087?
Moonface
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.
Q 16Where in the Kraków ghetto does Yanek's father hold a secret bar mitzvah for him in Prisoner B-3087?
In a basement
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.
Q 17Under the new Nazi rules in Kraków in Prisoner B-3087, what symbol must Yanek's family wear on an armband?
The Star of David
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.
Q 18In what kind of railway wagon are Yanek and other prisoners packed for journeys between camps in Prisoner B-3087?
Cattle cars
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.
Q 19Which German industrialist ran the Kraków enamelware factory where the real Yanek Gruener once worked?
Oskar Schindler
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.
Q 20Which building on Yanek's street do the Nazis set ablaze early in the occupation of Kraków in Prisoner B-3087?
The synagogue
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.
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.
Q 24Which surviving relative does Yanek find after liberation, his only living family, at the end of Prisoner B-3087?
A cousin
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.
Q 25On the final death march in Prisoner B-3087, villagers in which occupied country leave food out for the prisoners?
Czechoslovakia
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.
Q 26In Prisoner B-3087, what are the prisoners called whom the Nazis put in charge of other prisoners inside the camps?
Kapos
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.
Q 27Before the war in Prisoner B-3087, young Yanek daydreams of moving overseas to work in which business?
The movies
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.
Q 28What happens to Yanek's mother and father in the Kraków ghetto, leaving him to survive alone, in Prisoner B-3087?
They are deported
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.
Q 29On the death march to Sachsenhausen in Prisoner B-3087, what does Yanek do for an exhausted boy beside him?
Helps him walk
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.
Q 30Which publisher released Prisoner B-3087 in 2013?
Scholastic
Scholastic also published the author's later war novels, among them Refugee, which won a National Jewish Book Award.