Publishers Weekly
The Nazis killed more than one million Jewish children and teenagers; Jack (Yanek) Gruener, who was 10 when Krakow, Poland, fell, was a rare survivor. “Survive,” however, hardly seems adequate to describe what unfolds in these pages. Having lost his parents and close relatives just as he entered adolescence (Yanek has a secret bar mitzvah in a basement of the Krakow ghetto), the boy is totally alone as his life becomes a roll-call of nightmares: Trzebinia, Bir-kenau (where his arm is tattooed with the number in the book’s title), Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen. Yanek is finally liberated at age 16, when American soldiers arrive at Dachau. Gratz (Fantasy Baseball) has fictionalized some aspects of Gruener’s life to “paint a fuller and more representative picture of the Holocaust as a whole,” and this determination to be exhaustively inclusive, along with lapses into History Channel–like prose, threatens to overwhelm the story. But more often, Gratz ably conveys Yanek’s incredulity (“Not long ago, all these half-dead creatures around me had been people”), fatalism, yearning, and determination in the face of the unimaginable. Ages 10–14. Agent: Barry Goldblatt, Barry Goldblatt Literary. (Mar.)
Children's Literature - Greg M. Romaneck
Yanek Gruener was only ten years old when the Germans invaded his native land of Poland. Swiftly the German troops conquered Yanek's nation and occupied Krakow, where he and his family lived. As a Jew, Yanek was immediately subjected to the terrible hatred the Nazis had for him and all other members of his faith. But, even as the Germans inflicted indignities and brutality upon Yanek, his family, and all the Jews of Poland he could hardly imagine just how deep Nazi hatred of European Jews ran. In short order Yanek lost nearly his entire family and found himself in a concentration camp with his last remaining relative, Uncle Moshe. Over the course of six years Yanek was to travel from one camp to another, each more brutal than the last. During his journey of suffering Yanek became completely isolated in his hopelessness but somehow persisted in living. In the end, it was an inner spark of resilience linked to fate that allowed Yanek Gruener to survive his dreadful ordeal and eventually come to the United States to make a life. Here, in Prisoner B-3087, Alan Gratz and Jacob Gruener tell the story of this ordeal and eventual redemption. While there are many Holocaust books this particular addition to this vast library of suffering and hope is particularly effective. One can hardly imagine anyone surviving the manifold horrors that Yanek Gruener faced let alone his living to see his complex story told in print. By reading books such as Prisoner B-3087 we come away changed by the paired knowledge of the depths of evil that people are capable of alongside our innate ability to live via hope. This is a fine book told with elegance and realism. Reviewer: Greg M. Romaneck
Kirkus Reviews
If Anne Frank had been a boy, this is the story her male counterpart might have told. At least, the very beginning of this historical novel reads as such. It is 1939 and Yanek Gruener is a 10-year old Jew in Kraków when the Nazis invade Poland. His family is forced to live with multiple other families in a tiny apartment as his beloved neighborhood of Podgórze changes from haven to ghetto in a matter of weeks. Readers will be quickly drawn into this first-person account of dwindling freedoms, daily humiliations and heart-wrenching separations from loved ones. Yet as the story darkens, it begs the age-old question of when and how to introduce children to the extremes of human brutality. Based on the true story of the life of Jack Gruener, who remarkably survived not just one, but 10 different concentration camps, this is an extraordinary, memorable and hopeful saga told in unflinching prose. While Gratz's words and early images are geared for young people, and are less gory than some accounts, Yanek's later experiences bear a closer resemblance to Elie Wiesel's Night than more middle-grade offerings, such as Lois Lowry's Number the Stars. It may well support classroom work with adult review first. A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)
