Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Prisoner B-3087, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Determination and Luck
Anti-Semitism and Cruelty vs. Humanity
Connection vs. Isolation
Coming of Age, Trauma, and Remembrance
Identity vs. Anonymity
Summary
Analysis
Yanek arrives at Buchenwald and sees that the prisoners are terrified. Yanek carries rocks, learning to carry a stone just the right size—if it is too large and he dropped it, the Nazis would shoot him. If it was too small, they would shoot him for being lazy. Some of the Jews are chained to carts and “whipped like animals” while they haul loads of stones.
Yanek continues to learn the “game” of the camps, ensuring that he can continue to survive by picking just the right size rock to carry. Again, his descriptions of how the Nazis treat the prisoners “like animals” reinforces their dehumanization of the Jews, a theme that is especially prevalent at Buchenwald.
Themes
Yanek is quickly introduced to the Buchenwald zoo, the idea of the camp’s commandant, Karl Koch, and his wife Ilse. The fenced-in area has deer, monkeys, and bears—entertainment for the guards and their families. The prisoners stand at roll call next to the zoo, and Yanek wonders if the children and their mothers think that the Jews are animals too. One day, the Nazi gives the prisoners the chance to get a raw steak that would normally be fed to the bears, dropping it in the mud between two men and telling them to fight for it, which they do. Yanek thinks that the zoo animals are treated better than the prisoners.
The zoo invites further comparison between the prisoners and the animals. Yanek acknowledges how the poor treatment they experience—the fact that they are frequently treated even worse than animals—leads them to feel as though they are becoming subhuman. As Yanek observes the fight between the two prisoners over the steak, he recognizes that they are acting this way only because of the cruelty and the inhumane treatment that they are experiencing.
Themes
One day, Yanek is washing himself at the pump when he sees two SS officers lure a deer to the fence, then tie its antlers to the fence so that it can’t escape and leave it there. Yanek thinks that he had seen the Nazis do unimaginably cruel things, but seeing the deer thrashing around while tied to the fence enrages him. However, he can’t do anything to rescue it. At roll call, the two officers are pulled off duty by the commandant and have their zoo privileges taken away—the Nazis won’t abide cruelty to animals.
The deer symbolizes the idea that the Jews are powerless to fight the Nazis—which Yanek even acknowledges explicitly in being unable to help the animal. Yet this episode is also another reinforcement of the idea that the prisoners are treated worse than the animals: the Nazis have no problem with cruelty to human beings, yet they won’t tolerate cruelty to animals.
Themes
At roll call a few days later, Yanek is told that the prisoners are being moved again: Gross-Rosen needs workers, and there were no new shipments of prisoners. The Nazis had killed so many people that they’re running out of Jews.
Again, this small statement represents another reminder of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism and mass genocide: they have killed so many Jews that they don’t have enough to work in all of their prisons.
Themes
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