Prisoner B-3087

If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more. I wouldn’t have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o’clock every night. I would have played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them. But I was ten years old, and I had no idea of the nightmare that was to come. None of us did.

My father reached up to hold my mother’s hand. “We must not lose faith, Moshe.”

“See how easy it is to keep your faith when the Nazis take it away along with everything else,” Moshe told him.

My father smiled. “Let them take everything. They cannot take who we are.”

He was my father, and I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. It was January 1941. The Germans ruled Kraków. I was twelve years old. And for the first time in my life, I had begun to doubt my father.

“Mama,” I said, “if we don’t open up they’ll shoot us!”
My mother stared at the door. None of the other parents made a move.
I had to do something. I hurried to the door and unlocked it, and a German officer and a Judenrat police officer pushed past me down the hall.

“Yanek, my son,” he said, looking at me solemnly, “you are a man now, with all the duties of an adult under Jewish law. You are now responsible for your own sins, but also for your own goodness. Remember what the Talmud teaches: Life is but a river. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. All we are, all we are worth, is what we do while we float upon it—how we treat our fellow man. Remember this, and a good man you will be.”

“Yanek speaks with the wisdom of the prophet Isaiah,” he said softly, then quoted, “‘Come, my people…and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.’” He cleared his throat and looked around. “Mina and I are staying too.”

One by one, the others agreed, until even Uncle Moshe sat down and was quiet.

In the place of my pain, I felt the stirring of determination.

I would not give up. I would not turn myself in. No matter what the Nazis did to me, no matter what they took from me, I would survive.

I was thirteen years old, and my parents were gone.

I was all alone in the world, but I would survive on my own.

“Yanek, we haven’t much time,” he whispered. “Listen closely. Here at Plaszów, you must do nothing to stand out. From now on, you have no name, no personality, no family, no friends. Do you understand? Nothing to identify you, nothing to care about. Not if you want to survive. You must be anonymous to these monsters. Give your name to no one. Keep it secret, in here,” Uncle Moshe said, tapping his heart with his fist.

But no matter how he was standing, you always knew a Muselmann from his eyes. There wasn’t anything left there. Muselmanners had given up, and there was no life in their expression, no spark of a soul. They were zombies, worked and starved into a living death by our captors. If the man below me wasn’t dead when they came for us tomorrow, the morning roll call would kill him.

We were going to survive, the two of us. We were going to survive—the last two men in the Gruener family written on the pages of the world.

Now there was only me. Yanek. I was fourteen years old, and I was alone in the world again. This time for good.

I don’t know why I showed them. Not when you survived by looking out for yourself and only yourself. Maybe it was because I’d wanted someone to help me when I had needed it. Maybe it was just that I would be lonely in there all day. But maybe it was that I just couldn’t keep the secret from someone else who could use help too. I’d done that with the black-market food Moshe had bought for us, and I’d felt guilty.

I was an animal to them, a pack mule. But beasts were never treated so poorly. Working animals were expensive. They had value. I was a Jew. We were lower than animals. They could kill as many of us as they wanted, and there would always be another trainload of us to take our place.

There was no rhyme or reason to whether we lived or died. One day it might be the man next to you at roll call who is torn apart by dogs. The next day it might be you who is shot through the head. You could play the game perfectly and still lose, so why bother playing at all?

After the shower, nothing seemed to matter as much to me. I knew it was a game to the Nazis—kill us, don't kill us, to them it didn’t really matter—but even so, I was glad I had made it through.

I had been ready to die. But when water came out of those showers, not gas, it was like I was born again. I had survived, and I would keep surviving.

I was alive.

That’s what the Nazis carved into my skin. B for Birkenau, 3087 for my prisoner number. That was the mark they put on me, a mark I would have for as long as I lived. B-3087. That was who I was to them. Not Yanek Gruener, son of Oskar and Mina. Not Yanek Gruener of 20 Krakusa Street, Podgórze, Kraków. Not Yanek Gruener who loved books and science and American movies.
I was Prisoner B-3087.
But I was alive.

“We are alive,” I told him. “We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.”

I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.

“Where are you from?” Fred asked me while we worked.

I hesitated, remembering Uncle Moshe’s warnings. But Fred was the first person close to my age I’d met since hiding under the floors at Plaszów with Isaac and Thomas. I loved just talking again. Being human.

I should let him go, I thought over and over. Let him make his own way. I should save myself. That was how you survived the camps: You saved yourself. No one else was going to do it for you.

But this boy had a face. He had a name too, though I didn’t know it. He had a mother and father, probably dead now, but he had family. A home somewhere. He could have been me.

I shook with anger and frustration. He was supposed to die! I needed him to die, so I could have his bread.

I closed my eyes. What was I thinking? I wouldn’t steal bread from a living boy, but I would wish death on him so I could take it without guilt? What were the camps doing to me? What had the Nazis turned me into?

One day the Nazis gave two prisoners the chance. They dropped a piece of raw meat in the mud between two men and told them to fight for it, and they did. The SS officers laughed at them and hit them with clubs while the Jews scrambled in the mud for their dinner. The animals in the zoo were never treated so badly.

Farther inside Czechoslovakia, some of the villagers hung out of their windows to throw whatever they had to us—crusts of bread, half-eaten apples, raw potatoes. The Czechs couldn’t share much—there was a war on, after all, and food was hard to come by. But their kindness in the face of the Nazi soldiers and their guns warmed my heart. It was easy to think the worst of humanity when all I saw was brutality and selfishness, and these people showed me there was still good in the world, even if I rarely saw it.

I fell to my knees and wept. Had I really made it? Had I actually survived the Kraków ghetto and ten different concentration camps? […]

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“Yanek,” I told him. “My name is Yanek.”

“Everything’s going to be all right now, Yanek,” he told me, and for the first time in six years, I believed he was right.

Beside my bed there was a little table, and on the table the Americans had given me more gifts: a washcloth, a cup, and a toothbrush. I picked up the toothbrush reverently and cried as I held it in my hands. I remembered that day, standing at the pump in the camp—which camp had it been?—when I wondered when I had ever been so fortunate as to have something so simple as a toothbrush. Piece by piece, bit by bit, the Americans were giving me back my life.

I remembered the food on the table in my old apartment in Podgórze, and all my family sitting around me. Mother and Father. Uncle Moshe and Aunt Gizela, and little cousin Zytka. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela. […]

I thought too of my friend Fred, and the boy who had been hanged for trying to escape, and the man who had fought back, and all the other people I had watched die. They filled my table and the tables all around me, taking the places of all the real people in the room.