Anti-Semitism is central to Prisoner B-3087, as it follows Jewish protagonist Yanek Gruener during the Holocaust, in which the Nazis targeted and systematically murdered Jewish people and other marginalized groups in Europe. As Gratz tracks Yanek’s journey through the Kraków ghetto in Poland, as well as 10 different concentration camps, he illustrates how the Nazis used the prejudiced view that Jews were subhuman as a justification for unspeakable atrocities and cruelty. But more than that, Gratz also emphasizes how prisoners like Yanek truly felt less than human as a result: their lives were regarded as a game to the Nazis, and they were treated worse than animals. Thus, Gratz highlights how dehumanization can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if one is treated as subhuman, it is easy to lose one’s own sense of humanity.
As soon as the Nazis invade Poland, they separate the Jews from the rest of the Polish citizens and begin to treat them as less than others—all part of Hitler’s plan to make the Jews “disappear from Europe.” Yanek’s uncle Moshe describes the new policies that the Nazis enact: “Jews must keep their heads down and not look Germans in the face. We can't speak unless spoken to. We can't walk on the main streets of our own city.” Jews are also not allowed to go to school, Jewish businesses are closed, and they are given rations for food. Soon, a ghetto is built, and four families are forced to share a single flat. All of these discriminatory policies begin the slow separation of Jews from the norms of society; they are relegated to a lesser status by not being able to enjoy the freedoms of everyday life.
Yet these policies are nothing compared to the cruelty and abuse of the concentration camps, which serve to target, dehumanize, and ultimately kill the Jews. Three years after the Nazis invade Poland, Yanek is deported to a concentration camp called Plaszów, and he starts to observe the sheer brutality of the Nazis firsthand: the harsh working conditions, the scarcity of food, but mostly the violence and the lack of regard for their lives. There are daily beatings, torture, hangings, shootings, or even more brutal methods of death. On his first day in the camps, Yanek watches as Amon Goeth, the commandant of the camp, sics his dogs on a man at roll call for no reason, yelling, “Attack! Attack! Kill the Jew!” Being relegated to subhuman status makes Jews completely disposable to the Nazis, and the prisoners see how much of a game their lives are in this setting. At Plaszów, they keep track of how many Jews Amon Goeth has killed each day by asking “what’s the score?” and responding, “Goeth seven, Jews nil.” The prisoners understand how much their lives are devalued by their captors—and how many of them become victims of this dehumanization every day.
Because the prisoners are treated like animals, in many ways they come to view themselves like animals and lose their humanity. When Yanek experiences both the physical and mental cruelty of the Nazi soldiers at Trzebinia, he realizes, “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.” In this quote, Yanek acknowledges that the Nazis value Jews’ lives even less than those of animals, because they are seen as completely worthless and interchangeable. Yanek sees how this treatment turns people into animals when he observes a Nazi officer drop a piece of raw meat in the mud and tells two prisoners to fight for it. Yanek relays, “The SS officers laughed at them and hit them with clubs while the Jews scrambled in the mud for their dinner.” The complete lack of humanity that the Nazi officers exhibit, and their dehumanization of the Jews, forces the prisoners to truly become animals towards one another in order to survive.
Yanek also understands how the destitute conditions make the Jews violent toward each other: like the two men fighting for the raw meat, Yanek even feels himself growing more desperate, reduced to primal desires. When Yanek is walking through his second death march, he helps carry another boy who is very ill. But when Yanek discovers that in the process, Yanek’s bread portion has fallen out of his waistband, he considers stealing the bread from the sick boy—even hoping the boy might die before morning so Yanek can take his bread without guilt. But then Yanek reprimands himself for this hope: “What were the camps doing to me? What had the Nazis turned me into?” He sees how, facing desperation, he has lost some of the morality and humanity that once grounded him. He resolves to try to retain that humanity instead and does not wish the boy to die, but even his momentary lapse illustrates how the basic need to survive begins to outweigh the prisoners’ humanity.
At the end of the book, when the Americans liberate Yanek and the other prisoners from Dachau in 1945, Gratz shows the converse of what has transpired in the camps. When the Jews are once again treated like human beings, they in turn are able to extend that humanity to each other. Yanek cries over the simple luxury of owning a toothbrush again. When having their first full meal—with forks, knives, and napkins—many of the survivors start to cry at returning to basic human decency. Yanek even asks a fellow survivor to “pass the salt,” which prompts laughter. With this, Gratz demonstrates how simple human decency and gestures of kindness and just treatment can return humanity to those who have lost it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Anti-Semitism and Cruelty vs. Humanity ThemeTracker
Anti-Semitism and Cruelty vs. Humanity Quotes in 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
