Prisoner B-3087

by Alan Gratz, Ruth Gruener (Based on a book by), Jack Gruener (Based on a book by)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Based on a devastatingly true story, Prisoner B-3087 is steeped in the horrors of the Holocaust, but beneath the heavy darkness that hangs over the concentration camps is hope. It's a beautiful story of young man whose life is upended by war and genocide and the way he survives.

From Alan Gratz, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Refugee, comes this wrenching novel about one boy's struggle to survive ten concentration camps during the Holocaust. Based on the inspiring true life story of Jack Gruener.

10 concentration camps. 10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face. As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner — his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087. He is forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another, as World War II rages all around him. He encounters evil he could have never imagined, but also sees surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror. He just barely escapes death, only to confront it again seconds later. Can Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will — and, most of all, his sense of who he really is inside? Based on an astonishing true story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780545459013
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	6,942
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	760L (what's this?)
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

ALAN GRATZ is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of several highly acclaimed books for young readers, including Heroes: A Novel of Pearl Harbor, Two Degrees, Ground Zero, Allies, Grenade,Refugee, Projekt 1065, Prisoner B-3087, Code of Honor, and Captain America: The Ghost Army, an original graphic novel. Alan lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest. Look for him online at alangratz.com.
Ruth Gruener was born Aurelia Gamser in 1930s Poland. Ruth and her parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in the homes of gentile families. After World War II was over, Ruth and her family moved to the United States, where Ruth tried to start an ordinary teenage life in Brooklyn. Ruth married Jack Gruener, another Holocaust survivor, with whom she lived in Brooklyn until Jack's passing in 2017. They have two children and four grandchildren. Until her death in 2021, Ruth worked as a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan and traveled all over the country to speak to schools about her and Jack's experiences in the Holocaust.

Read an Excerpt

From PRISONER B-3087I looked out through the cracks of the crawlspace. Goeth was coming closer, all shining black leather boots and crisp black uniform. One of his dogs lifted its ears and looked right at me.I pulled back away from the wall. “We're trapped. We have to get out of here. ” I was almost choking on my own fear. “And go where?” Thomas hissed. “If we leave, they'll find us in the barrack!”“I don't care. We can't be caught here.” I pushed my way up and out of the crawlspace. I gasped, filling my lungs. But if I didn't really want to die , I had to move quickly. My heart was thumping. but I it made me feel alive, and feeling alive made me want to stay alive.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Prisoner B-3087:A Junior Library Guild SelectionGolden Sower Award, 2014-2015 Winner NebraskaIsinglass Teen Read Award, 2014-2015 Winner New HampshirePennsylvania Young Readers' Choice Award, 2014-2015 Winner PennsylvaniaJunior Book Award, 2015-2016 Winner South CarolinaGrand Canyon Reader Award, 2015-2016 Winner ArizonaTruman Readers Award, 2015-2016 Winner MissouriReaders Choice Awards, Winner 2015-2016 Virginia Volunteer State Book Award Winner, 2015-2016 Tennessee"A powerful story, well told." — School Library Journal"A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored." — Kirkus Reviews"[A] remarkable survival story." — Booklist"Gratz ably conveys . . . fatalism, yearning, and determination in the face of the unimaginable." — Publishers Weekly"Heartbreaking, gripping, raw, and emotional . . . storytelling at its finest." — VOYA

From the Publisher

Gr 6–10—"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." Yanek Gruener was 10 years old when the German army invaded Poland in 1939 and trapped his family inside the walls of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. Over the course of World War II, he saw his parents deported by the Nazis and survived 10 different concentration camps. Through Gratz's spare, persistent prose, the story of the boy's early life unfolds with the urgency and directness necessary for survivor stories. While some liberties have been taken, with the permission of Gruener and his wife, Ruth, also a survivor, the experiences and images come directly from the Grueners' collective memories of the war. An author's note provides further biographical information. A powerful story, well told.—Sara Saxton, Tuzzy Consortium Library, Barrow, AK

School Library Journal

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)

Kirkus Reviews