Danielle Jago - Identity versus Safety in Prisoner B-3087

            This book made me have so many feelings, oh my goodness. Historical fiction and novels based on true events fascinate me, so I could not even manage to put this book down once I started it. Reading about horrific tragedies like this is so surreal. You know it has happened, but it is so completely heinous and awful that you can’t even fully wrap your mind around it actually happening. Like Yanek says in the book “We could tell them all about it. Describe in every detail the horrors of the camps…But no one who had not been there would ever truly understand” (251). Naturally, I drew parallels between this novel and Elie Wiesel’s Night for obvious reasons as both center around the experiences of a young man trying to survive the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Each story is absolutely heart wrenching, but the stories need to be heard, nonetheless.  

            I think we can all agree that Yanek going through his adolescence as a Jewish person during the German occupation of Poland and his time in the concentration camps robbed him of his adolescence. Because of the risks his family takes, he is able to still have his bar mitzvah but so much of his adolescence, his life, is taken away. Several times throughout the story, he can’t even remember how old he is because the years just slip out of his grasp.

            Despite all of his experiences and all of the atrocities he witnesses, it amazes me how Yanek is able to still treat those around him with humanity, for the most part. Through it all, he still manages to keep his faith in God, he prays, and he tries to help his fellow man. Yanek manages to hold on to his father’s words “Let them take everything. They cannot take who we are” (11). He is beaten, starved, his family killed, yet he still holds up his fellow prisoner when he can’t seem to walk on the death march and still helps that father and son hold a small bar mitzvah in the camp. He manages to have this incredible strength and goodness throughout and manages to never lose himself which is just so beautiful.

            One aspect of the novel that I think is important is Yanek’s struggle with his identity. When he finds his Uncle Moshe at the Plaszów concentration camp, he tells Yanek “Remember: You are no one. You have no name” (69), and throughout the novel we can see Yanek struggling with this notion. He wants to help the father and his boy have a bar mitzvah, he wants to befriend Fred, he wants to be human, but he also wants to live. The German soldiers constantly dehumanize all of the Jews, and we can see Yanek struggle with how to reconcile these two urges: be nothing and be alive or be someone and be killed. Before he enters Dachau, he denies the parts of himself that his father used to say the Nazis could never take away in an effort to survive. Yanek tries to slip away from the Jewish “line” and when he is caught says “I was born Jewish, but I never practiced! I never went to synagogue…I’m not a Jew! (236). This moment seemed emblematic to me of his struggle with his identity in relation to his survival. Lastly, I found the moment at the end of the book when he discusses his name change from Yanek to Jacob very interesting and almost somewhat saddening (my feelings are more based on the historical context than Yanek’s personal journey). He says he took to calling himself Jack because that is what “the American soldiers called me”, so I just wonder how much of his name change is an homage to the people who rescued him from the camps and how much of it was this underlying pressure to assimilate into society in an effort to not be as easily recognized as Jewish due to his past experiences (255).