Maintaining Normalcy in the Midst of The Holocaust: Yanek's Strategy for Survival

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Firstly, I want to say that Prisoner B-3087 was such a difficult read for me. Sharissa brought up how powerful the opening lines were in our Today's Meet chat. I remember when I first began the book that those lines hit me really hard too. Yanek opens with, "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've played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them" (Gratz 2). These lines really set the tone of the entire novel in my opinion. Readers immediately realize that this novel is going to cover a really traumatic series of events in which Yanek has his childhood and his sense of normalcy ripped away from him.

Many people in class brought up the themes of perseverance and determination when discussing how Yanek survives in the concentration camps. Of course these themes are really really evident in all the ways that Yanek tries to blend in, hide, savor his food, prove he can work, and many other things. However, a particular aspect of these themes of perseverance and determination that stood out to me reading the novel was Yanek's attempts at acting and feeling normal and human. One way Yanek does this is by establishing a routine for himself. His routine helps him to not get lost in time and to feel like a productive human being even though he isn't treated like one. In chapter eighteen he states, "I stood at the water pump, scrubbing my body. It was bitterly cold out, but I didn't care. I would scrub my body, I decided, each and every morning, no matter how cold it was, no matter how tired I was. I was alive, and I meant to stay that way...I even rubbed my teeth with my wet fingers- we had no toothbrushes or toothpaste, of course, but it felt important to remember what it was like to be human" (Gratz 136).

Yanek also tries to maintain faith in humanity by acting brave and trying to make friends with others. He makes friends with the two boys, Isaac and Thomas, and hides with them under the floor of the barracks. He also helps the dying boy during the Death March. One of the more poignant examples of Yanek's attempts to maintain normalcy is when he helps the other prisoners celebrate a boy's bar mitzvah. He narrates, "I was tired, and starving, and my arm burned from the tattoo. But suddenly I thought standing in a minyan for somebody's bar mitzvah was the most important thing in the world. Worth losing sleep over. Worth being punished or killed" (Gratz 134). Yanek's own bar mitzvah was held in secret and was very make-shift. Having that experience surely made him want to help another boy have that important ceremony too. At times I thought Yanek was the only prisoner trying to survive. He constantly tried to strike a balance between prioritizing himself and helping others.

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