Prisoner B-3087

by Alan Gratz

  “Ha,” someone laughed humorlessly. “How will the Hitlerites know who they’re killing now?”

  “Easy,” someone else said. “They’ll know because they put all the Jews in this car, and all the Poles in that car. When we get to Dachau, they’ll just gas us and put the others to work.”

  He was probably right. They didn’t know our names anymore, but we still had our Jewish stars on our uniforms, ragged and torn though they were, and we were all in the Jewish car. As long as they kept us together, they could herd us all right into the gas chambers.

  Which gave me an idea.

  I found the Jewish star on my jacket. It was dirty and falling apart. Remembering my work sewing uniforms, I bit at the seams that still held it on my jacket until I could rip it off.

  “They’ll kill you for that,” a man next to me said, watching me.

  “They’ll kill him for wearing it too,” another man said.

  I didn’t listen. I had a plan. The place where the star had been sewn on was cleaner and newer-looking than anywhere else on the jacket, and you could still see the outline of the star. That would give me away for sure! I slipped my jacket off and put it on the floor, rubbing it around with my foot. When I picked it back up it was filthy all over, including the place where the star had been. Good. Now, at least, I would look the part.

  When the train finally stopped outside Dachau, we were taken out of the cattle cars. As the Jews and Poles got off beside one another, I slipped from one group to the other. If the Nazis had lost our records, they wouldn’t know I was a Jew unless I was standing with the Jews!

  One of the Poles saw me change sides, and he frowned at me. I worked my way farther into the group and waited, my heart thumping. If I was caught, I’d be killed. I remembered how back home in Kraków, people sometimes mistook me for a Gentile. I hoped the Nazis would be fooled.

  The SS officers made us line up and tell them our names and numbers.

  “Prisoner B-3087,” I told them. “My name is Yan Zielony.” Zielony meant “green” in Polish. My real last name, Gruener, meant “greener” in German. Zielony made me sound more Polish, and it was easy to remember.

  The Nazi wrote down my name and number and nodded me on. I had done it! I was no longer a Jew to the Nazis! I was going to live!

  “That boy’s a Jew,” someone said. It was the man who’d seen me cross over! He pointed at me. “He came over from the other car when we got here.”

  The blood drained from my face. A kapo grabbed me and raised his club to hit me.

  “Wait!” I cried. “I was born Jewish, but I never practiced!” I lied. “I never went to synagogue! All my friends were Poles! Christian Poles! I went to church with them! I’m not a Jew!”

  “If you were born a Jew, you’re a Jew,” the SS officer said. He marked through my name on his sheet. “Put him with the others, where he belongs.”

  The kapo shoved me along to the group of watching Jews. None of them had said a word, not even the men who’d seen me take off my Star of David. When the kapo had pushed me back among my people I turned to look at the Pole who had ratted me out. He kept his eyes on the ground and wouldn’t look at me. Why had he done it? What difference did it make? It’s not like I would have eaten food he could have eaten or slept on a bed he could have slept on. I was nothing to him, nor him to me. And yet he had told on me when there was nothing to be gained by it. He had told on me for no other reason than that I was a Jew.

  The Nazis took our names and numbers and made new documents for us to replace the ones that had been destroyed before they marched us into Dachau. They would need them so they could keep track of how they killed us all.

  The day after I got to Dachau, the man next to me in my bunk got the camp fever. “Camp fever” was what everyone called the typhus that spread like fire throughout the ranks of prisoners. It started with a headache and a fever, then became a cough. My bunkmate got a spotty rash on his chest, and soon he was so delirious he couldn’t speak or understand a word I said to him. The Nazis did nothing to treat him, or any of the other prisoners who got the camp fever. The man from my bunk died three days later, coughing up blood. Prisoners died by the hundreds every day.

  I always tried finding somewhere else to sleep, away from the sick, but it was almost impossible. More than 1,500 prisoners were crammed into barracks built to house 250 prisoners. It was a wonder we didn’t all have typhus within a week, the way we had to sleep on top of one another. Each day I woke up expecting to be sick, and it seemed like a miracle when I went to bed that night, spared.

  At least the Nazis didn’t expect the sick to work too. They didn’t make any of us work at Dachau. Prisoners had once worked here, like all the other camps, but not now. Dachau was in chaos. Some days we didn’t even have roll call. The war was coming to an end, and we all knew it, even the Nazis. Like we had guessed, the Germans had been moving us around to avoid the approaching Allied attack. Even so, the chimneys still burned day and night, day and night.

  One night, early in the spring, we woke in the barracks to the sound of explosions nearby. They were so close they were deafening. A building in the compound exploded, shaking our barrack, and I covered my head with my hands, just like all the prisoners around me. There was no place to go, no place to hide. The war had come to Dachau, and any moment a shell or a bomb might fall on our building and kill us all. So many times I had wished for a bomb to fall on me, to end my suffering, but now I prayed that no bomb would hit me. Not now, not when I was so close to the end! If I could survive only a little longer, I thought, just a little longer —

  Planes roared overhead for hours. Bullets fired — pop pop pop pop pop pop pop — from inside or outside the camp, I didn’t know. The heavy poom poom poom of artillery shook our wooden beds, and the dust and dirt of seven years rained down on us from the roof. I heard Nazis shouting to one another in German, more gunshots, more bombs exploding, but I kept my head down like the rest of the prisoners, whispering to death, pleading for it to pass me by yet again.

  Then, close to dawn, the shooting and explosions stopped. I felt a rush of relief at the silence. The bullets and bombs might come again another day, but for now we were alive. Used to the sounds of war coming and going, we went back to sleep. There might be a roll call in the morning, and we would need all the rest we could get.

  But come morning, something was different. For one thing, no kapo had come around to wake us up. I woke only because my body told me it was the time. As everyone stirred in their sleeping shelves, we looked around at one another, wondering where our jailers were. One of the prisoners crept to the door and peeked outside.

  “There — there aren’t any guards!” he told us. “I don’t see any guards!”

  What trick was this? I didn’t believe it. Slowly we all climbed down from our shelves and looked out the windows and doors. The man was right — there wasn’t a kapo or an SS officer to be seen. Prisoners staggered out of each of the barracks, looking this way and that, waiting for the Nazis to jump out and start shooting us. But the camp was empty. The Nazis had fled in the night!

  I staggered into the yard, but there I stood. I didn’t know what to do. None of us did. For so many years, we had only done what we were told. That was the only way to survive. Now I was on my own. I could walk right up to the front gates of the camp and walk away. But where would I go? What would I do? My home was in Kraków, hundreds of kilometers away. And what was home anymore? I had no family to go back to. No apartment that still belonged to me. I had no possessions or belongings. And even if I tried to go back, who would help me get there? Who would give me real clothes? Who would feed me? Who would be a friend to me, a Jew, when no one had stood up for me to begin with?

  The grim reality set in. We were free, but we were still Jews in a land that hated us, that had stolen everything we owned and had taken our families and put us in camps and gassed us and cremated our bodies.

  “Soldiers!” someone at the front gates cried.
“Soldiers are coming!”

  I steeled myself. So this was it then. The Nazi army would kill us all, gun us down and leave us for dead before the war ended. The extermination of the Jews was unfinished business.

  Some people ran for the barracks, as if to hide, but most of them, like me, stood in the yard and waited for what was to come.

  The gates opened, and soldiers marched into the yard. But the soldiers weren’t wearing gray and brown. They were wearing green. Their helmets looked different from the SS helmets too. And the tank that followed them … the tank had an American flag on it.

  “It’s the Americans!” I cried, feeling something close to joy for the first time since I could remember. “The Americans are coming! The Americans!”

  The Allies had reached us at last! Some prisoners hurried up to the American soldiers to shake their hands. Some hugged one another. Some gave prayers of thanks. I fell to my knees and wept. Had I really made it? Had I actually survived the Kraków ghetto and ten different concentration camps? I had been ten when the war started. Now I was sixteen. For more than six years I had been a prisoner of the Nazis. Prisoner B-3087. Now it was all over.

  An American soldier hurried to help me up, and asked me something in English I didn’t understand. He tried again in German. “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.

  As soon as they could, the Americans took us away from Dachau. We had walked and been trucked and been taken by train so many times to so many new horrible places that some of the prisoners were reluctant to go. But the Americans assured us that all that was over, and gave us blankets and food for the short truck ride into Munich. The Allies occupied the city, and there they would house us until they figured out what to do with us.

  I was put in a building that had once, I was told, been a barracks for SS officers. An American soldier led me upstairs to a big room filled with bunk beds and told me which one was mine.

  “How many other people do I have to share it with?” I asked him.

  He looked surprised. “Nobody,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  A bed all to myself! Then — wonder upon wonders — the soldier gave me a blanket, a pillow, and sheets for the bed. Sheets! My fellow prisoners and I looked around at one another like we were on some alien planet. I hadn’t slept on a sheet, nor had a pillow or a blanket, for five years. Perhaps six.

  With shaking hands, I began to make the bed. I didn’t even know how, didn’t remember the feeling of linens and soft things. The soldier helped me, and I climbed carefully into my new bed. A real mattress, with springs! My body sank into it, and my head fell into the pillow. What luxury!

  Beside my bed there was a little table, and on the table the Americans had given me more gifts: a wash-cloth, 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.

  That night in the dining hall, we sat in chairs. At a table. I hadn’t seen a chair in six years, nor a table. The tables were long, with places set for ten people at each. The American soldiers stationed with us came in and sat down with us. We were to eat the same food the soldiers ate. There were plates at the table, and silverware. I picked up a fork and looked at it the way I had my toothbrush, like it was some artifact from another world. There were napkins too. I watched the Americans tuck their napkins into their collars and did the same.

  And then they brought the food. Big platters of roast beef. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. And baskets of rolls — more bread than any of us had seen in years. The man across from me started to cry, and the American soldiers didn’t know what to do.

  “Would you pass the salt?” I asked him.

  The man looked up at me through his tears, and he started to laugh. He was laughing and crying at the same time. “Pass the salt,” he said. “Yes,” he said, laughing. “Yes, let me pass you the salt.”

  And so we began to pass the food around, this feast the Americans had laid out for us. They couldn’t understand our tears, couldn’t know how amazing such a simple meal was to us. Would they ever understand? Would anyone who hadn’t survived what we had survived understand? We could tell them all about it. Describe in every detail the horrors of the camps and the way we were treated. But no one who had not been there would ever truly understand.

  As the food filled my plate and the soldiers and former prisoners around me began to eat, I remembered that day in Kraków so long ago, the day the war had begun. 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. My cousins Sala, Dawid, and their two boys. They were all dead and gone now.

  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. The dead would always be with me, I knew, even when I was surrounded by life again, even if the Americans gave me back all the objects I had lost.

  It would be the same for all the other prisoners too, I knew. They smiled as they ate, but there was sadness in their eyes. Sadness for the people we had lost and would never get back.

  But I was wrong about losing everyone. A few days later I was out for a walk in my Munich neighborhood. I walked the streets whenever I could. I still wasn’t used to the fact that I could walk as I pleased, that I wasn’t gripped by thirst and hunger every second. I was thinking about what the rest of my life would hold when I saw a familiar face. She passed by on the other side of the street, and for a moment I thought I had to be mistaken.

  “Mrs. Immerglick?” I called. I dashed across the street to get a closer look. “Mrs. Immerglick?”

  The woman turned. It was! It was Mrs. Immerglick, the mean old lady who’d lived across the hall from me in Kraków! She burst into tears when I told her who I was, and she hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  “Oh, Yanek! Yanek, it is so good to see you!” she said at last. “The last time I saw you, you were just a boy! Now look at you. You’re a grown man!”

  I had grown, even in the camps. When I looked in the mirror these days, I didn’t recognize the person staring back at me.

  “The last time I saw you,” I told her, “you yelled at me for bouncing a ball in the hall!”

  “Yes! Yes! You and that ball!” She gripped my shoulders tight, as though if she let go I would disappear. “Oh, my dear boy, how I wish we could go back there now, how I wish we could start again. I wouldn’t have yelled at you, I promise.”

  I laughed, a sound as strange to me as my own face. I hadn’t laughed enough in the last six years to recognize the sound of it. “It’s all right, Mrs. Immerglick. What about your boys? The rest of your family?”

  “Fred,” she said. Her son’s name was Fred, like my friend who had died. She had tears in her eyes. “Fred survived. Like you. My Fred made it. But no one else.”

  I nodded, reaching out to squeeze her arm. “Is Fred here in Munich?” I asked. “I’d love to see him.”

  “Yes, yes. And you know about your cousin Youzek, of course.”

  My heart gave a small leap. “No.” I was almost afraid to hope….

  “Oh! My dear boy! Your cousin Youzek and his wife are alive! And they’re here, in Munich!”

  Youzek! I hadn’t seen him in years. Mrs. Immerglick brought me back to her apartment to write their address down for me on a piece of paper. I walked back out holding the paper in both hands and staring at it.

  I had family
— a cousin still. Family. I wasn’t alone.

  I went to see them as soon as I could. Cousin Youzek met me at the door, hugging me even harder than Mrs. Immerglick had. He pulled me inside and introduced me again to his wife, Hela. We cried, and laughed, and cried some more.

  “How did you survive? How did you make it?” we asked each other again and again, telling our stories long into the night. Youzek and his wife had survived by hiding with friends, and they had taken in another family, the Gamzers, who had survived the same way. There were three of them: Isaac, Barbara, and little Luncia, a twelve-year-old girl who sat in the corner reading a book the whole time.

  “What are your plans now, Yanek? What will you do?” Isaac Gamzer asked me as we sat around their table.

  I shrugged. It was true; life had to go on. “I like movies. There’s a theater near where I live now. I thought I would try to get a job as a projectionist.”

  “No, no, Yanek! You need to go to America!” Youzek told me. “That’s where the opportunities are. That’s where you can build a new life for yourself.”

  “America?” It felt so out of my reach now. “I don’t have any papers, any money,” I replied. “How would I ever get to America?”

  “There is a special program,” he told me. “For Jewish orphans of the war. They will help you get your visa and pay your way.”

  I was instantly excited by the idea of going to America. I remembered the movies I’d watched as a boy in Kraków. Did everyone ride around on horses and wear cowboy hats? Did gangsters have shootouts in the streets? Could I really find a home there? I had to find out.

  I registered for the program. I talked to lawyers. I filled out forms. I changed my name to Jacob Gruener and took to calling myself Jack, like the American soldiers called me. The process took months. Years. All the while I came back to visit Youzek and Hela almost every day, and soon I became good friends with the Gamzers too. Little Luncia and I still didn’t have much to say to each other, but Isaac and Barbara became like second parents to me, even more so than Youzek and Hela. They became family.