Of the 1.5 million Jewish children living in Europe before the war, only half a million survived-including Yanek. Three million of those six million Jews were Polish-over 90 percent of Poland’s Jewish population. All in all, six million Jews and millions of communists, homosexuals, and Roma people were killed by the Nazis. In the book, Yanek survives 10 different concentration camps: Plaszów, the Wieliczka Salt Mines, Trzebinia, Birkenau, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and finally Dachau, before being liberated by American soldiers on April 29, 1945. Soon after, concentration camps were built, where millions of Jews were worked to death or killed outright. After this invasion, the Jews were quickly separated into ghettos, including in Kraków, where Yanek lived. Poland, where Yanek grew up, was one of the first places to experience the violence of the Holocaust, the country was invaded by the Nazis on September 1, 1939. Prisoner B-3087 is based on the true story of Yanek Gruener’s experience during the Holocaust-Nazi Germany’s genocide of Jews and other marginalized peoples in Europe.
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