Yanek and his family live in Krakow, Poland. But in just a blink of an eye, their city was invaded by the Germans beginning WWII. For now, Yanek and his family remain in Krakow. For a little while they stay in their flat with several other families. Anti-Semitic rules have been put in place that persecute Jewish people, taking away any rights they had. Over time, walls are built up around the ghetto to contain the remaining Jews who have not been taken for resettlement or deportation yet. One-by-one many Jews were relocated to other Jewish ghettos, work camps, concentration camps or were killed on site.

Yanek's Figurative Journey

With the stress of no food, and constant hiding, Yanek is living in fear of being caught by the Nazis. His emotional state is one of constant terror and panic at what awaits him at every turn. The unknown aspects of the war leave a feeling of being unsettled. Yanek's early life as a 10 year old boy before the war was very normal. He attended school, played with friends, and went to the synagogue with his family. He loves his Mom and Dad and look up to them but as the war continues Yanek begins to doubt his fathers constant hopefulness and positivity and wonders who is really right- his father or Uncle Moshe. "I still worried he was wrong, but fresh bread made me forget all my troubles. For a little while, at least." (pg. 25) Doubting your parents for the first time is a struggle for Yanek especially in war-torn Poland.

Yanek's figurative journey starts with him coming back to the pigeon coop in the Kraków Ghetto and finding out his parents were deported, which took a turn of more negative emotions to fill him. Later, he was taken to a prison camp in Płaszów, Poland, where he found his Uncle Moshe. ""But we only have one purpose now: survive. Survive at all costs, Yanek. We cannot let these monsters tear us from the pages of the world."" (pg. 70) From that moment forward, Yanek knew that the only way of survival from this was to blend in and not be heard. His uncle's words hit him and made him realize that this was nothing to joke about and he had to keep quiet.

During a roll call one day, Yanek and 50 others were taken and loaded onto a truck. They were transported to the Wieliczka Salt Mine to pick away at the salt and load it into carts. The Nazis guided them around the underground salt mine, going down elevators and up and down stairs, they were shown floor 7 where they were being assigned. Yanek and the others were warned that escaping would not work out because they would get lost in the darkness of the tunnel and only be able to eat salt and drink the salt water, either way they would end up dead eventually. During working the next morning, one of the kapos finds the dead body of a man whom Yanek and two other prisoners recognized from Krakow, he was one of the Judenrats that lead the Nazis into his parents flat.

Chapter 14 begins with Yanek moving rocks, and as him and the other prisoners finished moving them to the other side, ""Good," the SS officer in charge of us said. "Now move it back."" (pg. 107) At first, Yanek was dumbfounded, before eventually realizing that the Nazis were making them work just to work. Yanek became irritated and angered by this demand, but had no choice but to do as told or there would be consequences. Though doing as told, Yanek was furious, not just at the Nazis but even angrier with his fellow prisoners. "If we turned on them all at once, we could overcome them. We were not animals to be led to the slaughter! We were thinking, feeling human beings!" (pg. 109) Yanek and the rest of the prisoners overpopulated the Nazis by a great amount, so they could easily overtake them. He felt as if they were lambs, following the directions of these bad people, why were they just standing around, working till death, and taking directions from the Nazis if there were so little of them? At roll call the next morning, one of the boys around Yanek's age finally had enough and grabbed the stick the Nazi was beating him with. Yanek believed this was where it began, they would all join with the boy and take over the Nazis, not accepting the beatings meekly no more. But none of the other prisoners did anything but remain with their heads down, looking at the ground. Before long, the brave boy was hung and Yanek promised to never forget the braveness the boy had shown.

Yanek gets marched at gunpoint onto a cattle car train, being shoved in tight with other prisoners like himself. They travel for days on end, without food or water. This resulted in some of the prisoners dying during the trip. Yanek ends up being able to get closer to the bars with snow on them, licking the snow as a source of hydration. The cattle car finally stops at night, stopping at Birkenau.

Yanek´s Figurative Journey

When Yanek was at his lowest point he thought,"Maybe someone was standing on the hose, I thought crazily, and I started to giggle. Yes. That was it. Or maybe they couldn't get the fire for the furnace going." (pg. 128) As he hits rock bottom, he starts acting differently and starts to giggle, showing that this really hit him hard and affected the way he thought since he was so close to death. But then, "The pipes rattled and moaned. Something was finally coming out....I reached my arms up toward the ceiling. Kill me, I prayed. Please kill me and put an end to this. I'm ready. Water drained down on me. Freezing water so cold it made me scream. Water! Not gas! I was going to live!" (pg. 129) Instead of gas to kill Yanek and the others, it was water. Freezing cold water. Yanek's spirits grew and he knew then, that he was alive. He wasn't dead, he had lived, lived through all the rough spots. That was the thing about luck, you never knew if it was your time to go or if you were going to stay just a while longer.

When Yanek arrived to Auschwitz, the gate above has a sign that says "arbeit macht frei" which translates to "work makes you free" in English. Yanek knew that it was a lie, but the newly prisoners would definitely believe it and that was the purpose of it. The Nazis wanted everyone to be calm and not panic, so that they would work for them without a problem. One morning after roll call in Auschwitz, Yanek and the other prisoners were told that they were being moved because workers were needed in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. None of them believed the Nazis though, since everyday there would be allied plans flying overhead and the bombs dropped just kept getting closer. Instead of being moved by train or cattle car, they were marched. They were marching for days, weeks even, with only half a loaf of bread to spare. They passed through towns with people and families, living their ordinary life. Some days when they woke up, there would be prisoners who died from the harsh winter weather conditions, one guy even had his ear frozen to the ground. In the book, Yanek explains how most prisoners didn't have shoes, using cloths to wrap around their feet but if they got wet it was worse and froze to their feet, him and some others had wooden shoes, but even with those and without socks their feet were like ice blocks.

Three days after attempting to take bread from a sick boy, Yanek walks through the gates of Sachsenhausen. The endless death march, as it seemed, was laborious and grueling. Many died of starvation, the harsh cold weather of the winter, and got shot if there were too weak and/or falling behind. 4 days before Yanek arrived to Sachsenhausen, he had helped a boy around his age make it to he next rest point. While it had slowed and took energy from Yanek tremendously, he didn't give up and soon an old man helped a long. With the two of them carrying the boy's weight, it made it easier for them to keep going and not fall down. Though, the possibility of death was following right behind them, they managed to keep a steady pace and not slow down to where the Nazis with guns lay. During his time is Sachsenhausen, they were demanded to stay out there in the cold harsh weather as it snowed down on them, one of the prisoners having to hold a squat for moving ever so slightly. Yanek and the other prisoners were assigned jobs just like at the other camps, but never did Yanek know why the Nazis needed so much gravel. The Nazis laughed as they made the prisoners work and work, for no reason whatsoever other than their own pleasure. During time at Sachsenhausen, they played jokes and games. They would make some of the prisoners sing as they ate their rich food and laughed together in conversation, they even made prisoners go up against each other and box for free entertainment.

Yanek and prisoners like himself got shipped off by train into Bergen-Belsen, Germany because the guards at Sachsenhausen had gotten bored of the prisoners. When they walked into the gates of Bergen-Belsen, the commandant of the camp screamed at their guards, saying things such as ""What did you bring me? Look at these skeletons! How do you expect these walking dead to work?"" (pg. 196) That day, the commandant demanded that they take a one week rest to regain energy. They were fed very rich and thick soup, and a big fresh baked piece of bread. Though it was hearty and nutritious, something they hadn't gotten in a while, their bodies responded negatively in the coming morning. They had to take several turns in and out of the latrines, their bodies so foreign to that amount of nourishing food that it hurt them and it went right through them. As Yanek thought that life here in Bergen-Belsen was the best of the camps, he believed that he could be there until the time the war ended and the US liquidated them. But then came along Moonface, who, as Yanek had heard from other prisoners talking among themselves, was a murderer before the war had even started. It started when Moonface punched him because Yanek 'looked at him wrong', then it was whenever Moonface had the chance to beat Yanek. Yanek tried to get assigned jobs away from him, but every time he was assigned to work, it was where Moonface was. At some point Yanek heard the Nazis rounding up prisoners to send them to another camp and immediately he made sure that he was front of the line, desperate to escape Moonface. The Nazis made them run across the barracks as fast as they could, a race. Though Yanek felt like falling on the ground when he finished, he stayed standing and strong, resulting in him getting accepted to get transferred to the new camp.

The race at Bergen-Belsen in which Yanek successfully managed to get through, took Yanek to Buchenwald in prize of winning. Yanek was glad he would be able to get away from Moonface for good but when he got there, he realized it was unfair and cruel as ever before. There was a zoo there, and in that zoo the bears would get fed big bloody steaks. Yanek started to realize how poorly they were really being treated, with the animals getting treated better than they, human beings, were. One day at Buchenwald, the Nazi guards lured a deer to the fence and trapped its antlers with a leather strap, preventing it from being able to escape. This made Yanek's blood boil with anger, not liking how horribly they would treat such a creature. With the unfairness in treatment the prisoners received, Yanek still felt sorrow for the poor animal. That was just how bad Buchenwald was, where the prisoners were treated less than animals, and by the end they were running out of Jews from how many of them they had already killed. Yanek then fully realized the seriousness of the situation, the awful reality that the amount of Jews already killed led to the Nazis running out of them.

Yanek arrived at Gross-Rosen by train, just like all the other times they were packed in one, many died from the starvation and just by how weak they now were. But to Yanek, "People died all around me, just like before, but now I hardly took notice of it. I had been surrounded by death for so long....that I almost couldn't care anymore." (pg. 212) All day prisoners whispered among one another about how it would be any day that the allies would be in Berlin and they, set free. As Yanek worked day and night, one day a kapo came up to him asking where his button was. Yanek answered honestly, having no idea where the button went, nor did he even notice it had disappeared. But apparently there was a penalty for losing a button, and Yanek had to find out the hard way by getting whipped repeatedly. He was forced to count the many lashes he received in German, having messed up the kapo started over again. During the middle of that night, Yanek and the other prisoners were awoken by the sound of bombs nearby. But, that was no reason not to sleep since there would be work to be done tomorrow. So, they just went right back to sleep to get rest for the next day.

When Yanek arrives to Dachau after the second death march to happen, typhus (or camp fever) starts spreading around the barracks throughout the prisoners. As camp fever spread, Yanek tried his best to avoid the ones that were infected with it, but it was unavoidable since they were a crammed 1,500 prisoners in a barrack built to only house 250 prisoners. Strangely, or maybe even luckily, the Nazis didn't make any of them work there at Dachau. One night in the early spring, they woke to the sound of explosions nearby. While Yanek used to wish for a bomb to fall on him to end his suffering, now he was praying that no bomb would hit him. He knew he was close to survival, telling himself, "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--" (pg. 242) All of them in the barracks could hear the planes over head for hours on end, the bullets fired, and bombs exploding. They heard Nazis shouting to each other as well, but Yanek just kept his head down like the rest of the prisoners, silently pleading for death to pass him by yet again. The next morning they were not woken up by the Nazis, instead they simply woke up themselves. Something was different though...as one of the prisoners pushed themselves off their barrack and looked outside, he announced that there were no Nazis outside, or anywhere. Though their thoughts of it being a trick by the Nazis once again, they cautiously made their way out of the barracks and outside. It was true, the Nazis were gone, they probably fled that night after the attack. Then they noticed something, or someones, in the distance. At first they thought it was the Nazis but as they neared closer, it was the American soldiers! The allies had reached them at last. Yanek was in utter shock and started crying. He never knew whether he would make it out alive, but here he was. It had been more than six years of being in the Nazi control and he was finally free.

When the American allies rescued the Jews they gave them their own barracks, which they didn't have to share, and gave them simple daily items such as a washcloth, a cup, and a toothbrush. With this, since the prisoners haven't had something so simple like that, they started to cry. Another thing that happened was that the Americans and Jews ate the same food, and together. It brought tears of joy to the Jews because they had never been treated the same as others for six years. Yanek also signed up for a program for Jewish orphans of the war to travel to america. He talked to lots of lawyers, filled out many forms, and changed his name to Jacob Gruener, though he goes by Jack, as the American soldiers called him.