Yanek and his family live in Krakow, Poland. But in just a blink of an eye, their city was invaded by 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-sematic rules have been put in place that persecute Jewish people, taking away any rights they had. The Jews were scapegoats of the Nazis. 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, and concentration camps or were killed on site.

Yanek's Figurative

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 looks up to them but as the war continues Yanek begins to doubt his father's constant hopefulness and positivity and wonders who is really right- his father or Uncle Moshe. "I still worried he was wrong but the 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.

At the beginning of chapter nine, Yanek has no family left in the Krakow Ghetto. The deportations and resettlements have taken only a few people in his family at a time until only Yanek is left. They are only euphemisms though and Yanek knows he will never see them again. He has to work at the tailor shop while he lives in the ghetto. While working there a Nazi truck pulls up Nazis start loading people from the shop, one of them being Yanek. Yanek is taken to a work camp in Plaszow, Poland where he is surrounded by violence. Yanek is in a dangerous place so he can't let his guard down. While he's there he finds his Uncle Moshe and is so happy to see him. He tells Yanek how he has to handle being at the camp. Uncle Moshe tells him how he has to keep a low profile. He can't stand out, or the leader, Amon Goeth, will kill him for his entertainment. "Here at Plaszow, you must do nothing to stand out. From now on you have no name, no personality, no family, no friends."(pg. 68) Yanek is under a lot of pressure at the concentration camp and his life is always being threatened. There is starvation, Amon Goeth, and the Kapo, prisoners who are put in charge by the SS. Yanek has had many fears and doubts, but the war continues.

One morning Yanek is taken from the ranks and is loaded onto a truck to work a new job at Wieliczka Salt Mine to mine salt. While he is on the truck he recognizes one of the other men he is with as someone from Krakow but can't place how. He is taken from the truck by a Kapo and shown where to work, a mile underground where it is pitch black without their headlamps. Yanek is shown how to do his job and is told not to get lost. The other workers realize that the man Yanek recognized was a Judenrat and stole things from his flat. He has to relive the memories of having to take charge because his mother is too terrified to move or say anything and recognizes how much he misses his parents. He works really hard at the salt mines but while working the Kapo starts yelling "Who did this" and when Yanek investigates he finds that the former Judenrat was violently beaten up and has been tortured by having salt spread in his wounds. Yanek has to feel scared and realize how anyone can die at any second for many reasons, the other prisoners, overworking, malnourishment, the prison guards, and many other reasons. Yanek has to face many emotions while being a Jew in World War 2 waiting for the violence to end.

Yanek is retaken and has to work at the Trzebinia work camp where the Nazis are ruthless toward the Jews. Yanek is told to move heavy boulders from one pile to another and works until his hands and arms are red and bruised. When finished the Nazis tell them to then move all the boulders back to the original pile. This infuriated Yanek and he was so convinced if all of the Jews and prisoners teamed up, even though they are overworked, exhausted, and starving, there are so many of them that they could defeat these Nazis. He moves the boulders anyway though. Another Jew who is about to be beaten with a club by a Nazi takes the club from him and the Jew beats up the Nazi instead. Yanek feels excited and is happy that the Jew is a resistor. The Nazi is being defeated because they are unfair to the Jews, but the Jew that holds the club is shot in the head. Yanek realizes the severe punishment that follows the action of challenging the Nazis and going down with a fight, but then because the Nazi gets beaten other innocent Jews are hung as an additional punishment for the attempt of revolution. Yanek decides that it is better to die quietly than go down with a fight but takes innocent people with him.

Yanek leaves Trzebinia to get onto a cattle car on a train. The car smells so terribly bad like vomit and urine and Yanek soon finds out why. Yanek and all the other prisoners are so smushed into the car that they can't move. The car is cold and it is a long ride to Birkenau where they are told they won't survive because of the gas chambers. They were finally let out of the train where they were beaten and whipped to get to the showers the Nazis are so cruel to the prisoners but don't end up killing them in the gas chambers where they are all waiting, begging to die because they have had enough torture. The shower heads only run water though and they have all been spared. They continue working at Birkenau so lucky and Yanek is so grateful to still survive.

Yanek's Figurative Journey

Starting from the train ride to Birkenau Yanek is terrified of what's to come. They are told they are going to Birkenau, not a concentration camp, a death camp. When they make it to Birkenau they wait for hours in the train car on the tracks and Yanek is impatient wondering what is taking so long and why they won't kill them already. They had to wait for the crematorium to be unoccupied so they can go next, it was the gypsies turn for now. Yanek is finally taken to the chambers and is told by another prisoner that he should stand directly under a showerhead. It won't save him though, it will kill him faster. Inside the showers, Yanek sits there waiting for the gas to start until it becomes unbearable and he stands under one of the shower heads yelling for them to kill him already, laughing at it, wanting the Nazis to stop messing with them and for Yanek to just die. The gas never comes though, instead, Yanek is showered with water saving his life. With this, Yanek feels like he has been not killed but rebirthed. He has survived the ghetto, Plaszow, Wieliczka Salt Mines, Trezbina, the train ride, and now the Birkenau gas chambers, and refuses to give up now. He has survived the unsurvivable and is determined to make it out of the war. Yanek then gets a tattoo of B-3087 that becomes his new name, he attends a late-night bar mitzvah in the barracks, and prisoners attempt a prison break but are caught and shot against a wall.

Chapters 19-20 Yanek is at Auschwitz concentration camp which is known as a death camp and Yanek is told you walk in through the gate but the only way out is through the chimneys. They were told that they would not survive this camp, that there was no chance of making it out alive, but People would die during the night or they would get sick. When they were unable to get up in the morning for roll call and work. When they were useless they would get beaten and killed. Yanek talks to his bunkmate, Fred, and they become immediate friends. Both of them are from Krakow and they are around the same age. They bond over talking about what food they are going to eat when the war is over. Yanek is thrilled to have someone to talk to and rely on and he cares for Fred like a brother. Fred doesn't want to get up one morning though because he is sick and Yanek tells him he will be better the next day. The next day he is worse and Yanek is devasted. Fred can't get out of bed and a kapo comes to beat him to check if he's lying. Yanek is taken by one of the other prisoners to roll call where Fred follows shortly after with the kapo. Fred is hung for not getting up and Yanek catches a glimpse of his face right before the chair is kicked out from under him. Yanek has to hold back his sobs. The prisoners were told the only way out was through the chimneys and they won't survive. Yanek survives anyway because of the death march to Sachsenhausen where he exits through the gate that says Arbeit Macht Frei, work makes you free. Yanek has survived for a long time and will continue to survive.

Yanek escapes Auschwitz only to go on a death march where he walks for days. On the death march, it is cold, they are hungry and exhausted, and Yanek is lucky to have shoes to protect his feet from the frozen ground. While walking a boy around Yanek's age is having trouble walking and staying alive so Yanek makes the risky choice and walks with him. The boy reminded Yanek of Fred who he couldn't save but he knows he can save this boy during the death march. The next morning the boy is much better but Yanek lost his bread so he goes 3 more days of walking without food. Yanek makes it to Sachsenhausen after the death march and is given the rest of the day to eat his soup and sleep which he badly needs. At Sachsenhausen, the Nazis use the prisoners for their entertainment and mess with them for the fun of it. Death is so common here that the prisoners, kapos, and Nazis don't even think about all the corpses lying on the ground everywhere. On page 188 it says, "death was so common, so ordinary, that the dead were like fallen trees in a forest." At roll call the Nazis make them stand in the cold rain while they warm themselves inside. When someone moves they beat him and make him do the Sachsenhausen Salute. The man was so weak and a healthy person would fall over at some point. Yanek felt bad for the man and when he finally fell over and the Nazis came to beat him he threw himself at the electric fence. The Nazis came to collect the prisoners during the Nazis' dinner so the prisoners would sing for them as entertainment. After they forced the prisoners to box one another and for everyone else to watch.

Just like all of the other Nazis in camps, the ones here were ruthless. They would make the prisoners do things that had no reason and were just to torture them. They had to move rocks but they couldn't take a too big rock or a small one or they would get shot. They were treated worse than animals and there was even a zoo there for the Nazis and their family's entertainment. If the Nazis were mean to the animals they were punished but then they would torture the prisoners without consequence. The Prisoners had to pull carts and sing at the same time and the camp's commandment and his wife were brutal. The wife was known as the Witch of Buchenwald because she was even worse than her husband. She scared everyone including Yanek so they had to stay away from her. She had punished a man for having a tattoo that the Nazis hadn't given him and Yanek never saw him again. Nazis had tied up a harmless deer that Yanek said on page 208 "trying to free itself from the fence, made my blood boil". They were then punished for capturing the deer later. Yanek noticed how the animals are given mercy but the prisoners would never be given anything close to mercy from the Nazis.

Yanek's Literal Journey

Yanek is taken from Gross-Rosen on another death march to Dachau. They walk through Czechoslovakia where the citizens are kind and throw the prisoners food scraps and leave out bread loaves for them. Yanek doesn't manage to get any left-out food for them but sees that a kapo in front of him has a sack full of bread. When he approaches him, he realizes it's Moonface and tries to get his attention while walking. Nervous that Moonface will kill him Yanek asks anyway and Moonface holds a knife to his throat but proceeds to cut a chunk of bread for him saving Yanek's life.

The prisoners are in terrible shape because of the march so they end up loading into cattle cars, Poles in one and Jews in the other. The bombs are so close that the prisoners continuously get thrown over and the documents keeping track of them are ruined with an explosion. When they arrive at Dachau Yanek slips into the Pole line with a homemade disguise where he rips off the star of David on his uniform and eventually gets pointlessly ratted out by one of them. It wouldn't change the lives of the Poles and it wouldn't affect anyone other than himself, so why would he tell on him? Yanek could have survived so easily if it weren't for the one Pole who told on him so he is devasted and frustrated that he didn't get away with his switch. At Dachau, the war is coming to an end. Whether he would make it out was still debatable because several threats remained for him. The camp had Typhus going around which they called "camp fever". If you got it you were going to die and not make it out of the war. That night when they were going to sleep the bombs around them were so close it shook the barracks. Before Yanek had been like Fred and didn't mind, even hoping bombs would wipe them all out, but now they were so close to survival that he prayed it would miss them. The next morning the Nazis have all disappeared. Everyone is so confused and is waiting for them to kill them as a trick, but then Ally soldiers come to liberate them and they know they are free. He realizes that this is the end of the war and drops to his knees sobbing because he made it. Yanek is told on page 245 by an American soldier, "Everything's going to be all right now, Yanek" and Yanek believes him, knowing it's not another trick by the Nazis.

The war has finally come to an end and the prisoners at Dachau were liberated after the persecution of the Jews. All of the freed prisoners are taken to Munich where the soldiers give them each their own bed and washcloths and toothbrushes to clean themselves up. They are astonished that they have a bed all to themselves with a mattress, pillows, and sheets. The soldiers then bring them to sit down at a table in chairs. They haven't seen things like this since the war began. The food comes on trays and there is so much and it looks so amazing that some prisoners start crying. They are so happy that the camps and war are over, but they have all lost their families and the lives they had before. Yanek has to get used to being free and takes walks whenever possible, leading to him running into someone from Krakow, Mrs. Immerglick. She is overjoyed to see that Yanek survived and tells him his cousin is alive. Over time he becomes very close with his cousin and the Gamzers who survived with them and he thinks of them as family. He has applied to move to the U.S. and when he finally leaves they all say their sad goodbyes. In America, he starts using his name Jacob, and goes by Jack he is sent to fight in the Vietnam War and when he gets back the Gamzers are also in America. He falls in love with their daughter, Luncia who changed her name to Ruth, and they had kids and now grandchildren. He says in the story on page 256, "For nine years I had done everything I could to survive. Now it was time to live." The story of Yanek, or Jack, Gruener is an incredible journey about an ordinary Jewish boy whose life is changed because of World War II. Jack and Ruth died in the last 5-10 years and had a much better life after the war together. They would always miss the people they had lost and the lives they had before, but it was time for the new life that awaited them.