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Yank Gruener Character List

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Character The main character of the story is 10-year-old Yanek Gruener. He is an adolescent Jewish boy living in 1930s Poland during World War Two. Although he sees the very worst of people he still manages to find that one sliver of good in every person. Throughout the novel, he has to fight to maintain his will to survive. The story is based on a real man who now travels the world telling his survival story. At the beginning of the war, he and his family are forced to live with four other families in the Krakow ghetto. He is kicked out of his school and his friends turn on him. He is no longer allowed to do the things he was allowed to do before. On some nights Yanek would assist his father in making bread for the family. Eventually, he and his family are sent to different concentration camps. He never sees his parents again. At the end of the war, Yanek went to ten different camps. Among these included Auschwitz, where he came face to face with the …show more content…

The German dictator Adolf Hitler said the Jews were to blame for this. The Nazis believed Germans were racially superior and that the Jews were secondary in regard to what they believed in. Although they mostly addressed Jews, they also targeted Roma Gypsies, the disabled and the Slavic community which included Poles and Russians. By 1945, millions of Jews were exterminated as part of what they called the Final Solution. In the early years of the Nazi regime, they established concentration camps originally used to imprison prisoners of war. But as the war raged on, SS and police officials put Jews, Gypsies and other racially impure people inside these camps to be worked or gassed. The crimes committed during the Holocaust completely devastated the European Jewish community. In 1933 the Jewish population stood at over nine million only to be diminished to little more than 3 million. Yanek who now goes by Jack travels the world telling his

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