The three badges on the book’s cover and its two title pages are of prime importance within the story.

The armband of a “kapo” also appears within the narrative.

By 1936, the Nazis had gone beyond the plain, yellow Star of David (shown in the center above), originally used for all their Jewish prisoners who were not murdered immediately upon arrival at the camps, and had codified an entire system of prisoner-marking and separating badges. These were set forth bureaucratically with all their varieties in unmistakable, bright colors on charts like this:

[Roma and Sinti females were labelled petty criminals and classified as Asocial, or Anti-social, and so had black badges.]