The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Read online

Gretel touched the bark of a tree, and as she did the owl hooted again, deeper in the forest now. “Listen, Hansel.”

  They stood and stared ahead into the gloom. Had the trees been in full leaf, the darkness under the canopy would have been absolute, but only the scudding clouds blocked the moonlight fitfully.

  “The owl is leading us,” he said. “Listen.”

  They waited, breathing shallowly, and heard the call, mournful as the voice of the mad cantor who had stood calling on the corner of Pilnesky Street under their window.

  Gretel smiled. “We’ll go that way.”

  Hansel nodded, only partly attentive, his whole body tense with the work of giving up his bread, crumb by crumb.

  They walked on for a long time, and the way did not get more difficult. The ground was soft at times, but their slight weight made only dents. They came to a stream and both knelt and drank the icy water.

  “We ought to wade in it so if there are dogs they can’t sniff us.” Hansel held only one crumb now, and he did not want to eat it. It wouldn’t be perfect if he did. He thought of the soldiers riding in formation, so clean, so unafraid.

  “You do it too.” He cut the crumb with his thumbnail and gave one part to her. Gretel took it carefully, ignoring the hunger in herself so she could behave with dignity.

  “It’s still my bread.” He picked the other piece out from under his nail. He had to do it quickly or he would put it in his mouth. “You have to do what I say.”

  “All right.”

  “Like this.” He threw it hard and it went into the flowing water of the stream. She threw her bread too, and they stood watching the water.

  “They do that, some people,” she said, an old story she had heard coming back to her.

  “Do what?”

  “Throw bread on the water.”

  “Why?”

  “It carries their sins away.”

  “What are sins?”

  “Bad things you do.”

  Hansel thought about it. “How much bread did they throw?”

  “Maybe a whole marked piece.”

  “From the end to the mark?” He couldn’t believe it.

  “I don’t know. We can’t walk in the water, Hansel. It’s too cold, and we’d get sick.”

  “The dogs will smell us.” The sound of barking always made him have to pee.

  “No dogs. We’d hear them.”

  She was so tired, and she knew he was too, but they had to find someone. A farmer who had a lot of food. If they didn’t they’d die. But if the farmer was too afraid of death, then he would report them.

  “I have to pee. Wait.” He pulled down his pants.

  “No.” She grabbed him. “Not even in front of me. You have to go behind a tree.”

  He pulled his pants up and began to walk around a tree. “It’s dark.”

  “Shut up. You can’t let anyone see it.”

  “You’ve seen it before.” He pushed hard to finish and go back to her.

  “You can’t pee in front of anyone. Not ever again.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Why did they make my penis this way?”

  “Because they had to. They didn’t know it’d be like this.”

  She couldn’t walk much farther. They followed the owl’s call until another owl began to call off to their right, and then a third owl answered on the left. It was too confusing.

  “There aren’t any farmers in the forest,” she told him. “We have to go to sleep and then find a farm tomorrow, when we get to the end of the trees.”

  “How long will that take?”

  She stared ahead. The moon was covered with dense clouds now and the air smelled of snow. She knew it wasn’t safe to go to sleep when it was so cold, but she walked on until there was a small clearing in the middle of circling trees. The sky was dark and high up.

  “Help me.” She kicked leaves into a pile in the middle of the clearing. He got on all fours and pushed leaves, sneezing from the dust. When the pile was large enough for her, she got on all fours with him.

  “Now we’re like little rabbits. We’ll make a hole in the leaves and sleep under them.”

  “Rabbits live under the ground. Uncle—”

  “Don’t say any names.”

  “I didn’t say it.” He was nearly in tears.

  “Just don’t. Come on. Crawl in the leaves. It’ll make us warmer.”

  It was harder to crawl in than she thought it would be. The leaves moved away from them and fell off, but finally she lay beside him and pulled as many leaves over them as she could, covering even their heads.

  “Roll over.” She wrapped herself around him, and his back and her stomach grew a little warmer where they were pressed together. “Now go to sleep.”

  He was cold, but everyone was cold for part of the year. It was how things were. He fell asleep quickly and his fist, pressed again into his gut, relaxed and softened.

  She felt him relax under her arm, and then she fell asleep too, but not before she heard it. At first she thought it was the owls, but the sound was too great for the wings of owls. Then she thought it was the wind in the trees, but that wasn’t it either.

  It went on until she was too tired to wonder and fell asleep, with the sound of great wings over them, beating, cracking the air, the sound continuing as the sky darkened and the first dust of snow fell onto the wings of the angels and through the moving sinew and muscle and feather onto the pile of leaves which covered the children.

  Magda

  Hansel woke first, but he couldn’t bear to move. He was terribly cold, but the air outside the leaves was colder. He wasn’t hungry now and smiled at the feel of his stomach with no pain in it.

  Gretel stirred and the leaves moved. A leaf with a few flakes of snow on its brown surface fell beside Hansel’s face and he stuck his tongue out and touched the white crystals.

  “Snow.”

  Gretel was awake instantly when she heard his voice.

  “Shut up!”

  He lay, ashamed. He had spoken aloud.

  They curled under the leaves, nearly frozen, and listened, but there was no sound. Even the birds had left the forest. Not a footstep, not a crack of a twig.

  Gretel pushed a few leaves away and stared out at the floor of the forest. It was covered with a dust of snow. She craned her neck and examined the whole surface of the clearing. Not a single footprint marking the snow. They were alone.

  Unless someone hid behind the trees. She shut her eyes. It was different in the country. It was harder to hide. It was bigger.

  “I’ll get up first. If anything happens, just lie still.” Her mouth barely moved near his ear.

  She rolled to the side and pulled up on her knees and then stood stiffly. Nothing. No shouts of “Raus! Raus!” or the bark of a dog or the thump of a blow.

  “It’s all right. Get up—” She hesitated and was frightened for a second. “Hansel,” she said, remembering. “We have to practice our names.”

  “What’s our last name?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her face twisted with worry. He was right. They’d need a last name.

  He stood and brushed the leaves off. His face was very pale and he looked hopefully at her. “When will we find a farmer?”

  “Soon. Maybe.”

  “I’m not hungry now.” He smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. There were no hunger pains in her own body, and she knew what it meant. Ransacking her pockets for a crumb, no matter how small or dirty, she felt the panic rising again. Just a tiny crumb swallowed could bring the hunger raging back. There was nothing in her pockets.

  “Come on. We have to go fast now.” She knew they had to get food before night. “The dogs might come.”

  He would go faster if he thought about the dogs, and they had to get out of the forest. Stealing food could take time, and stealing was safer than asking. They moved at a trot through the trees and she wondered how you stole food from farmers. She h
ad seen pictures of farms in a book, but she couldn’t remember if farmers had refrigerators or kept the food outside in their barns.

  They had a refrigerator once. When she was little and lived in a city somewhere else. Two men carried it up the back stairs into the kitchen. She remembered the maid shrieking when she opened it up and felt the cold air coming out.

  The sun was only a glare through the clouds and the cold didn’t get any better. Gretel could tell it was midmorning by the silver disk of sun in the sky when she glimpsed it through tree limbs.

  “Can we whisper, Gretel?”

  She looked around. It was silent except for the sound of their feet and their breathing.

  “Only whisper.” She leaned toward him so her voice didn’t have to rise.

  “I’m thirsty.” His whisper was loud, but she was glad he had thirst.

  They had come a long way. The forest was bigger than Bialy Park, maybe bigger than Bialystok itself. The forest might not ever end but just keep going east until they were in Byelorussia. She remembered the map on the wall of their room in the ghetto. She had watched her father tear it out of a book and hang it up. He had been able to save only three books.

  “A mathematics book and an atlas. We will study logical thought and the world. Not everything is Poland and Germany. And one book of fairy tales, for you, daughter.”

  Then he pointed. “This is Poland. This is Germany. But the rest of it, look now, the rest of it is the world.”

  Her father taught them ever since she could remember. Math lessons and geography. And the third book that lay in the corner of the room where she slept on a mat with her brother.

  There had been a lot of books on the cart. The cart. Going down the road, and the blankets piled up, and her sitting on top—until the airplanes. For a second the airplanes hung in the blue sky of her mind like silver wasps, and then the door in her mind shut and they were gone.

  “Look.” Hansel had stopped so abruptly that she nearly knocked him over. “Look at that.”

  Beyond them she heard the sound of water, another stream. Ahead she saw a group of particularly large trees, she didn’t know what kind they were, and in the middle of the trees was a tiny house—not a house—sort of a shed—like the one where Uncle—she shook her head to stop the name from coming into her mind—where someone kept his gardening tools.

  Smoke came from the pipe that stuck out of the roof at an angle, but it wasn’t the smoke that Hansel was staring at. Before she could stop him, he ran through the trees and reached toward the side of the hut. She wanted to call out, but knew it was too late. She could have helped him if he had waited, but he couldn’t wait, and she knew that too.

  He stood on tiptoe and tore at a piece of dark bread that had been pressed over a metal spike sunk in the wood of the hut. Hansel couldn’t reach it and, afraid he would call to her, Gretel sprung across the clearing and pulled the bread off the spike.

  “Mine!” He remembered to whisper, but his tone was fierce.

  Gretel gave it to him, grabbed his arm, and was pulling him toward the forest when she saw the woman. She was very old, white hair hanging down past her shoulders, her eyes so dark they only showed as holes in the wrinkled skin of her face. She wasn’t much taller than Gretel herself.

  Gretel pulled Hansel around, and the jerk made him drop the bread.

  “No,” he screamed, and she knew it didn’t matter. The woman had seen them.

  Gretel was running with him, struggling as he tried to go back and get the bread, the two of them in a tangle of feet, and then she fell, dragging him on top of her. The woman was near them, but Gretel didn’t dare look at her.

  And then Gretel heard the laugh. Husky at first, then clear and ringing through the air. It made Gretel stop struggling with Hansel, and he crawled back to where the lump of hard bread lay on the ground.

  Gretel stared at the dirt under her head. The woman had laughed, but sometimes they laughed before they killed people. She waited for the pressure of the gun against her neck and imagined how the bullet would tear through the bone of her skull and blow the whitish brain tissue out through her forehead. She knew the flesh would spill out of her skull and cover the ground like a dropped pudding, but the bullet didn’t come.

  Looking up, the girl saw the woman coming into the clearing, dressed in dark clothes, ragged like everyone was, a bucket of water in each hand.

  “If you want to eat my bread, you have to carry these pails, boy.”

  “No.” Hansel was gnawing on the bread, ignoring the gray of mold on one corner.

  “You won’t work?”

  Hansel shook his head. Gretel knew his mind was too connected with the bread to understand. Hansel never said anything to people while he ate except “No.”

  “I’ll carry them.” She held out her arms. They were thin but she’d prove they were strong.

  The woman wasn’t listening to her. “The boy could almost be one of the Rom.”

  “His name is Hansel. I’m Gretel.” She didn’t know what the Rom were, but it was better not to be anything.

  The woman wore a piece of blanket cut to make a shawl. Under that were several sweaters, the color of dirt, then some sort of dress. Over the skirt of the dress she had layered a woolen skirt that dragged in the dirt, heavy with mud on the bottom. Gretel stared at the woman’s clothes, but it was all right. There was no lump of a gun, no stick or whip under her clothes. None that the girl could see.

  Stretching out her hand, the woman lifted a strand of Gretel’s silvery hair, moving closer until Gretel could smell a musty odor. Suddenly the woman took Gretel’s face in her hands and imprisoned it with hard fingers. Gretel stared into the black eyes with her blue ones and hoped the woman wouldn’t twist her neck and break it. There was nothing to do. The woman held her too tightly.

  “But you’re not of the Rom.”

  “No,” Gretel whispered.

  “And you have such nice, sturdy, German names.”

  Gretel willed herself to stare in the woman’s eyes but her eyeballs twitched like a horse’s.

  The woman dropped her hands and nodded. “And where are your adults?”

  “We’re looking for farmers.” Hansel had finished the bread and was drinking with his hand out of a bucket.

  “Where are your parents?” The woman looked at Gretel. “Hiding back there? Waiting to come out and kill me for my bread?”

  Gretel couldn’t think of an answer. She stared at the hut and saw another piece of bread and then another on the boards. “Why do you put bread on your house?”

  “The birds feed on it.”

  “That’s wasteful.” Gretel frowned at her.

  “Wasting a little shows you believe in tomorrow.”

  Gretel knew then that the woman was one of those who had lost her mind. “Bread is important.”

  “Bread is more than that, little girl with eyes that flinch. Bread is your luck. If you throw it away, you throw your luck away.”

  Hansel looked up from the bucket. His face crumpled.

  “But you throw your bread away. You tack it up for the birds.”

  “I give it. Giving isn’t throwing.”

  Hansel’s face crumpled more. He began to make those breathy sounds that were so hard to stop once he had begun.

  “I threw the breadcrumbs on the dirt, Gretel.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” She dragged him to his feet and slapped his face. It was what the Stepmother did to stop the sound. “She’s crazy. Like the old man under our window. You remember?”

  The sounds stopped and he nodded. “But I threw the breadcrumbs—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The woman turned her dark eyes to the boy. “You threw your bread away?”

  Hansel nodded.

  “Then we’ll try to make it right again. You have to pay me.”

  “We don’t have any money.”

  The woman walked to him and looked at his coat. She reached out and with a quick jerk took one of
the metal buttons in her fingers and tore it from the material. Before Gretel could protest, the button was tucked into the bosom of the woman’s dress.

  “Now.” She walked to the trees and searched the ground, picked up a long stick, and came back to the children. Gretel stepped in front of her brother.

  Ignoring her, the woman drew a circle through the dusting of snow, a groove into the dirt around the two children. She left the circle unconnected until she had stepped inside and then connected the two lines to close it.

  “Hold the stick.” She held it out and Hansel put his hand on it. Gretel put her hand over his.

  “Protected by the closed circle, this child with moonlight hair and the other, the child who is almost of the Rom, will have their luck back.”

  She muttered something in a language that wasn’t Polish or German or Yiddish. Then she fell silent, and the three of them stood close until the woman laughed and walked to the buckets. Still holding the stick, the two children watched her.

  “Who are the Rom?” Hansel asked.

  “Gypsies. But there are none left now. They killed them first. They were gone before they started on the rest.” She picked up the buckets and grunted from the weight.

  Gretel stepped forward.

  “No!” The woman nearly spilled the water. “Don’t step on the line.”

  Gretel drew back and waited while the woman walked around the circle whispering and rubbing at the dirt, until Gretel’s footprint marring the circle, and the circle itself, were obliterated.

  “Will Gretel have bad luck?” Hansel asked.

  “The wheel moves on, and we move with it.” The woman stared into the forest as if she were listening for someone.

  “Who are you?” Gretel asked.

  “I am Magda. Magda the Witch they call me in the village.” She picked up the buckets, swung open the door of the hut with a twist of her foot, and went inside.

  The Forest

  The motorcycle whined in complaint and they nearly skidded off the road on every curve. His wife didn’t cry out but clung to him with eyes shut. Soon they would have to stop and run. She made her mind still and saved her strength.

  “The next curve,” he shouted into the wind. She squeezed his sides to show that she heard. It came upon them in an instant, a curve topped heavily by trees. But then he was unsure. Perhaps it should be less impenetrable so they could run. The Nazis would have dogs with them—now or later—they always brought in the dogs.