The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Read online

  He couldn’t think about the boy. Or the girl. There were no children now. “They died in the Bialystok ghetto,” he muttered, rehearsing.

  The engine sputtered. The gas was gone. It was going to be here. “Get off.”

  She leapt from the machine and he managed to ride it into a ditch. Holding the throttle open, he walked the machine into the brush and let it drop. As the engine cut off with a last jagged cough, the silence of the forest was around them. The Nazis’ machines were a distant hum. He stood and couldn’t move.

  “Quick!” She grabbed his hand and pulled him through the brush.

  He knew that if he put his hand on her chest he would feel her heart nearly pushing through the bone. They ran.

  He knew she had held the dogs in her mind all along. He took her hand, but the thought of the children came to him. He sobbed and staggered.

  “Not now.” She led the way, moving as fast as possible through brush until they were deep enough so the trees around them had been standing for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. These giants were too tall and leafy in summer to allow much to grow under them.

  They trotted steadily through the trees, stumbling occasionally when the moon was hidden behind the clouds. He ran into low branches and ignored the whip against his skin. Once he saw her face looking back at him, and she had blood oozing from a cut over her eye. She did not cry out ever, and he was glad. He had no comfort to offer her.

  They came to a creek. He threw himself down to drink, and took water into his mouth. I have to drink, he thought, but the water gushed out from between his lips. He couldn’t swallow.

  She drank deeply, great gulping mouthfuls. Then she pulled off her boots and the socks layered under them. She had lovely, strong feet.

  “We’ll walk in the creek. It’ll throw the dogs off.”

  He sat and watched her feet, white against the black moss on the bank.

  She wished she could hold him, but there wasn’t time. She had to break through his shock. Leaning forward, she punched him in the chest to make him move.

  They waded for a long time. She kept looking for a place to leave the creek. Her feet were numb from the cold water, and it didn’t hurt as much when she slipped and hit her toes.

  Then she saw the long slope of stone. She nodded toward it, and hoped he understood. He said nothing, so she grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the shelf of rock. It hung over the water, and she wasn’t able to push him up.

  Bending double she braced her hands against the rocks on the creek bottom. Her face was close to the running water. “Step up,” she ordered.

  She thought he would say he was too heavy, but he did as she ordered. His weight, all bone and stringy muscle, made her gasp as she tried to lock her knees and keep her back high.

  Then he was up. She stretched out her arms, and he pulled her onto the rock overhang. Her bones struck against it as if there was no flesh, no shirt and pants and coat protecting her.

  “Put on your shoes,” she whispered. The leather might have less scent than bare feet.

  They walked, leaping from stone to stone until it was inevitable. They were walking again on the leaves of the forest. She looked up. The smell of snow was sharp in the air, the coldness making the red warmth of her lungs ache.

  “It’s going to snow.”

  He didn’t answer, but she was becoming more confident. It might be possible. The dogs would have trouble tracking through snow.

  “Why would they bother coming back tomorrow?” he asked. “We’re only two people.” He couldn’t help going on with his ideas. “Why did they bother tracking down Mr. Samuels, who was nearly dead and hiding in the sewage tank? Why did they shoot the boy who sold saccharine candy on the corner of Lipsky Street? Why did they beat my mother and father and brother to death? Why’ve they done any of it?”

  She felt the rage coming up in her body. Why had they lifted her baby and smashed his head against the terrace wall? She didn’t say this aloud. She had told him about her family, her husband dead during the first days of the invasion, but not about the baby. She would have told him, but she couldn’t make her mouth say the child’s name.

  “Fuck why.” He had to stop talking.

  They moved onward. He hoped they weren’t going in a circle, and when they came to another creek, he worried that they had doubled back on themselves.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t think it’s the same one.”

  He had never been in the forest at night.

  “Did you walk in the forests—before?”

  She smiled. “Not this far east. This forest has never been logged. Never. I wandered in the smaller forests in the west.”

  She had told him about it. The big house. The servants. The fields of grain moving like an ocean around the house. Lying in the fields in summer with the straw smell of grain around her. Looking up into the sky and watching the wind move the heavy heads of the wheat, bending them until she would pull one off and chew it. And going by cart with the peasants to watch the logging. The trees falling with shrieks as real as human screams.

  It would have been wonderful to sit down and think for an hour about the past, but there was no way to think about the good parts without having her mind drift to the terrible things.

  “We have to rest,” he said.

  “No. We’ll keep moving until dawn and then sleep. We can’t move safely by daylight.”

  So they kept walking, breaking into a stumbling jog when the brush was thin. They had to rest more often than she liked. They were too starved to move steadily.

  He felt the air grow even colder and the snow began to sift down on their heads. Large flakes. She smiled at him, and he was almost able to smile back at her. The silence was total and unnerving.

  And then it was dawn. The light went from black darkness to gray like velvet against his eyes and faded to silver with no touch of pink. It was snowing hard now, and soon they would stop and try to find a place to sleep.

  She was almost happy. No sound of dogs all night. They might not find the motorcycle in the brush until the next day. If they waited too long, the machine would be covered by snow.

  They both heard the click of the pistol being cocked before they saw the man. He was ahead of them and had stepped out from behind a tree. He had a pistol in his hand and a rifle strapped to his back.

  She heard her husband catch his breath in a sob, and turned to see his face. His features were twisted and frozen in a grimace of pain. She took his hand and squeezed it.

  “City Jews!” The man with the pistol spit on the ground as he said it. “Useless, fucking, city Jews.”

  “I grew up in the country—” she began.

  “Do you have a gun? Do you have bullets? Do you have a tank that you just happened to capture?”

  The husband and wife stood silent.

  “No winter clothes. No guns.”

  “We waded in the water.” She was getting angry. “They can’t follow us.”

  “At least there aren’t any brats. I wouldn’t be talking now if there had been brats.” The man spat again.

  “The children are dead,” the husband said.

  “Thank God. You think I should help you? You’re walking corpses.”

  “We’re not dead.” Her body held too much cold and pain to be dead.

  “The Nazis don’t have to kill you now. Winter is the Nazi in this forest. If I let you go, you’ll lead them right to us.”

  The woman was filled with rage again. He was right. They had no guns. But he had a gun.

  The man with the pistol leaned against a tree and pulled from his coat pocket a cigarette, which he smelled delicately and then placed between his lips and lit. The smell of tobacco was like food entering her body. Then he walked to her, put the gun against her head, felt her breasts and hips and ran his hands in her coat pockets and between her legs. The husband moved to protect her, but the woman knew it was nothing. The man didn’t touch her with any interest.

&n
bsp; Then he ran his hands over her husband with the same intent and smiled. “Not even a carving knife. And I should just leave you? Let you walk on? What happens when they catch you? When they say to you, ‘We won’t kill you if you show us where you saw the partisan. Lead us to the spot and you can live.’”

  “I wouldn’t tell. Never.”

  “What about him?” He looked at her husband, and she knew it was true. Her husband would not watch her being killed and maimed just to save this man with a pistol.

  “He wouldn’t tell,” she lied.

  He drew on the cigarette again and then lightly ground out the glowing tip against the tree. He put the unfinished cigarette in a leather bag, tenderly, like a woman places her pearls in a silk case, and shook his head.

  “We’ll see what the others say. But don’t get hopeful. You’re useless.”

  They walked in front of him, going as he ordered. With the sun a silver ball behind the clouds, she could get her bearings enough to tell that they were circling. We nearly walked over them, she thought, and shivered. It would have been death to surprise these people.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, and then she saw it in front of her. Her eyes could barely differentiate the structures from the forest floor. Bark roofs covering holes dug in the dirt. Burrows. Like the holes where foxes hide when the hounds chase them.

  The other men were around them now. She counted six, seven.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “What does it matter?” A man moved close to her, and she knew from his scarred forehead and cheeks that the Nazis had branded him with a hot iron as a Russian prisoner of war. His Polish was almost unaccented.

  “The NSZ, the AK, the AL, the Greens—who the hell cares? The Nazis wouldn’t care. We could be Jews like you.”

  “Then help us,” her husband said. “In God’s name.”

  “God packed up and left Poland in 1939.”

  There was another man lying on the ground beyond the roofs of the dens. He was tied and moved only his eyes. His face was swollen as if he had been beaten, but she didn’t see that at first. It was the uniform that held her eyes. It was black and silver—the colors of Hell—although she didn’t know if she believed in Hell. But the Christians did, and there were times when she hoped they were right. She could stand everything if only they were right about Hell.

  She waited for an opportunity while the Russian talked to her husband.

  “They died in the ghetto. Typhoid. Last winter. We have no children. None. We—”

  She snatched the pistol from the hand of the man who had caught them and bolted toward the Nazi who lay on the ground. She didn’t hear the shouts. She put the gun to the head of the soldier and looked back at the men.

  “He’s a Nazi?”

  “Yes. We caught him raping a girl in the woods yesterday.” The Russian smiled.

  She didn’t hear anything he said after the word yes. The explosion of the gun filled her ears and she knew joy. One gone. And she had done it. She hadn’t fired a gun since before the war, and she’d never fired at a man.

  They were all screaming at her, and she stood holding the gun limply by her side. She was smiling. Her body was warm all over and bile rose into her mouth. She coughed and spit.

  Murder is warm and it’s bitter, she thought. She had hunted deer with her father, but she’d never killed a human before.

  “Crazy bitch!”

  “Now what?”

  Her husband was crying.

  The Russian looked at the woman and smiled. “Bury the bastard. Deep. Strip him. She can have the coat and pants. She earned them. We’ve got his gun and his cigarettes. That was all he was good for.”

  “And then?”

  The Russian looked at the woman and the crying man. “She can stay if she can keep up.”

  “A woman can’t keep up.”

  “This one will. She could be useful. People don’t suspect a woman. They feel sorry for her, or want to fuck her. She can stay but not the man.”

  She walked to the Russian and put the gun against his gut. She leaned into the gun so he would feel it.

  “Both of us.”

  He looked into her eyes. “I’d call you She Wolf, but I don’t like wolves.”

  She stood with the gun pushing into him. He saw in her eyes that she would never be charmed by anything he could say. He sighed.

  “You have to be sensible. He’s too weak.”

  She thought about this, and no one moved. Then her husband spoke.

  “I have a motorcycle. It has no gas, but it runs well.”

  They stared at him, and he went on more quickly. “I’m an engineer. I can fix anything. Make anything run. You’ll need me.”

  “We don’t have machines,” the Russian said.

  Her husband smiled for the first time since they had gotten on the motorcycle. “One hundred thousand Germans surrendered at Stalingrad. When the Russians come they’ll have trucks, tanks. We’ll get machines later, and I’ll make them run.”

  “You’re an optimist. I like that. Optimism can keep you warm.”

  “Or get you killed,” murmured one of the other men.

  “It’ll have to be Russian trucks. Hitler didn’t send oil for our winter. All the German gears have frozen solid.” The Russian smiled.

  “Why didn’t they send the right oil for winter?” Her husband was interested. It was a simple mechanic’s problem.

  “They thought they’d be in Moscow by October of 1941. They figured that by first snow, the Russians would be supplying their oil. They didn’t know the Russians.”

  The men laughed, but it wasn’t a long laugh.

  “They should have asked the Poles about the Russians,” said one man, and the laugh was louder this time, but with the same sad edge to it.

  The Russian was not offended. He nodded. “He can stay. He’s the Mechanik.” He gave the word the Polish pronunciation. “We may need him, God willing.”

  She kept the gun in the Russian’s belly for a second so he could see that she would never waver, never, and he understood. She lowered the gun.

  “But do you have guts? She showed us. Now it’s your turn.”

  There was a muttering of approval.

  “Where is this motorcycle?”

  “Back there. In a ditch beside the road. Under some brush.”

  “Then you have to go back and find it. Walk it up the road. Keep walking until you reach the first dirt track turning into the forest. Turn off on the track and walk until we find you.”

  She stared at them. “No.”

  “I’ll get it, darling. Don’t worry.”

  “He needs food. He’ll get lost. He’ll—”

  “You get the motorcycle and bring it back. Then you’re one of us, Mechanik.”

  She watched her husband turn and walk into the trees. He began a staggering lope, trying to move faster than his strength would allow. He was weak because he always gave his food up to his children when she wasn’t watching. She knew he was hurrying to try to find them. She knew it. For a moment she hated those children.

  The Russian was pleased. They would either acquire a motorcycle and a mechanic or the man would be killed. If he was killed, it was a sign that he hadn’t been able to survive and they were right to test him first. Of course, if he was tortured, the man might tell where he had come from—where in the woods he had last seen the partisans. But that would also expose the woman. He wouldn’t want to do that. It could be dealt with. They would move fast. He began to unfasten his pants. “Piss now. Shit if you can.” The men began to unfasten their pants.

  “You too.”

  “You do this next to where you live?” She was scornful. She knew all about hiding excrement. They had hidden their shit for months so the Nazis wouldn’t find them.

  “We don’t sleep here. We just want to leave our stink so if they bring dogs they’ll think they’ve found our camp.”

  “We don’t live this nice
,” said a younger man whose ears stuck out from his head and had reddened with the cold. His round face was very young. “Not nearly this nice.”

  The men laughed. “Listen to Lydka. He’s right.”

  The woman smiled. The boy’s nickname, Lydka, suited him. He moved restlessly, with the springy walk of a young calf.

  She squatted and pulled aside her pants so the piss wouldn’t wet her. The men paid no attention. Her mind went to her husband, alone and running through the woods, back toward the hunters and dogs. There was nothing she could do for him now. She thought of the black and silver of the uniform splattered with red blood. She thought of the dead German, and she was happy for the first time in four years.

  Brother and Sister

  Heavy snow had begun to fall. Gretel and Hansel sat watching Magda’s hut for nearly an hour. Every few minutes they stood and jumped up and down to get warm and knock off the snow.

  “Take a piece of bread. She won’t know.”

  “We can’t make her angry. Wait, Hansel.”

  Another hour went by. The door opened and Magda came out, ignoring the children and walking past them to the woods. She moved slowly, her back bowed with arthritis.

  “We can help.” Hansel moved after her.

  “It won’t do you any good. I can’t help you.” Magda talked without turning. Occasionally she leaned over and picked up a piece of wood. “There’ve been others. I couldn’t take care of them either. Walk a mile toward the sun. There’s a village. I can’t keep you.”

  Hansel dropped Gretel’s hand and began to pick up wood. He filled his arms, grunting with the effort, and Gretel picked up wood until she was breathing hard. They had walked for too long, and Hansel was giving a little moan with each exhalation.

  When they returned to the clearing, Magda went into the hut, and Hansel walked in behind her without knocking or begging. He just walked inside and Gretel followed. They put the wood on top of a pile near the huge stove that filled half the side of the hut.