The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Read online

  “The wrong horses, the wrong oil, the trains full of Jews they have to kill. No winter clothes. No oil for your tanks. No trains full of food. No trains full of oil. Just Jews. Jews. Jews. Jews. Jews, and your soldiers dying and dying.”

  He would have done a little dance, the words pleased him so much, but he had to concentrate on keeping the sun to his right as it began to fall in the sky. The road was south.

  He had walked for most of the day and knew he must be close. Hearing a shout, he fell to the ground and waited. There was another shout, and it was in German, so he knew it was the killers.

  “No dogs. Please. No dogs,” he whispered. He crawled slowly toward the road bisecting the trees.

  “Let’s go,” the voice shouted in German. “He’s freezing his ass off back there.”

  It wasn’t the first time the Mechanik was glad that he had learned German. Knowing German let you know when to speak and when to be silent and when to grovel in the dirt. Those who hadn’t understood German hadn’t jumped quickly enough, and died. He watched as two soldiers rode slowly back down the road on their motorcycles. Beyond them was an officer on another cycle.

  Around four bends in the rutted road he caught up with them. The three motorcycles were clustered in the road. The Mechanik did not stop to see if his motorcycle was in the ditch near them. He moved more deeply into the forest and kept going alongside the road.

  The children must be hiding nearby. Waiting for him.

  He finally dared to draw closer to the road. He knew that he couldn’t go much farther. His legs trembled, and without food he could never walk for another day.

  “If I sleep, I die,” he muttered. “If I walk many more hours with no food, I die. If they catch me, I die. If they don’t catch me, I die. If I go back with no motorcycle, I die. If I steal a motorcycle from the Germans, I die.”

  He felt hysterical laughter rising up in his empty gut and fought it down. He couldn’t even call to the children. They might be hiding two hundred feet away in the brush, but he couldn’t call to them or the Germans would hear.

  First he should make sure that the children were not dead. If a German had found them, he would have dragged them back to the officer. Then the beating to see if the children knew where the adults had gone. Then the shots to the head. The bodies would be on the road.

  He walked through the trees and brush and began to move down the edge of the road, away from the Germans. He could move faster on the frozen mud.

  The Germans wouldn’t have bothered hiding the murdered children. They would have let the bodies fall with no thought of concealing the killings. Dead children were a good lesson for any Poles who came down the road. Little corpses kept the Poles docile until their turn came.

  There were no bodies on the road, but he kept looking until he finally gave up and began walking back toward the Germans. He still stared ahead into every ditch looking for the boy’s small form. The girl was older. They might have kept her for a while.

  His face twitched at the thought. Not rape though. Not with an officer present. The soldiers would be shot on the spot if they had sex with a Jew. They probably wouldn’t dare rape the girl with an officer leading the search, but the officer might rape her. He could send the soldiers off on the hunt and rape the girl before he killed her. The Mechanik’s mind moved logically over these facts as he walked.

  The voices shouted in German up ahead, and he moved into the trees. His whole body was hot and tense, and he hadn’t scratched his lice since going into the forest the day before. It was amazing. It was as if the lice knew they had better not distract him or their host would die and be useless to them. Or his body didn’t feel the crawling. That was a bad thing. It meant that death was standing next to you, waiting to step into your shoes.

  The Mechanik smelled the cigarette before he saw the man. Twenty feet away the German soldier was smoking and holding a submachine gun in his hand. Not a German gun. It was a pepecha, the Russian PPD.

  The Mechanik smiled. The killers were using any gun they could get now. Their own supplies were dwindling. They even had to use the guns of the despised subhumans. He stepped behind a tree and waited for the soldier to be called, to be summoned back to the road.

  The soldier smoked and then there was a sound in the trees beyond them, the distinct crack of a twig, sharp and brief, then silence. The soldier threw down his cigarette and moved forward in a crouch. He held the pepecha in front and moved slowly.

  The Mechanik’s breath was fast in his throat. The children. One of them had stepped on a branch or rolled over on it. They were lying there in the leaves. Her blond hair like a scarf on the mud. His tiny face, so thin now, turned up curiously, looking for—

  The ground was covered with wet snow, and the leaves were soggy. The Mechanik moved silently and not a leaf rustled. His feet were sinking in the damp soil and snow with no sound. An owl called nearby and the soldier jumped but did not turn. He stared into the forest, looking, waiting to kill again.

  The German soldier suddenly sighed. It almost stopped the Mechanik. It was such a human thing, this soft, sad exhalation of air. The sound of a tired and homesick man who might be a normal man, sighing in his loneliness.

  The Mechanik was so close he could smell the soap that the German had bathed with—the smell of oil from stolen Polish sausages and a whiff of the vodka he drank with his lunch to keep off the damp and cold.

  A dark shadow, all bone and sinew, his clothes flapping around him as he leapt, the Mechanik jumped on the back of the German, closing his hands on the man’s throat.

  The soldier fell forward, taken by surprise and thrown off balance, and the hands of the Mechanik closed on his windpipe in a vise.

  There was no choice. The Mechanik could only hold on, closing off any shout or cry of alarm with his hands, using the bony length of his body to hold down the man. Pressing in with his fingers as the soldier flopped under him, and thrashed, rose on all fours like a horse under the weight of the Mechanik until he grew dizzy and fell limply, convulsing a last time and lying still.

  The Mechanik was afraid to loosen his hold, and he lay on top of the German with his hands clenched on the well-shaved throat until he thought he could go to sleep lying there.

  His mind kept telling him that it was over, and finally he released his fingers. They were stiff from the effort, and he groaned. There wasn’t time. The others would come looking for the soldier. The children.

  “Children? Children?” he whispered.

  They were too frightened to come out. They knew better than to come to someone who called. They were smart children. Jewish names would never draw them out.

  Remembering their stepmother’s idea, he called again.

  “Hansel? Gretel?”

  But there was nothing. Leaves and brush and more trees stretching endlessly. He had to get away from the dead soldier.

  “It won’t help them if I get killed,” he whispered. “If I’m caught they might torture me. I might tell.”

  His mind rationalized as he stood staring back toward where the road was. He had to run, but he had to take what he could first. He moved back to the body of the soldier and jerked and dragged at the coat of the German until he got it off. The pants were good too. Woolen and thick. And the boots made him smile. Real boots. No holes at all. Well polished. He undressed the soldier and dragged the pants on, slipped into the coat which was too large and still held the warmth of the German’s body, and after a second of hesitation, took the boots in one hand and the gun in the other.

  He was breathing hard. There would be no motorcycle. He’d never be able to take it now. But he could take the gun. A pepecha and the cartridge belt was a prize. And the boots. Good boots saved your life in the winter.

  The German lay on his back, legs naked, tongue stuck out between engorged lips, face darkening. The Mechanik lay down the gun and boots and grabbed the man by the shoulders.

  “Help me, God,” he whispered, and then he was angry. He had
never believed in the God his father had talked of night and day. He had never believed, and there had been nothing since 1939 to make him believe.

  The body was heavy, but he dragged it behind a tree and rolled it into a depression in the earth. Moving as quickly as he could, the Mechanik threw small pieces of dead wood onto the body and kicked leaves over the white skin of the man’s legs. He wasn’t covered well, but it might give the Mechanik an hour or two.

  Collecting the gun and the boots, the cartridge belt over his chest, he picked up the hard leather pack the soldier had dropped to the ground and moved off through the woods. He had to find his wife.

  The pack had some weight. He opened it, and the smell hit his face when the top flipped back. He kept moving as he turned over the contents.

  Sausage—a good-size piece—and bread, and something that looked like a piece of beef wrapped up, cheese. A flask. A small canteen. And most miraculous of all, an apple.

  He took the bread out and ate it slowly as he walked.

  “I’ll keep the rest for her,” he whispered.

  He finished the bread and then began tearing at the sausage with his teeth.

  “I’ll save the apple and the cheese for later.” He crammed the food into his mouth. He was eating too fast, and he knew it. It could make him sick.

  His need to live was like a murderer rising up in him, killing his good intentions. The apple he ate, core and all. Then the beef. Then the cheese. There was no sound from behind him. They weren’t looking for the soldier yet.

  He unscrewed the flask and poured the vodka down his throat, hardly tasting it. He gulped it all and then threw the flask into the leaves. The partisans might not like it that he hadn’t shared the vodka.

  “If I die, it doesn’t do my wife any good.” He felt the grease of the meat begin to travel through his gut. He knew it would give him the runs.

  He walked on. The gun and ammunition would be enough booty for the partisans to let him live. If not, he would kill the Russian and the others and take his wife and go.

  He walked a little faster now. The vodka had stopped his legs from shaking. If only there had been coffee. He didn’t know if the Germans still had real coffee. A cup of hot coffee would have given him the strength to walk for a week.

  And maybe the children were moving in the same direction. Their bodies were not lying in the road. They were hiding. It was cold, but the girl was smart. She’d find a farm or a village. She’d find a way to get food.

  “I never called out their names,” he said aloud. “I never did.” And that seemed like good luck to him. If you did not name a thing, then it did not exist. There were no Jewish children for the murderers to find in these woods.

  He told himself this as he moved into the forest, deeper and deeper, farther from the road and the dead man. He kept saying it over and over as he walked and jogged onward, and only his eyes betrayed him and leaked bitter water onto his face as he fled.

  The Village Piaski

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hansel Cegielski.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Germany. Working on a farm.” Hansel picked up a stone and threw it at a rook who watched them from a fence post.

  “Pay attention.” Magda moved steadily down the narrow road. It was frozen hard so the mud didn’t catch her feet like glue.

  “Our father was killed in September of 1939. He wasn’t a soldier. He was hit by a truck when he was walking on a road pushing a wheel-barrow.” Gretel spoke earnestly as she shifted to her other hand the basket that held their First Communion pictures and the false papers that said she and Hansel had been born in Warsaw and were members of the Karaites.

  “Why did they circumcise you, Hansel?” Magda stopped to catch her breath. She stared into the gray forest and shivered. Perhaps she shouldn’t take the children to the village.

  “Because the Karaites believe that boys should be cut.”

  “And when they tease you about it?”

  “Jesus was cut too. So why shouldn’t a Christian be the same?”

  “You won’t say that unless they’re pushing you hard. Who told you that about Jesus?”

  “The priest of the Karaites. They said it was true. I’m just like Jesus.” He wasn’t paying real attention. His mind was on the rooks that sat waiting for him to scare them off.

  Magda walked on. The girl was wary. There’d be no problem with her, but the boy was impulsive and too young. He had been quiet when the children came to her three weeks ago. Now Hansel jumped and ran and talked all day.

  It’s the food, Magda thought. Kasha and potatoes and turnips and the occasional bit of salt pork, dried mushrooms, and berries and herb tea. Tenaciously fastened on life, his body recovered. If only she had a little farm, a few pigs. Then she could do without the ration cards.

  Magda groaned as the cold crept up her legs and her hips began to ache. There was nothing for it. A guest in the house was God in the house. The old folk saying came to her.

  “Will we have to talk to the Germans, Magda?” Gretel fingered the plait of hair which hung down over her shoulder. Magda had braided it with her swollen fingers and tied it with string.

  “I can talk to them. I talked to them a lot. Look, Magda.” Hansel stopped walking and drew himself rigidly to attention. He clicked his heels and threw his arm out. “Heil Hitler!” he screamed. He held the pose for a moment and then relaxed and grinned at Magda. “Sometimes we got bread when we saluted.”

  “They won’t give you bread in the village if you do that. Too many mouths to feed. And if you act like a little Nazi, the village brats will beat you up.”

  “They won’t beat me up. I can fight. And I can run.” He ran down the road, around a curve and was gone. He slipped on the ice only once and with an acrobatic leap corrected his balance.

  Magda sighed.

  “He’ll be all right, Magda. I’ll watch him.”

  “He’s too young. He’ll kill us all.” Magda walked on, but it had become serious now. Forcing her brother to behave like the Christian he had always pretended to be had been amusing, but it wasn’t amusing anymore. It seemed an act of stupidity now. Trying to save two Jews.

  Like dancing with death, but maybe that was appropriate at her age. And her grandmother would have helped the children. The Grandmother would have spit on the ground and said, “Fuck the Germans. They don’t get their way every time.”

  Magda smiled at the thought. And the boy was almost like one of the Rom. How could she throw him away?

  Gretel didn’t ask if Magda was afraid. Everyone was afraid when they had to speak to the Germans. And if they didn’t speak to them, there would be no ration cards. Magda couldn’t feed them all winter on her card alone.

  “Hansel? Come back here.” Magda needed to collect the boy. She needed to walk into the village quietly, with no wild jumping and running and calling of attention. Two new children would be bad enough. Two new mouths to eat up what the Germans had portioned out for the village. No one would be happy to see them.

  Hansel trotted back, trying to slide on the icy road and slipping, falling, getting up with a grin, his cheeks red from the cold and the running. “I’m coming, Magda.”

  The boy took the old woman’s hand firmly and swung it as they walked on. She didn’t pull away, and the warmth of his hand gradually warmed her own.

  They smelled the village before they got there. It was the smell of smoke from wood fires, and mud churned up by feet and hooves and the hard round wheels of the carts.

  “It’s not the same,” Magda murmured.

  “What’s not the same?” Gretel smoothed her coat gently. It was a safe coat. There was no darker patch on her chest where a yellow star had been sewn and then torn off. This coat had been stolen in Bialystok by—she almost stumbled on a rut in the road. Stolen by someone. She did not think his name. “What’s not the same?” she asked again.

  “When you live in the forest, you forget what people smell
like when they live all together on one piece of mud. But it used to be—” She hesitated, thinking. “It used to be better. I would walk into the village and almost decide to live here.”

  “Why?” Hansel still held her hand, but he skipped and jumped occasionally and she felt his energy springing out as she walked more slowly.

  “Food cooking. Bread baking. Hunter’s stew and meat roasting. Pancakes sizzling in oil, and in the summer the smell of melons and peaches hung over the fields around the village like perfume. My God! What a lot we ate then!”

  “What do you miss the most, Magda?” Gretel knew what she missed. Her mouth watered delicately as she remembered it.

  “Good Polish soup. Full of everything the earth gives us. So thick you stick a spoon in it and it can’t fall over. Soup with a little beer mixed in, and a glass of strong wine beside it.”

  “I miss oranges.” Gretel could hardly say the word. Water filled her mouth at the memory of the sweetness.

  “That’s for city folk. Maybe at Christmas they’d bring a basket of them out here.”

  “I don’t think oranges are all that good.” Hansel pulled away from Magda and picked up a stone. He threw it, and it went wild and hit a tree limb with a sharp click. He blew on his fingers to warm them.

  “You never had an orange. You were too little when we had them. Babies don’t eat oranges.” Gretel was sure of it.

  “You never had oranges either.” He ran behind Gretel and jerked her braid.

  “I ate an orange every day.” Gretel stopped. The memory was clear. He had white hair, and he came every morning. He crept in very quietly and gave Gretel an orange and he smelled of tobacco and he smiled as he held the waxy orange fruit out to her. He said that she would have an orange every morning of her life. He had been wrong. She had called him Zayde, a Yiddish word, even though Father frowned. Her Zayde. Grandfather.

  “Gretel?” Magda stared at the girl.

  Gretel opened her eyes. It had been so clear. The warm room with the table. His coming in and handing her the orange.

  “Daydreamer, daydreamer,” Hansel chanted. He leaped from side to side on the road, taking twenty steps for Magda’s one.