The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (2 page)

“With the children,” the father shouted.

The boy listened. The Stepmother would get her way. She wasn’t their real mother.

“They’ll bring dogs. The children will slow us. Leave the children, and we’ll all have a chance.”

The father hated her with such a surge of his blood that he almost stopped the motorcycle so he could choke her. Beat her. He clung to the anger as long as he could because it squeezed the truth out, but the feeling seeped away and he concentrated on the road. He needed a curve, a hill, something to block the view so he could put the children down.

“It isn’t deep enough,” he said of the first curve. When he didn’t slow for the third, she gripped his sides again and howled like a dog.

The father braked on the fourth curve and leapt off. He grabbed the girl and wrenched her from the sidecar. The boy staggered when he was set on the road.

“Go,” he whispered. “Go into the woods. Run.”

The woman sat with her head down, but she called out to them. “Hide until the other motorcycles are past. Then find someone. Find a farmer who will feed you.”

The girl shook her head. “They’ll report us. If they don’t, the Nazis will kill them.”

Her stepmother looked back. She had to end it.

“You don’t look Jewish. You’re blond. Your brother—” She stopped and stared behind at the machines coming toward them. What was, was. “Don’t let him take his pants down in front of anyone. They’ll see he’s circumcised. Do you hear me?”

“Our names?” The girl clung to the sidecar.

“Never say them. You don’t have Jewish names anymore.”

“Who are we?” The boy smiled. It was interesting. He wouldn’t be himself.

“Any name. Any name that’s—” the stepmother paused and she couldn’t think of Polish names. Her mind was blank. She knew it was hunger. Six hundred calories a day for two years—on the good days, on the days when there was something left to sell. Sometimes she went blank.

The boy took his sister’s hand and moved toward the woods. “Who are we?” he called back.

The Stepmother moaned and slapped her face viciously. The man got on the motorcycle and they moved off slowly so the wheels wouldn’t catch in the ruts.

Slamming her fist against her head, their Stepmother shook loose an old memory.

“Hansel and Gretel,” she screamed over her shoulder at the children who were now almost hidden in the trees. “You are Hansel and Gretel. Remember.”

The man couldn’t look back. He gunned the engine and moved away from that place. The two adults had become the lure that would lead the hunters away from the children. The gas would last for another ten miles. Their motorcycle could stay ahead with the weight of the children gone. The Nazis mustn’t know that anyone had been left behind.

Hansel and Gretel

T
he children stood near the trees and looked after their father and stepmother until the three motorcycles following droned louder.

“Quick.” The girl helped her brother climb over a log and push through the piles of crackling leaves.

They moved back into the darkness between the trees. The boy stared up and saw only a few stars. Clouds obscured the moon, and as the two children staggered through the deep layers of leaves, stiff-legged from being folded into the sidecar, they heard an owl call nearly over their heads. The boy almost cried out, but remembered the need to be silent, and bit his lip so hard it left a half-moon line of red when he unfastened his teeth.

“Lie down.” His sister pushed him into the leaves and lay beside him.

Their voices would not have been heard over the roar of the motorcycles that came slowly but steadily down the rutted road. One in front. Two behind in perfect formation. Precision even at midnight on a dirt road while chasing subhumans in eastern Poland.

The boy lifted his head above the leaves and watched. He stared admiringly at the clean uniforms, the smooth metal bowl of helmet. The three motorcycles swept past, and the child marked down in his mind the way the Nazis sat perfectly straight and weren’t afraid of being seen.

The noise of the engines grew fainter until there was complete silence. The girl felt panic rising. The silence was unlike the constant moaning and screams in the ghetto. Too many people in such little space. Always someone dying or losing their last rag of dignity and howling for food or fighting or weeping. It had never been silent for so much as a second.

She felt the tears run down her cheeks, and her brother watched her with interest.

“You’re crying?”

“Everyone’s gone.”

“They didn’t see us. I was quiet.”

She nodded. “You were good—” She paused. The new name. It took a moment. “Hansel.”

“What’s your name?”

“Gretel.”

“Maybe I’m Gretel.”

“Gretel is a girl’s name.”

“All right. I’m Hansel.” He smiled. He was not himself anymore. He was not the little Jew who hid in the grease pit. He wondered if he could change his stomach to a stomach full of food. He tried to imagine it but couldn’t.

“We can’t lie here. They could come back. They could have dogs.”

“Wait a minute, Gretel.”

She didn’t flinch when she heard her new name, but her lips quivered for a second. She felt herself wanting to relax so she could cry again, but there wasn’t time. “Come on.”

He followed her back into deeper darkness, walking with one bony fist smaller than a windfall apple pushed deep into his gut to stop the pain. The brush was thinning, and the enormous height of the trees rose over their heads in a canopy which allowed only moss and low plants to grow underneath.

They had gone only a few steps when he stopped, holding her back like an anchor. She turned and waited. She knew his nature. It was impossible to move him until he was ready.

He was making a great decision. He had some in his pocket, but it would mean breaking the most sacred law. You never touched the last piece of bread until everything had been done. The swallowing of spit. The fist in the gut. Forcing yourself to feel the stomach pain as if it belonged to someone else standing beside you. Father had taught him how to do these things.

Only when the pain gave up could you touch the last piece of bread. Gretel said it was the law. You had to eat it slowly, not gobble it. It was how they did it. He didn’t know why.

He took the piece of bread out and measured it with his eyes. His father had stolen it from a pile that had been forgotten in the burning and killing. Like all the ghetto bread, there was a dark mark where the metal rods that pressed into the bread while it baked left lines. There had to be lines on the bread so it could be divided evenly.

Both children leaned toward the bread until their noses almost touched the hard lump. They stared at it with the gaze of connoisseurs. It was slightly larger than the piece that Hansel usually managed to save.

He looked at Gretel appraisingly. She might forbid it, but it was his right. No one could take it from you. Even if they were sick or starving or hungrier than you. The Stepmother had taught them. Your bread was your bread.

He pinched off a tiny piece and deliberately let his fingers open so the bread fell to the leaves under their feet.

Gretel’s eyes widened. The hunger tore through her, and her hand twitched but she did not grab the bread from Hansel. He picked off another piece and threw it back toward the road.

“Why?” Her mouth grew wetter as she thought of going back, finding the breadcrumb, holding it in her mouth.

“If we leave bread, they can find us. Later.” He began walking into the dark and every ten steps he dropped another crumb.

“The leaves will cover it up.”

“Stepmother can find a crumb on the street, in the middle of bodies thrown out in the morning. She’ll smell it.”

Gretel nodded. The Stepmother always found crumbs, pressed them into a flat pancake with water, and divided it meticulously among the four of them. It was true.

“She’ll find the bread.”

Gretel couldn’t really believe it. It would be too hard to find in the leaves. The Stepmother was used to concrete pavement where crumbs lay naked. But the law was the law. It was his bread. No one else could eat it, and if he chose to waste it, she guessed it was his right, although no person had ever done that as long as she could remember.

There were memories. Far back. Food on a table. A hand pulling off a piece of bread carelessly, without measuring. Candles. The bread—challah—the word stuck in her mind. She savored the sound—it reminded her of someone—not her mother—

A man. White hair and beard. She could shut her eyes and see him smiling down at her, and he was saying something—asking her to do something.

The memory was gone. It bothered her. She had lost so many memories during the ghetto.

Forcing her mind, she saw the curtains again and felt the warmth of summer air moving the cloth like mist over the window. Then she quite deliberately shut the door in her mind. It wasn’t good to think of things that were too far off, and now it was the first day of November. Warmth was too far in the future.

She turned and plunged past the trunks of trees that became larger as the children moved deeper. Her hair rose on the back of her neck. They were bigger than any trees she had ever seen. They weren’t like the spindly, friendly, little trees in the gardens by the Bialy Lake in the city. Those were trees that men had planted, little umbrellas of trees, in pleasing patterns following the paths.

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.