The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (29 page)

Magda was panting. Her heart fibrillated in her chest.

“Nelka has been useful to the Brown Sister, I believe. She spends time helping Sister Rosa? Sister Rosa is concerned for the baby?”

“The baby stays with Sister Rosa.”

“Of course”—Major Frankel blew the smoke out with a harsh sigh—“none of us want more contact with these Polish subhumans than we have to have for the sake of the war.”

“Of course.”

“Not only because of the illegality of contact, but because it would be disgusting.” Major Frankel looked at Gretel. She did look like his sister around the eyes and in the way she smiled. He turned his good eye and looked the SS man in the face. “I wonder if it’s wise to upset Nelka. Nelka is one of the few women in the village presentable enough to serve Sister Rosa, and killing this girl might drive the peasants into the forest.”

Magda thought she would faint if the rattle of German didn’t stop.

The Oberführer looked out the window as if he barely heard. He couldn’t tell if the man knew of the transfusions or if he was really concerned about Sister Rosa having a proper servant. The Major probably knew nothing, but taking blood from a Pole could be used against an SS officer in some quarters. And there was that information that Jedrik had hinted at last night. Jedrik’s information might complicate things.

“If she’s useful, she can live. The children are not in need of medical treatment. We’ll leave them in the village.” The Oberführer handed Magda two white cards.

They went outside, and Magda didn’t look at the other parents. Telek said that all the children who might have been chosen had been made imperfect. Except for Nelka’s baby, and it was so small. How would they keep it alive all the way to Germany?

“Go home, Magda.” Nelka tied Magda’s scarf firmly under the old woman’s chin.

“He was going to kill her—then the Major talked—” Magda whispered so Hansel couldn’t hear, but he clung to her side and heard the words. He breathed heavily through his mouth, a hoarse sound in the cold air. “I’ll stay until they look at the baby.” Magda nodded, but her lips trembled.

“Go.” Nelka gave Magda a light push, and some hardness in the girl’s face made Magda turn and go. Nelka didn’t need the presence of a great-aunt called a witch by half the village or kinship with a mad child and a circumcised boy.

They walked as fast as Magda could go. The road was growing soft with the slush that replaced the icy snow of January. Thank you, Mary, she thought, for letting them stay with me. Magda stopped walking and closed her eyes, praying a last time. Sweet Mary, she prayed silently, don’t let them take Nelka’s baby away. Let God come to earth if he has to and kill the SS man.

Hansel had stopped skipping and was watching Magda. “Are there any Jews left in any of the villages, Magda?” His neck itched. He knew it was the lice. He hadn’t had a bath for weeks.

“The Germans have eaten the Gypsies of Poland for breakfast, child, and then they ate the Jews for lunch, but soon it will be supper.”

“What will they eat then?”

“All the rest of the Poles, my boy.”

Hansel ran toward the hut. “Magda, can I put a piece of bread on the boards for the birds?”

“No, child. The bread is for us now.”

“You said you’d always give the birds bread. You’d rather be hungry than scared.”

“I was foolish. Now I’m wiser.”

They went in the hut and closed the door. The sleet began again and fell straight down like a curtain, closing off the hut from the forest with strings of gray.

“Not a single child in the village worth saving so far. All of them ugly and round-faced or mutilated by carelessness. It’s odd that the children all had accidents. Could they have known?”

Forgetting that he never spoke unless spoken to, forgetting that being involved in this line of thinking could get him killed, forgetting all the survival skills he had learned in the jails of Warsaw and then used when he was selected by the Nazis for work—forgetting everything, Wiktor spoke.

“It’s often like this at the end of winter. There are more accidents when it’s cold.”

Wiktor stared down at the desk and cursed himself silently. All his creeping and crawling and his silences and his work. He had taken a chance on throwing it all away for peasants in a mud village who weren’t even his kin. But they were Poles, and Wiktor was still a Pole. The Nazis couldn’t change that. Wiktor looked up, but the Oberführer turned away when Nelka knocked.

“Put the basket down.”

They forgot Wiktor, and he sat feeling the sweat slide like oil down his spine.

Unwrapping the baby on the desk, Sister Rosa displayed its legs and arms, its smooth stomach and the perfect bobble of its uncircumcised penis. As the Oberführer watched, the penis lifted slightly and a strong stream of urine jetted up.

“A sign of health,” Sister Rosa said firmly. “And look at the limbs. The straightness. The eyes are blue, I can testify to that, and the hair is the palest blond. See the ears? They lie flat the way the ears of an Aryan should. You agree that he should receive the red card?”

The Oberführer sighed. “There is another matter. I will question the mother, Sister Rosa.”

“Of course, Oberführer.”

The Oberführer saw Sister Rosa’s slyness, and rage began to make his neck feel hot. The bitch. Rosa had been present when Jedrik had blurted out the village gossip. So now it had to be brought out. If he didn’t question Nelka, Sister Rosa would be suspicious. She might even report him when they got back to Berlin.

“Nelka, I was told that you have a heritage not as pure as I assumed.”

Jedrik must have told, Nelka thought. No one in the village bears me bad will, but Jedrik will do anything for a sack of potatoes and some salt.

“Perhaps you have an ancestor who was a Gypsy? Is this true?”

“I don’t understand.” Nelka stared at the baby.

“If you are of pure Polish blood, and if your husband was untainted by Jew or Gypsy blood, this baby is perfect for assimilation into the German people. He will be taken to Germany to live as a free man in the new world that we are building. If he is part Gypsy, then we are merciful, of course. You and the child would be sent to a camp until you can be relocated.”

She had heard of the camps. No one returned from the camps.

“But if the baby is sent to Germany. I can go with it?”

“That is unfortunately impossible.”

If she said that her blood was part Gypsy, she could stay with the baby. They would be in a camp, but they might live. The Russians were close. If they could live just a month—two months.

“In Germany—” She stopped. There was hardly any air in the room.

“Your child would become a true German. You should be proud.” Sister Rosa smiled.

Nelka thought. She could go to the camps. They could live there until the Russians came and freed them. She opened her mouth to say that she had Gypsy blood in her veins when she remembered. Father Piotr was her grandfather. Magda was her great-aunt. The trains. The cold, damp spring in a camp. Neither could survive it. If she admitted her Gypsy blood, it followed that Magda and Piotr had Gypsy blood, and Hansel and Gretel, her cousins.

“Death,” she whispered. Nelka bent her head. She would have to be separated from the baby and take a chance on searching for him in Germany. She couldn’t doom her family.

“There is no Gypsy blood in me,” she whispered. “My child is pure-blooded.”

The Oberführer smiled. “I knew it. The rumors were simple jealousy because your child is the only perfect one.” He stared defiantly at Sister Rosa.

Sister Rosa tucked her notebook and the calipers in the baby’s basket. She took a red card, wrote the baby’s identification on it, handed it to Nelka, and left the room. The baby was hers now. She carried the only perfect Aryan child in the village of Piaski.

“I am relieved that the rumors are false,” the Oberführer was saying. He stared at Nelka. She would understand. It was their secret. He had her blood inside him now, and if that blood was tainted, he would have been very angry. More than angry. He would have been murderous. He smiled as he thought of it, the joy of unleashing such a feeling.

The Major wondered why he hadn’t been told this rumor of Gypsy ancestors. Wiktor should have heard something, but what a magnificent joke it would be if Nelka were part Gypsy! What a disaster for the arrogant bastard, an Oberführer who’d avoided every major battle in the war.

Nelka went outside and walked down the steps into the sleet. She didn’t even put her scarf over her head but let the frozen rain wet her hair and face unchecked.

“I didn’t think she had Gypsy blood. You can always tell. It would have been tragic.” The Oberführer shook his head.

Major Frankel almost laughed. He knew exactly how tragic it would have been.

“Of course, I would have shot her immediately. And the child. I’m glad it wasn’t necessary. Such a mess in the office. Bloodstains are hard to remove. Depressing for you and your clerk.”

“Blood is impossible to remove. It can be the hardest stain to get out.”

The Oberführer stared at the Major for a second, but the other man’s face was bland and faintly bored. With a nod, the Oberführer left the office, and Major Frankel lit another cigarette. He looked quickly at Wiktor, but the man had enough sense to be staring down at the papers on the desk as if he heard and understood nothing.

The Major sucked the smoke deeply into his lungs. There were parts of this war that would never bear remembering. He sighed, the smoke expelled from him in a diffuse cloud. For a moment he actually wished he was in the trenches again at the Russian front.

March 11, 1944

T
hey had walked for three days when it began, groups of men and trucks, a thin trickle fleeing Poland. Then the trickle of Germans began to grow. At first the partisans were afraid. They stayed deep in the woods, away from the road, but after a while they crept closer to watch.

The trucks stopped only to refuel. The German soldiers walked with great exhaustion, but they moved as fast as they could. They didn’t even step behind the trees to piss but pissed on the road openly. And that was wise. If they stepped into the trees, they were easy prey for the partisans. A lone man would not be missed in this great exodus out of eastern Poland.

The men and machines turned into a thick snake that was never broken. Even at night they passed. The only sound in the forest was the tramp of feet, the engines of the machines, and the curses when guns were stuck and had to be abandoned or loaded on trucks.

And the constant stuttering of guns came from the distance. The partisans hardly heard the noise after a few days. If it had stopped, they would have been startled.

The airplanes were flying overhead now too. They passed in waves, too high for the Germans to bring down with their guns. The planes were Russian this time, and they moved west, toward Germany. The Russian grinned whenever he heard their drone above the trees.

But sometimes the planes, as if the pilots couldn’t stand watching the snake of German soldiers and equipment moving unscathed below them, dove and strafed the road, scattering men and machines and delaying progress. After the strafing, the dead had to be picked up and buried. The trucks that burned were pulled off the road, so the retreat could go on. The partisans watched from the safety of the forest, and the Russian sometimes had to shove his fist in his mouth so he wouldn’t shout out loud with joy at watching the men who had branded and starved him lose their war.

The partisans had to move through the trees, the roads being full of Germans now, so they went more slowly, but the weather was changing. The snow had melted, and that meant they didn’t have to push through drifts, but all of them wore a layer of mud to their hips. The mud was like glue catching their boots, and when they found rocky areas, it was a great relief. As they moved east, the rocks were fewer and the ground was more swampy.

“It’s hard for us, but think what it is for them.” The Russian moved relentlessly now, not letting them rest for more than a few minutes.

It was March, and they were beginning to see tanks as well as trucks. Most of the motorcycles were abandoned by the road because the mud was so churned up that they were more trouble to ride than it was worth.

The partisan group sat beside a field and watched tank after tank cross it. The tanks came in a regular pattern, a swooping curve that avoided the worst of the low, swampy places. Beyond the field was smoke from a village, but the crows had moved deeper into the forest. Except for the noise of the tanks, it was silent.

They had fought the tanks as best they could. Every village had soup tureens, and when they were upended and covered with dirt, they looked like carelessly laid mines. Starzec, the oldest man of them all, had thought of the idea, and it delayed the tanks so they could pick off the men as they climbed out to check the mounded mud. Many Germans had been killed that way.