The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (37 page)

“A woman,” he began again. “My age with white streaks in her hair. She would have come here not long ago. Have you seen her?”

“I never saw the woman, but there were two children. Magda took them in.”

“Where is this Magda?” He didn’t smile. He couldn’t hope. Not yet.

The woman looked at the ground.

“Where?” He was begging her.

“Her hut was in the woods. A mile from the village. Back the way you came. Turn into the woods by the big rock and the bend in the road.”

He turned and began to run east toward the pounding of the guns that never stopped now but made a steady sound like the beating of an insane drummer.

“They won’t be there,” she called after him. “They killed the priest and went to get Magda. You won’t find them. They killed them. We saw the smoke when they burned the hut.”

She didn’t shout too loudly. Maybe the children were still there. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the Nazis had pity and only took the old woman. The man was too far away now anyway, running like a crazy person.

The Mechanik saw the bend in the road. He turned when he got to the large boulder beside the ditch and loped into the woods. He stared around, looking for the hut and smelled it before he saw it. Burnt wood. The pungent stink of smoke.

The blackened circle of ash was barely warm now. The lump of the huge stove, a stove surely too large for the size of this hut, lay on its side in the ash. The Mechanik walked to the circle and stood in the middle, ignoring the smell and the dust from the ash that covered his boots. He stared out at the enormous trees encircling where the hut had been. The forest was silent.

He opened his mouth to call, but stopped. The children would be afraid to come out if he called their Jewish names. His wife had named them, given them names that were safe, and the children had probably answered to those names since November.

“Hansel? Gretel? Hansel? Greteeeeel?”

The Mechanik shouted until his throat was torn and he was hoarse and then he knelt in the ash and lifted the soft stuff in his hands and poured it on his head. He rubbed the gray powder on his face until he was blackened. He had lost them. By a few hours, he had lost them. His wife must be dead, and his children dead too. He was an afternoon too late.

The Oven

M
agda gasped in pain. She knew that a rib had been broken when they knocked her down. She was cold without her coat. The young woman beside Magda had circles around her eyes so dark it was as if her eyes had been put in her head with a sooty finger.

“I’m Rachele.”

“Magda.”

Magda turned her head and looked at the soldier sitting on the narrow bench that ran along the inside of the truck. His pot of a helmet hid his face until he turned. His unlined face and young eyes saw Magda staring, and he kicked out with his boot. The kick glanced off her leg, and she gasped in pain. The rib was going to cause her trouble. She hoped it wouldn’t keep her from working. They said the camps were for work.

Magda didn’t want to ask Rachele, but she suddenly had to know.

“Jew?” she whispered.

Rachele couldn’t hear the old woman’s whisper over the roar of the truck’s engine, but she saw the lips form the word. She nodded.

Magda looked down and saw a body shoved under the narrow seat. It was strange they had bothered to take a dead man with them. She stared at the body, and her mind suddenly cleared. It was the patch on the back that she had sewn with her own hands. She recognized the gray tweed against the black of the coat. Magda tried to crawl to the body, but the woman held her back.

“He was the priest,” Magda said. “Did they kill the priest?”

Rachele nodded. “He killed some German woman and a soldier.”

Magda couldn’t speak for a while. Then she thought of Nelka and the baby. If her brother was killed, and they came to get her and the children—

“Did they kill a young woman? Blond? She had a baby? A man with her too?”

“They asked if anyone knew where a woman was. They said she was related to the priest. They said her baby had disappeared too.”

Magda began to be happy. Her brother had killed the Brown Sister and the guard who held the baby. Nelka and the baby had fled. If Nelka fled, Telek must have fled too. It puzzled her that her brother had done the murders. It was something she thought Telek would have done. Nelka and the baby could go to the hidey-hole and stay until the Germans were gone. Hansel would take Gretel there when they escaped the oven and the hut. She knew they would crawl out.

Piotr and me. Both of us so old that death has been sitting on our noses for years. All they could do is kill him and send me off to a camp, but our young ones are alive in the forest.

Magda wanted to tell Rachele what she knew, she wanted to have someone rejoice with her, but the woman sat with her eyes shut. The other people in the truck were strained and dirty, some of them had bruises and dried blood on their faces like they had been beaten.

Their look of despair, their helplessness, moved Magda. She thought of all the Poles who had died. All the Jews who disappeared, all the Gypsies, the priests, the mayors, the Polish army officers slaughtered. She thought of the stream of men and women sent into Germany and Russia. The kidnapped children. Her tears began, and she was angry with herself. She needed to be strong, but she couldn’t stop the tears.

“End it,” she whispered to God, not praying but demanding. “Come and end this world.”

But Magda thought of Hansel struggling toward the hidey-hole. She thought of him leading Gretel on, and she couldn’t wish that the world would end. She pictured Nelka holding her baby and fleeing with Telek, hiding in the earth and comforting Hansel and Gretel. As long as those young ones walked on the earth, she wanted it to exist for them.

“All right,” she whispered. “For the children. Let the wheel keep turning for their sake.”

She shut her eyes and sat silent for nearly an hour as the truck lurched on the muddy roads. It was moving more slowly now, and she heard voices from the cab of the truck. The motor coughed and they came to a stop.

“Because of Hansel you can let the world live,” she whispered. “But if they kill him, I say that you must come down with all your angels and end it. I charge you with this.”

The tailgate of the truck dropped.

One of the bearded Jews lifted Magda as easily as a log of wood and set her on the ground. Her legs buckled, and Rachele put her arm around Magda. She had to get to wherever it was they were going. If she could just live for a month or two in the camp, the Russians would free them.

The sound of a train grew louder down the tracks. She hoped they could sit down soon. If she could rest in the train, drink a little water, then she could face the camp with some energy. The pain of her rib stabbed her with every step, but she ignored it. It was time to gather her strength for survival. Perhaps she would fool them all yet.

They were being driven by shouts and prods. Magda had to force herself not to look back. She didn’t want to see what they did with her brother’s body. The doors of the cattle car rolled open. Magda shook her head. The bodies of the prisoners were packed so tightly that it was impossible to fit in more people, but the soldiers began hitting them with clubs and screaming.

She didn’t climb into the boxcar but was pushed from behind until she was up and wedged in tightly. Rachele was beside her, the two of them smashed together. The door crashed shut, and a man screamed as it closed on his foot. The door bounced on his flesh and bone, and then slammed. Magda heard the bolt shoved down and knew they were locked inside.

“But we can’t even breathe,” she whispered.

Magda thought of her notion of sitting in the train and sipping water, and she knew that nothing was going to be like what she had imagined. For a moment she was terrified and nearly began to scream. They were going to be killed.

“Where are they taking us?” a woman called out.

“Birkenau. The new camp,” someone said. “Everyone goes to Birkenau since last year. History will remember us.”

History is the bookkeeping of murderers, Magda thought, but she didn’t say it aloud.

Magda stood, held up by the bodies around her. It wasn’t cold because so many of them were packed together. Her mouth was very dry, and she wished it would rain so that some of the water might run into the boxcar, but it was clear and dry outside as the train moved on toward the west.

The worst of it was that she had to urinate. She held it as long as she could, and then she had to release the urine and let it run down her legs. The humiliation of it bothered her.

“Stop fussing, old fool,” she muttered. “What’s a little healthy urine in this place.”

The sounds inside the boxcar didn’t penetrate to the world outside, the mechanical chugging of the train covering up the cries. Only a single vixen in a field stopped trotting and turned her head as the train passed. Her hackles were raised, the fur roughened over her shoulders, and she bared her teeth warningly, ears pricked forward, ready for flight.

When the doors opened, Magda hadn’t realized they had stopped. She felt the rush of air, cold but not fresh. It was air with a tinge of smoke and another smell in it, sweetish and cloying, that she couldn’t identify. She was swept out of the car by the surge of people, and her legs were so swollen, her joints so stiff, she couldn’t have walked except for a man who took her around the waist and half carried her.

“Come on, Grandmother,” he said in a perfectly calm voice. His beard was filthy and matted. His face was ravaged as Magda knew her own was, but he nodded at her, and Magda found the strength to walk a little.

They were driven like pigs. Blows from sticks. Dogs lunging and barking. Driven so fast that she only got a glimpse of a series of large redbrick buildings. Steep roofs. Dormer windows. Neat walks. All the mud was shoveled off the walks, and huge piles of firewood, hundreds of yards long, were stacked against the brick side of the building.

“They have factories at the camp,” she said to the man.

He said nothing but kept his grip on her, and they moved at a trot now. Magda knew that even with his help, she couldn’t go much farther. But they kept on. He spoke to her occasionally.

“Little Grandmother, you are doing well.”

“I chopped my own wood and drew my own water,” she tried to say. Her mouth couldn’t form the words properly, and it came out a garbled noise.

“Good. Good, Grandmother.”

Then she fell when a soldier hit the man holding her with a stick. He was driven to one side, and she, managing to pull herself erect, was driven to the other.

“Line up!” The people were whipped into rows of five and walked past waiting SS men. The male prisoners were on one side, the women on the other.

Looking at Magda and the young woman next to her who held a baby, the SS man screamed, “To the left, bitches! Left!”

The young woman hesitated. She stared down wildly at her baby.

“He’s dead,” she cried out. “My baby is dead.” She tried to go to the right with a man who held his hands out to her from the men’s lines.

“He’s dead,” she screamed as the SS soldier ran toward her.

“Jew bitch!” The soldier lifted his stick and hit her such a blow that she dropped to the platform, blood streaming down her head. He kept hitting her until Magda knew she was dead, but Magda was in a line, and she moved on until the young woman, and her baby, and the man beating her, disappeared. A woman next to Magda, almost as old as she, put her arm around Magda.

“The woman told the truth. The baby was dead. I begged her to put it down in the train. We’ll walk together, Bubbeh,” she said to Magda.

Magda was barely conscious. The woman had called her grandmother. She knew that was what she had said. She had heard the Yiddish word before from the Jews in the village.

“I’m not a grandmother,” Magda said, but the words were still just a gargle of sound.

The older men and all the young boys were walking with the women now. Magda couldn’t understand this place. There were wooden barracks and barbed wire everywhere. It was much larger than she had thought it would be. It was a city.

The concrete steps under their feet led down, down until they entered through a door and went into a room underground. The soldiers stood on each side. They shouted and screamed, and the people around Magda tried to move faster down the stairs to avoid the whips and clubs. The woman helping Magda stumbled and nearly fell. The jarring cleared Magda’s head a little, and she saw they could spread out some in the room.

She took a deep breath and frowned. There was a smell she couldn’t place. She breathed again. Something burning. Something sweet like pork. Against the wall was a bench with numbered hooks above it. Magda wanted to sit, but the soldiers kept shouting.