The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (43 page)

“Stop it. Stop it. Make it stop.” The boy was running now toward the men with guns. He ran jerkily, screaming again at them, and soon he would reach the space between the men in the field and the men near the creek.

Gretel saw the movement of his body and turned. He was running toward the guns. He was going to die.

Something in her mind gave way and the memories came in like a wall of water, all at once, the thoughts filling every empty place in her head. She remembered. The war. The guns. Magda. Her father. The Stepmother. She had to take care of Hansel. The forest. The motorcycle. Telek. The ghetto. The tinkling of ice. Nelka. Hansel.

Gretel began to run as soon as the thoughts began, and she ran the way animals run. She bounded after her brother and caught up with him in a few leaps. She didn’t try to call him, but fell on him and knocked him down and held him against her. He struggled and then went limp, and she was afraid he’d been shot and was dead. She ran her hands over him, felt no hot warmth of spilled blood, and then held him tight.

Hansel turned in her arms and clung to Gretel. He held her, pressing his face against her, and so they lay, each child taking the other and holding fast.

She opened her mouth, but her mind was so full of memories, she couldn’t speak. Hansel lay totally still, clutching her, and she pressed her head to his and let her mind run free.

The hut. There had been a barn. And buckets, and she couldn’t ever look out the window. Swans. She had seen thousands of them, and one of them carried her over the water. No. Something carried them. The oven. Magda.

Gretel shut her eyes. She lay and remembered and didn’t know where she was or why she had forgotten for so long. She held Hansel, and when the guns stopped she lay and hummed to him. She hummed like Magda had hummed, softly, deep in her throat.

The memories kept coming while she was humming. She let them flow through her mind, and then she stopped humming suddenly. She wanted her name. Her real name. She wanted to have it. She lay still and tried to fish the name out of the water of memory that flooded her mind, but it was no use. She could only remember Gretel, the name that the Stepmother had given her when they were abandoned in the dark forest.

The girl held her brother more tightly and fought with her mind. She couldn’t get at her name or her brother’s name either. Other memories were coming to her, although her mind still stuttered and was confused. Something had happened in the forest, when everything was made of ice—she remembered being very cold and looking up at rainbows in the ice. Something had happened, but she could not think what it was. That and the two names were gone.

The men, paying no attention to the children, but taking their guns, checking to see if one of their party was truly dead or only wounded, ran after the fleeing German remnant who had gone back over the creek. They left the field, calling to each other in excitement. Only one of theirs dead, and they had killed a dozen.

Gretel hummed, and in a while a single crow flew over the field in curiosity. The corpse of a man lay on his back, pressing down the wheat in the shape of an X. His red blood had spattered and was drying brown on the gold of the grain. The crow soared above the man and flew on.

The children lay together in the field, and finally Hansel turned his face up to her.

“I’m dead.”

“No, you’re not. I felt you. There’s no blood on you.”

Hansel pulled back and looked at her.

“Gretel?”

“I remember. I’d forgotten, but I remember nearly all of it now.”

Gretel frowned. The names would not come to her. She remembered Telek finding her and carrying her back to Magda. She remembered the hut on fire. Gretel shut her eyes for a moment and then opened them and looked at her brother.

Hansel stared into her eyes, and saw that she had come back into the world. She was with him again. He sighed deeply and put his face back against her shoulder.

“I’m tired, Gretel.”

“Me too. Where’s the forest, Hansel?”

“The forest was a long time ago.”

She lay there and thought. “We have to go back.”

“To the forest?”

“No. To the city. We have to look for Father. And our stepmother. There aren’t so many soldiers now. The tanks are nearly gone. We have to find the city.”

“I can’t remember the name.”

“Of the city?”

He nodded his head.

“It’s Bialystok, silly. We went there when the Germans came, and that’s where we were with Father last, remember? Father put us in big tires and we rode out of the ghetto on the back of the trucks. Then there was the pit with all the grease, before the forest.”

Hansel shut his eyes and felt himself relax. He wasn’t dead. She knew the name of the city. He began to smile and felt the sun on his body. He didn’t think he’d ever get tired of the warmth.

“Gretel, what was my name? Before the forest?”

She was silent and tears came into her eyes. His name was as lost to her as her own, and she couldn’t bear telling that truth to her brother.

“We have to call each other Hansel and Gretel. The Stepmother said. You know that.”

He nodded his head. The Stepmother had said. Gretel didn’t want to say his name because it still wasn’t safe. Someday it would be different, and she could tell him. He fell asleep and slept deeply for the first time in months.

Bread

F
or three weeks they walked. Now that the Germans were gone, it was a little easier. People fed them, and they could walk openly on the roads. Gretel asked directions and begged food, and there was something in her insistence that made people point the way. A man once walked a mile with the children and showed them a dirt road that would keep them away from the stream of Russians moving toward the city.

“They captured the city at the end of July,” the man said. He looked at the beautiful girl child. “But don’t trust the Russians. Stay away from them.”

“We’re going to find our father and stepmother.”

The man watched the children walk away toward the north and the city. Everyone was looking for someone. And most of them would be disappointed. He shook his head and turned back to his fields. He wondered who would steal his crops this autumn. Probably the Russians. He was too cynical, his wife said, but the world wouldn’t care about Poland when war was over.

The road outside the city was full of trucks and tanks. The Russians poured into the city and onward toward the west.

“They don’t look like soldiers,” Gretel said.

“They beat the Germans. How are we going to find Father?” Hansel waved at the ragged soldiers who sometimes waved back.

“We’ll go to the house in the ghetto and wait for him.”

Hansel remembered being in the apartment with a lot of people and the cantor singing under the window. But that was all. He didn’t remember anything much before the forest. There was just the forest and Gretel and Magda and Nelka and Telek and him.

A Russian soldier tried to speak to the children in broken Polish. He finally gave up and simply said, “Bialystok?”

Gretel nodded.

The soldier waved at a passing truck and when it stopped, he picked up the children and put them in the back. “Bialystok,” he shouted at the driver. The Russian soldiers in the back grinned at Hansel and Gretel, and Hansel grinned back until his face was sore.

“They smell bad,” Gretel whispered.

“They have to chase the Nazis. There isn’t time to wash.”

Gretel watched the buildings which were larger and larger and closer together as they drove into the city. She knew it was Bialystok, but everything had changed.

“It’s big.” Hansel shivered.

“I don’t see anything I know.”

The truck rattled over a damaged bridge, the railing shell-pocked and broken.

“Bialy Lake,” she shouted. “We have to get out. I can get home from the park.”

The men laughed when she tried to climb out, and they shouted to the driver, who stopped. Hansel and Gretel were lifted and dropped down on the far side of the bridge. They walked and walked, and she finally sat down on a patch of dirt and thought.

“This is the Bialy Lake. It has to be the park, but it doesn’t look like the park anymore. They cut so many trees. And the buildings—”

Hansel looked at the buildings of the city beyond the dirt area. He shivered. Half of them were blackened and empty, burned out and roofless. The others had no windows and stood abandoned.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know. Shut up, Hansel.”

But he didn’t shut up. He walked down a street with Gretel trailing after him, and he began to ask people questions. Tugging at a woman’s sleeve, he would demand, “Where are all the people who used to be here? Where did all the people live that the Nazis made live here?”

Hansel didn’t dare say the word
Jew.
He asked in dozens of ways but he was afraid to say that word to anyone. An old woman stopped and stared at the child whose hair was half dirty blond and half brown. She shook her head.

“Where is the ghetto?”

“Burned, boy. Burned and gone. All of it.”

“Where are the people?”

She shrugged and turned away.

“The city isn’t like it was.” Gretel sighed and sat down on a curb in the busy marketplace.

“What was it like?” Hansel put his head on her shoulder and watched the people bartering for vegetables and even an occasional lump of butter.

“There was a man with a monkey.”

“What does a monkey look like?”

“It was little and brown and furry, and it took the coins out of your hand and tipped his hat at you.”

“I want a monkey,” Hansel said. “I want my own monkey.”

“And you could get on the trolley and ride out to the woods. And the horses were lovely that pulled it. And the market on Piaskes where you could buy—”

Hansel stood up tiredly. They had to find the ghetto. He walked to a man who was carrying an old tire in his arms. Tugging at the man’s shirt, Hansel asked again.

“Where are the people who lived here? When the Germans came? Where was the ghetto?”

The man turned, and Hansel looked up at him. For a moment they both stared at each other without moving. His hair was longer, more shaggy than when Hansel had seen him last, but the dark eyes and long eyelashes were the same, the handsome face was only a little dirty.

“Run, Gretel! It’s him! Run!”

She saw the man and leapt up. The two children ran between the crowds of peasants, stepping on food laid out on blankets, uncaring about the shouts and curses that followed them.

The man was close behind them. He had thrown down the tire and was loping after them. The man was dressed as a Polish peasant but he had the face of the Oberführer.

Hansel didn’t look over his shoulder. In the mass of people crowded into the square, he and Gretel managed to lose the man at first. They ran down a long street and stopped, panting, their hearts banging.

“Run! He’s coming!”

The Oberführer had turned into the street with long strides and came after them. Hansel couldn’t look back again. They ran and darted down one street and then another. Once they turned into an alley with no way out, and Gretel helped him climb through a little hole in the fence to get to the next street.

“Stop, Hansel.”

He stopped and looked back at his sister. The Nazi was not in sight.

“This is it. This is where the ghetto was.”

It was even worse than the rest of the city. The chimneys were torn from the building in front of her. To their right was a line of bombed buildings, the bricks blackened by fire.

“The cobblestone pavement,” she muttered, looking down. It led to the alley where you turned. “The third floor, second door on the left. That was our apartment.”

“We have to keep going,” he begged. It was getting late. The sky was darkening. It was going to be night soon. The Oberführer might find them if they stood on the street.

They had run into the desolated section of the city until there were no people around them. Only the blasted buildings stood, their shadows falling on the two children.

“It was the Oberführer.”

“Yes.” She shivered.

“He’ll kill us. He killed—” Hansel stopped. He didn’t want to think about whether the Oberführer had killed anyone else. It was a big city. They would never meet him again with so many people.

“We’ll sleep here, Gretel. Tomorrow we’ll ask where the people went.”

“There aren’t any people left. I don’t know if these are the right cobblestones. The buildings all look different now.”

“Come on.”

They climbed over rubble and went into the front of a house. It had been divided into apartments, but all the doors were gone, and the glass was broken out. The children walked up the stairs that still stood.

“Don’t get close to the edge,” she told him. The railing had been broken off and lay in pieces at the bottom.

They walked up to the next floor, and Gretel looked for a bed or a blanket to lie on. One room had an iron bed, but the springs and mattress were gone. Another room was full of feathers from a mattress that was ripped open, the cloth rotting and spotted with mildew.

Hansel picked up handfuls of the goose down and threw it in the air. It clung to his hair and shirt, and he laughed. There were photographs on the floor. A boy holding his dog. People sitting on a blanket outside wearing bathing suits for swimming.

“Look.” Gretel showed him the photograph. “They were having a picnic.”

“The Germans let them?”

“It must have been before the Germans.” Gretel laid the picture down and covered it with feathers. “Come on.”

They went up until they came to a stair that led onto the roof. It was a hot night. The air barely stirred. Leaning over the parapet, Gretel looked out at the gutted buildings standing close together, and she didn’t see a single person. “Let’s sleep outside.”