The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (7 page)

“Come outside, Hansel. We have to get wood.” Gretel didn’t want Hansel to make Magda angry. He had to stop.

“Don’t go far, and if you see anyone, run back here.”

And so began a stretch of days that lasted over a week. Each day it was the same. The children and Magda ate kasha for breakfast. There were wooden bowls for the food, but there were metal spoons. They drank hot water or shared Magda’s hot drink of rye and acorns. Then they looked for wood. The stove was voracious.

At noon they ate cabbage soup and bread with beet marmalade on it. “It tastes like dirt,” Hansel told Magda.

“There’s no sugar in it, but when did you eat dirt?”

He had never eaten dirt, but he knew he was right. After lunch he sat on the snow and scraped until he had a clean patch of earth. He pinched up a lump of dirt and placed it on his tongue. It filled his mouth with the mold of long dead tree leaves and something else, something indescribable.

“I’m right,” he shouted to Magda, running into the hut where she sat in the rocker. “Beet marmalade tastes like dirt.”

Magda smiled but didn’t move. Her bones hurt while the weather was so changeable.

“Once we are snowed in, I can move. Then in spring my bones will ache again until summer is here.”

So the children played outside during the afternoon.

“I’m cold, Gretel. I want to go in.”

“We have to stay outside, Hansel. That way, she’ll forget we’re even here.”

“I hated the turnips last night,” he said.

“You have to eat them.”

“Nobody liked them. They were mushy.”

“If Magda doesn’t like them, then we have to like them a lot. That way she won’t say we’re eating all the good food and taking the best things away from her. We have to like all the bad food, Hansel. Then she won’t mind feeding us.”

When Gretel was ahead of him and couldn’t hear, he whispered, “I hate mushy turnips.”

They lived outside most of the time, running and moving to keep warm, eating everything allowed. The days went slowly. It wasn’t like home. Home was before the ghetto. Before the cart and horse and the airplanes. Gretel could remember the piano, toys, and books, whole walls of them everywhere. Hansel could remember nothing.

“Not walls of them.”

“Yes. Walls and walls of books from the floor to the ceiling.”

He didn’t believe it. In the ghetto there had been three books, and not toys exactly but sometimes there was a piece of chalk for a game or the cigarette cards.

Because his father had been a mechanic and went outside the barbed wire to work on the German trucks and cars, Hansel had the best collection of cigarette boxes of any boy in his building. The front of the box was always bright and clean and shiny. Cut apart, they made cards to play with or trade for something else.

Hansel frowned. He had left them under the blanket in the corner where they would be safe. Someday he might go back and get them. He knew the street. He knew the stairs. He tried to remember the name of the city.

No piano, Gretel thought, and her fingers twitched, remembering. Her mother’s hands moving over the keys. The white and black of the keys so clean. Washing her hands before she practiced. The Germans had the piano now. They probably had all the pianos in the world.

It was hard to tell what day it was. Magda never went to the village. There were no calendars or clocks. The Germans didn’t allow church on most Sundays. They slept in the dark and got up when it was light.

Days had gone by when the priest returned. With him was a man carrying a knapsack. Gretel saw them moving through the trees, and she drew Hansel behind her. The man was as ragged as the priest but younger and more frightened.

The two men went into the hut. Then Magda came outside. “Children?”

Hansel stared up into his sister’s face, and Gretel felt the weight of taking care of him come down on her. She could hardly breathe.

The new man didn’t look like a German. He was too thin. He looked too frightened.

She stepped out from behind the tree, and the three adults watched them walk toward the hut. The priest laughed.

“By God, the boy looks all right. A little odd with those dark eyes, but his skin’s so pale. It may work.”

The other man said nothing.

“It will work, and if not, then the wheel will go on.”

It was something Magda said often. Gretel didn’t know what she meant.

“Take their picture.”

The new man spoke for the first time. “I have to get their heads just the right size. Then I cut them off and glue them over the other heads in the old photograph. Then I’ll take another photograph of the composite picture. It won’t be perfect, but if I age the picture a little—no one would notice without a good lens to study it.”

“He’s going to cut our heads off,” Hansel whispered.

“No. He won’t.” Gretel wasn’t sure.

“You can’t cut my head off.” Hansel tried to pull away from Gretel’s hand and run.

The priest grinned. “We’re not the Nazis. Just the head in the picture will be cut off.”

Hansel was uncertain still, but the pictures of the children were taken. They stood separately and the man worked a long time to get the heads at a proper distance.

“It’s done,” the man said to the priest. “Give me the First Communion pictures tonight. The girl will be harder. I have to make her look younger. Maybe one picture will blur just a fraction. Maybe if she blinked.”

He grabbed Gretel by the shoulder and stared at her eyes. “When I say
blink
you will blink very slowly. Do you understand?”

She nodded. He cried out the word and she closed her eyes and then opened them slowly while he took another picture.

And it was done. Seven more days of the light and dark coming and going, and the priest came back with a package.

Magda unwrapped the pictures. “That’s a nice touch, using old frames.” Magda stroked the wood gently. “Come look at what Christians you are, children.”

Gretel and Hansel looked at the photographs that lay on the table. Hansel smiled. He looked wonderful. Below his face, which had a startled expression, was the body of a boy fatter than Hansel. He wore a black suit with short pants, clean white socks, and shiny shoes. There was a white flower in the lapel of the suit and a white ribbon with a bow was fastened around the sleeve of the suit on the child’s left arm.

“My shoes are beautiful.”

“Those aren’t your shoes.” Gretel was angry.

“Yes they are.” Hansel was complacent. “I remember them.”

Gretel stared at the picture of the girl. It was her but it wasn’t her. The girl had blinked and her face was a tiny bit blurred. You couldn’t say how old the face was, but the body—

“I was never like that.” Gretel frowned.

“Yes, you were. I remember.” Hansel picked up his picture and cradled it in his arms.

“You weren’t born then.” Gretel stared at the five-year-old girl in a white dress who carried a bouquet of white flowers and stared out with blurry eyes.

“I remember.” Hansel smiled. “I want to hang it where I sleep.”

The priest patted the boy on his head. “Now listen, children. These are your photographs of your First Communion. It is when you took the body of our Lord for the first time. Magda will explain all this to you.”

He turned and grinned at Magda. “You have to teach them all of it. The prayers. How to behave at Communion. Confession.”

“I don’t remember those things.”

“If you want to live, you had better remember, sister.”

“You teach them.”

“I can’t come here every day. You must do it.”

“They never allow services. Who will see them worshiping?”

The priest laughed. “Perhaps that is why God led these children here, sister. Perhaps it was to make you faithful at your devotions. Here—” He drew from his jacket a small book. “I brought you this. You can say morning prayers. Noon prayers. Prayers at night. The Lord’s Prayer. The devotions. And—”

He put his hand back in his pocket and pulled out a string of wooden beads. “The rosary. They should know it. Say it every night until they can do it in their sleep.”

“No.”

“Teach them or die, sister. Teach them or kill everyone—the villagers—” He paused and then went on. “Nelka. All of us.”

She took the beads reluctantly. “I’ll teach them enough to answer the need. I’m not trying to make a priest and a nun.”

“Perhaps they were sent to save you!”

The children said nothing. Hansel hung up his picture, and Gretel, after some thought, did the same. If people came in, both pictures should be there. She hung her picture on the wall but didn’t like to look at it. The blurry eyes and the pale face over the well-fed body made her uneasy.

“It’s like that fat girl ate me up,” she told Magda.

Magda thought for a long while, rocking as usual, and then she spoke. “Let her eat you up, Gretel. There are worse wolves than that waiting with sharp teeth. Let the child have you.”

Gretel hated it, but she knew Magda was right, so she forced herself to stare at the picture until she could no longer tell if it was her or not. She let the fat child devour the child she had been. After all, there were no pictures left of herself at that age or at any age. She had no pictures of her house, or her mother, or father, or the Stepmother.

The chair the fat girl stood beside, the lamp on the table with its shiny glass base, the carpet and the wall behind, and the physical fact of the child herself, this was what Gretel had for a past. She was uneasy, but she accepted it. Any picture was better than nothing.

The Mechanik

T
o live he had to find the motorcycle, but he could only think of his children, lost in the snow. The father, newly christened the Mechanik, moved steadily, concentrating on erasing his son and daughter from his mind. If he was caught, he must not think of them.

His feet began to sink in a bog of moss and mud, and he circled around it, moving slowly now, but steadily. The ooze of swamp had not frozen, and mist lay deep over the wet heart of the forest.

He saw a movement to his right and fell to the ground. Pushing his face into the snow-covered moss and leaves in his terror, he lay still. He caught no sound, and then, near him, the snort of breath released and a whickering.

He barely raised his head and saw the wild ponies in the trees. Four of them stood and stared at him, and only the jets of steam that their breath made in the cold air betrayed their presence.

“Too small for German horses,” he muttered.

Their gray winter coats hung low under their legs, and he couldn’t see their eyes for the shaggy hair that grew over their faces. The ponies didn’t move until he stood and walked toward them, and then they disappeared into the trees and the white mist with only the squelch of hooves in the soft mud.

He stood resting, looking at the mist hanging in the air where the horses’ breath had been, and smiled. The German horses. Huge and impossible to feed in the Russian winter. They had all been eaten by their masters. The Mechanik plodded through the woods. He chanted to himself, and it almost became a song as he walked on.

“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.