The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

Description

A poignant and suspenseful retelling of a classic fairy tale set in a war-torn world, for readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, We Were the Lucky Ones, and Lilac Girls

In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed “Hansel” and “Gretel.” They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called a “witch” by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village with his own plans for the children. Louise Murphy’s haunting novel of journey and survival, of redemption and memory, powerfully depicts how war is experienced by families and especially by children.

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

“Purely imaginative . . . [Murphy’s] characters speak to us with terrible prescience.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Filled with the breathtaking, sometimes death-defying contortions of war.”
—Los Angeles Times

“This harrowing portrayal of the daily ordeal of Poles caught up in the German occupation—Gentiles as well as Jews—makes this a page-turner as well as a moving testament to the human will to do good and survive despite all odds. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

“It’s the scariet of all fairy tales, and it’s retold here with gripping realism. . . . The Grimms’ story is always there like a dark shadow intensifying the drama as the searing narrative transforms the old archetypes.”
—Booklist

“A provocative transformation of the classic fairy tale into a haunting survival story set in Poland during WWII. No reader who picks up this inspiring novel will put it down until the final pages, in which redemption is not a fairy tale ending but a heartening message of hope.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Unusually gripping . . . Lyrical, haunting, unforgettable.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Louise Murphy, winner of a Writers Digest Award for formal poetry, is the author of the novel The Sea Within and a book for children, My Garden. She is a regular contributor to numerous literary and poetry journals.

INTRODUCTION

“The story has been told over and over by liars and it must be retold.”

In the winter of 1943, on the outskirts of a dark forest, two Jewish children flee the Nazis with their father and stepmother. In a moment of desperation, the children are given the aliases Hansel and Gretel and sent alone into the woods to hide. Gretel leads her younger brother in search of food and protection, while Hansel leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind so that their father might find them again. So begins The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, which takes us along on their journey into a forest more ancient than man. In a landscape populated by exotic beasts, refugees, and revolutionaries, the two children embark upon a new life as Christian orphans, protected by a woman who is called Magda the witch and whose tiny hut is heated by an enormous baker’s oven.

In this extraordinary novel by Louise Murphy, a fairy tale is reimagined and a war story retold. It is the story of individuals striving to survive and a village trying to outlast a war. Magda the witch lives on the edge of Piaski, in a region of Eastern Poland that has been overrun first by Russians and now by Germans. Her family is an assortment of outsiders: her brother Piotr, a fallen priest, her great-niece Nelka, a beauty in love with an enigmatic woodsman, her dead grandmother, a Gypsy and an abortionist. The villagers are terrorized by a small but vicious Nazi presence and weary at the end of a war that has brought them many conquerors and few saviors. Murphy unflinchingly presents the war as a landscape of horrors, the village humiliated under the yoke of ruthless SS officers and by the necessities of survival under unbearable circumstances.

We also follow the trials of Hansel and Gretel’s father, who endures a brutal winter of revolutionary action and personal transformation, all the while preoccupied with the fear that his children may not survive and the hope that he will find them again. This unique novel gives voice to figures that have before now been underrepresented in the writing of World War II: the voices of Jews who hid in the forests, of men and women who participated in resistance movements, and of Polish civilians. These characters struggle with their relationship with God, with their disgust for a humanity in crisis, and with the desire to define a new and more just world.

Yet Murphy manages to maintain the fairy-tale foundation of her story, returning again and again to the elements of an old story to infuse meaning into a newer one. The Bialowieza Forest, the oldest in Europe, is a place of mysterious and untouched beauty, and its lessons for the children and for humanity permeate the book. Murphy juxtaposes horror with lyricism, reality with magic. The primal nature of war is met by the primal power of story—and the belief that love can rescue humans from their worst capabilities. Hansel and Gretel are on a quest to reclaim their identities, and the witch and the forest—the world of the fairy tale—show them the way.

In prose both luminous and enlightening, Murphy explores the power of memory, the necessity of love in times of great trauma, and the redemption that can come about through the refusal to erase one’s own past. This is the tale of two brave children who never give up, of women who refuse to be defined by convention, and of the bitter cost of survival. Over the course of the winter, Hansel and Gretel will come of age. Their mother dead, their father and stepmother in hiding, by necessity forced to alter their own identities, they become survivors.

ABOUT LOUISE MURPHY

Louise Murphy, winner of a Writers Digest Award for formal poetry, is the author of the novel The Sea Within and a book for children, My Garden. She is a regular contributor to numerous literary and poetry journals.

A CONVERSATION WITH LOUISE MURPHY

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel is in part the retelling of a classic fairy tale. How long have you had an interest in fairy tales and in the story of Hansel and Gretel in particular?

As a child, I did not like most fairy tales, particularly this one. The deep unconscious meanings in those stories triggered my nightmares. In college I took a folklore course that fascinated me as we traced and studied the folk motifs that are found in every culture.

The original fairy tale is actually quite frightening; is that one reason why you chose it as a frame for this harrowing tale?

This is the fairy tale that scared me the most when I was a child. It mirrors my worst adult fears about what the abandon-ment and blind violence of war does to children all over the world.

You seem to try to redeem certain characters, particularly women, from the traditional stereotyping they receive in fairy tales and elsewhere. The stepmother and the witch, two types often vilified, are portrayed very positively. Were you conscious of this as a feminist project? And are these stereotypes the kinds of lies that you have Magda refer to at the start?

Stereotypes are always lies. It was the idea of “the witch” that began my struggle to understand Magda and then all the other characters. Our culture denigrates older women, yet they are often the ones who protect and nurture everyone in the family. As many “blended” families demonstrate, there are loving stepparents in every culture. I don’t like stereotypes of any group of people.

This story takes place in a particular region of Eastern Poland. How did you learn about the history of the area, and what kind of research did you do for the book? How did you balance research and storytelling?

I have no personal memories of World War II. It is all history for me, so I was lucky to have the Holocaust Library in San Francisco and the University of California library nearby with its huge collection of books. I read for three years and took hundreds of pages of notes to understand the area and the people, the timetable of the war and the daily details of life in a Polish village during World War II. Ultimately, it is the characters that matter to me. They take over the novel and drive the plot, but research gives the novelist ideas, and the setting of any story becomes part of its power.

The Bialowieza Forest is one of the last patches of primeval growth in Europe. It seems like the perfect setting for a fairy tale, a place where stories might both emerge and endure, almost outside of time. How did you find out about this forest, and have you ever actually been there?

I have never visited the forest. I learned of it while watching television! It was a program on the Bialowieza Forest, and it was like watching a film about a country in your dreams. I saw the program several years before I began the book, and vaguely thought it would be a wonderful place to set the Magda story, if I ever wrote it.

This region was also home to many of Hitler’s concentration camps. Many people identify the Holocaust with Germany and have less information about the events that took place in Poland. Is this a reason why you chose to set the story in Poland rather than in Germany?

Poland was called “the anvil of the devil” during the war. The German master plan was to kill all the Jews, Gypsies, dissidents and leaders in Poland, then starve off the old and the very young, leaving a work force to build cities for the new German world order. Children who looked Aryan must be kidnapped and “saved,” because the Germans did not have enough population for their grandiose scheme. At the end of the building, all the remaining Polish workers would be killed in the camps. Setting a novel in this place allowed me to show the horrors of war against children and civilians and put my characters in situations where they had to make hard decisions daily.

You certainly do not flinch from depicting acts of true horror, and characters like the Oberführer seem to typify the Nazi as an incarnation of evil. With other characters, including some of the Polish citizens and Major Frankel in particular, you step away from such absolute characteristics and tread more in the realm of psychological ambiguity. Guilty though these characters are, you make them human beings. Was this difficult, especially when writing about such an iconic and horrific event?

I honestly do not understand the psychotic desire to control, torture, and kill that the Oberführer represents, and he was the most difficult character to portray. I experimented with humanizing him, but it was like saying that “after all, Hitler loved his dogs.” No humanizing can explain and forgive such evil. Men like the Oberführer appear when historical events give them permission to use this dark side of the human imagination. Major Frankel is a very different type. He is a man in a dirty war who began as a patriot. He is every soldier, a normal man caught up in the dehumanizing actions that war demands.

Did you ever get just plain depressed by the actions some of the characters take (or are forced to take), and did you ever feel the urge to make parts of the book less graphic and therefore less painful? How difficult was it to envision a happy ending?

The research was so chilling that sometimes I would leave the library and take a walk in the sun, but writing the story, I could create a rescuer like Magda. I could save the children from death, which made a happy ending tempered by tragedy. When I finished the writing, I realized that I had not killed a single child in the novel. You hear of children dying, but do not see it. This was unconscious on my part and quite unrealistic since Poland lost over twenty percent of her children. I procrastinated writing Magda’s death scene for weeks. As soon as I accepted that I couldn’t bear to kill Magda, I sat down and wrote the chapter. It was terrible to kill a character I loved so much even though she is only a part of my imagination.

Though the novel is called The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, it is also the story of the father and stepmother, of Magda and her brother, and of the entire village of Piaski. How did you incorporate so many different voices into one narrative? Were any of these characters based on real people?

None of the characters were based on people I know. When I write a novel, I seem to create characters who are people I would like to meet, people I hope exist, people I hope to become myself someday, or people that frighten me. If my life requires it, I want Magda’s courage, Father Piotr’s self-knowledge, the Major’s strength, Nelka and Telek’s passion, and Hansel’s capacity for survival.

How important was it to you, as the author, to let there be satisfaction for certain characters, and justice for others? Did you feel a responsibility to lend a kind of moral balance to a situation that was distinctly unjust?

Like most people who read about the Holocaust and the circumstances of any people occupied and at war, I long for justice. The story of Father Piotr and his final actions is a very complicated effort to show a man yearning for justice for himself and his family. I punish the Oberführer at the end, but I hope the lingering fear is present in the reader that this man will return, as evil always returns to haunt us. The responsibility of the artist is to try and find the truth, regardless of whether it is comfortable or not, but the moral balance is ultimately on the side of good people who manage to save children by courageous action.

The ultimate goal of the story seems to be to pass on hope, and to praise the value of love; this is certainly how Magda, as the narrator, frames the tale. How difficult was it to keep the idea of love meaningful while also writing so unflinchingly about evil?

I never really thought in terms of what abstract ideas I was presenting or not presenting while writing. Most novel writers become so involved in creating the characters and the plot, we leave the analysis to others. After the novel is done, we see things we did that weren’t consciously conceived, and good readers tell us things we didn’t see while we wrote. It is after the novel is completed that we find out what we, in our deepest heart, believe about life, and that is our own truth we give the world in our art. I believe there are as many truths about life as there are artists.

You dedicate this novel to your son. What are your thoughts about passing on memories and knowledge about the Holocaust to younger generations? Is this topic one that you plan to keep to in future writing, or do you feel that now you will move on?

Watching my son and a daughter become adults, I have been impressed with how much harder their decisions are than when I was growing up. The fluidity of values, the availability of drugs, the commonplace of divorce and the movement of people every few years to find work has changed our world. I hope, perhaps too optimistically, that by showing the darkness of the Holocaust to our young adults, we will teach them to reject racism and war.

I was born in 1943, perhaps the darkest year the world has ever seen. Because I was born in the United States, I survived, but felt compelled to understand the time of my own birth. For all of my reading and work, I will never “understand” the Holocaust. It is too huge, too terrible to categorize or comprehend, but this novel is the best I can do to present the period that so deeply disturbs me. I doubt that I will write about this again.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Murphy begins and ends her true fairy tale with the words of the wise witch Magda, who is the children’s savior. She’s an outsider from the village of Piaski, with Gypsy heritage, but she’s also a relative to many characters: an aunt, a sister, and a surrogate mother to the children. How is she a traditional witch? What abilities mark her as such? How does she display her unconventional morals when considering the affairs of others? Why does Murphy make her a kind of narrator?
 

The primeval forest of Bialowieza is itself a character in this novel. It’s a place that is harsh and wild but that offers protection to the children, to Magda, and to the Partisans as they work to oust the Germans. How does the forest enhance the fairy-tale sensibility? Does the forest have a personality; and if so, how would you describe it?
 

The forest is filled with wild beasts: the wild ponies, the elusive bison, the mad boar. Think back to some of the encounters characters have with these animals. How do wild animals function as symbols in the story? How do they connect characters? Do they serve as indicators of change at certain crucial moments in the plot?
 

Nelka and Telek are the romantic center of the novel. Each is forced to undertake harrowing actions in order to protect their families and the villagers. Telek in particular is forced to inflict harm in order to prevent an even greater wrong. What do these sacrifices bring them? How do you think they are able to endure these horrors and still imagine a future for themselves as lovers?
 

The stepmother is not a traditional fairy-tale stepmother; she is portrayed very positively, as an independent woman and a brave guardian of Hansel and Gretel’s father. She does, however, make some excruciating decisions for the Mechanik and his children, decisions that have major consequences for them all. Consider different points in the story when she is forced to make painful choices; do you agree with those choices? Could she have acted differently? Do you think her fate—she is, after all, the stepmother—is a necessity of the fairy-tale genre?
 

At the start of novel, the children are given new names by the stepmother; they will struggle after a while to remember their original ones. Other characters receive new names too: the father becomes the Mechanik, the stepmother the White Wolf. The father notes that “His name had disappeared with the war”; what does this loss of names symbolize? Why do so many of the Partisans go by aliases? Why do you think Murphy chose not to reveal everyone’s “real” names?
 

Memory is a key theme, especially for Gretel. At the start of the novel, she is already complaining that time in the ghetto has marred her memories of life before the war. By the end, those memories become key to her emotional well-being. What does it mean for her to lose and/or retain memories of a home before the trauma? How does memory serve the children during their quest to stay alive and find their father? Do you think Murphy implies there is a symbolic or real relationship between people and memory?
 

In many ways, this novel details a fairy-tale world, one with magical animals, the true love of Nelka and Telek, and a woman known as a witch. A traumatized Gretel spends part of the novel in the realm of madness, and for her it ultimately becomes important that she leave behind her immersion in fantasy and face reality. Hansel, too, has to give up playing war and lead his sister in a very real struggle for survival. Do you think that Murphy is suggesting that too much belief in fantasy can be an obstacle to maturity or to finding resolution? Or do you think that she shows how belief—in fairy tales, magic, and beauty—can help us overcome trials? Will Gretel continue to be an unusual child, or do you imagine her as more ordinary—more normal—as we leave her at the end of the book?
 

Both religion and magic infuse this story. There are scenes of Father Piotr’s agony over his fallen priesthood, Hansel’s folk cure for Gretel when she has the grippe, and Gretel holding a personal Shabbas. Often traditional church-centered worship and a more female-oriented magic or paganism have been in conflict in Europe and America; here it seems that a more immediate experience of evil erodes that conflict, at least for some of the central characters. How does this story allow church and magic to coexist? What does this say about the nature of spirituality for some of the characters?
 

On the other hand, the Partisans are distinctly antireligious; they dream of a godless communism to supplant the bloody passions of a world they view as too irrational. The father became an assimilated, nonreligious Jew, and throughout the book he struggles with his own inability to believe in God. At the same time he is trying with all his might to believe, against all logic, that his children will survive. How did the ending resolve this conflict in him, or did it? And what is Murphy suggesting about the place of religion in an ethical society, whether it be postwar revolutionary communist, or family-based? What place do you think religion will—or should—have for the main characters in their new lives?
 

The village of Piaski is populated by many types of people: there are ordinary Polish citizens, collaborators, and secret revolutionaries, alongside Nazis and their imported workers. Though there are, as one character notes, “so many reasons to hate the war,” many of the villagers seem to be trying to simply endure the world of devastation that is closing in on their small town in the hopes that the war will end before they have to make greater sacrifices. Who in the town did you sympathize with? Try to recall villagers you would characterize as collaborators. Were their actions understandable to you? What about Hansel’s childish admiration for the Nazis? What might you have done in a similar situation?
 

The end of the novel brings satisfaction for some, but doesn’t avoid the real consequences of the war on the lives of these characters; all of them face futures that are radically altered from anything they have known before. Which characters do you think achieved redemption? Who got what they deserved? What do you think the future will be like for Hansel and Gretel? For the people of Piaski?
 

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7200 × 5.0300 × 8.1900 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780142003077
ISBN-10	0142003077
Author	Louise Murphy
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC014000, FIC010000
Subjects	historical fiction best sellers, holocaust books best sellers, survivor stories, holocaust stories, holocaust novels, best wwii books, the true story of hansel and gretel, ww2 book, wwii novels, hansel and gretel, fiction best sellers, world war 2 historical fiction, alternate history books, true story books, world war ii gifts, ww2 books, war, holocaust books, world war 2 books, WWII books, survival stories, retellings, alternate history, historical fiction, holocaust, women's fiction, FIC010000, FIC014000, true story, fairy tale, fairy tales