The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

“‘All right. I’m Hansel.’ He smiled. He was not himself anymore. He was not the little Jew who hid in the grease pit. He wondered if he could change his stomach to a stomach full of food. He tried to imagine it but couldn’t.” 

Hansel welcomes the opportunity to begin a new life with his new name. He remembers the tragedies of his recent life and smiles to think that they could cease to be part of his life story. Still, the reality of his hunger tempers Hansel’s optimism. He can gain a degree of solace by pretending to be someone new but pretending has its limits.

“It would have been wonderful to sit down and think for an hour about the past, but there was no way to think about the good parts without having her mind drift to the terrible things.” 

The Stepmother articulates the fraught role of memory as a means of comfort. The past and the present are in conversation with one another, and awful experiences in the present can cast a shadow over even the most positive memories. The Stepmother’s thoughts exemplify her stern approach to managing emotion. If she believes that a memory will negatively impact her ability to function, she is willing to push it aside.

“God packed up and left Poland in 1939.” 

The Russian partisan says this line in response to the Mechanik’s plea request that he help the Stepmother and the Mechanik “’n God’s name” (25). It suggests the Russian Communist rejection of religion as well as the degree to which World War II damaged Poland. The Russian implies that God has abandoned the country. 

“If they didn’t get food soon, he wouldn’t care about eating, and when the caring was gone, death would come.” 

Hansel is only 7 years old, so his familiarity with feelings of hunger and despair is particularly jarring. These thoughts imply that he has experienced extreme hunger before and knows the sort of response it creates. The quote also illustrates the stakes of Magda’s choice to care for Hansel and Gretel. Had she chosen not to feed him soon after he thinks about giving up, Hansel likely would have died.

“Let her eat you up, Gretel. There are worse wolves than that waiting with sharp teeth. Let the child have you.” 

When Gretel resists assuming the Christian identity of the girl in her forged communion photo, Magda reminds her of the absolute necessity of pretending. Her language evokes that of fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood.” It also suggests that Magda is not the villain in Gretel’s story, even though she is called “the Witch.” World War II is a bigger, more monstrous threat than a single old woman with an oven could ever be.

“He had never believed in the God his father had talked of night and day. He had never believed, and there had been nothing since 1939 to make him believe.” 

The Mechanik asks God for strength after he kills a German soldier, but he immediately regrets his request. He sees it as a sign of weakness and desperation. He identifies as a man of science and wants to maintain that identity instead of allowing his circumstances to influence it. The Mechanik’s words are a reminder to himself that there is no reason to return to his father’s religion.

“Magda had no use for the church, but it gave the people heart. The Communists couldn’t take it away. The Communists vomited on the church but they couldn’t drive it out of the heart of the Poles.”

Magda analyzes the importance of the Christian church in Poland and finds that it transcends ceremony. This quote positions religion as a form of resistance to authoritarian rule. The Communists can outlaw the structures and rituals of Christianity, but they cannot prevent its influence on the Polish population.

“When you’re falling off a cliff, you can even grip a razor blade, child.” 

Magda urges Gretel to enter the Major’s headquarters despite her fear. The children’s need for ration cards is a more pressing, long-term concern than the immediate danger of encountering the Nazi officer. Magda’s brutal imagery illustrates the extreme difficulty of life in World War II Poland. 

“The Nazi nodded. You could tell sometimes by the bones and the hair. The girl was quite a pure Aryan type.” 

This window into the Major’s thoughts reveals the absurdity of the Nazi position on ethnic purity. Gretel is a Jewish child, but her fair appearance heavily influences the Major’s valuation of her life. His confidence in a false conclusion makes clear the flaws in the Nazis’ ideology.

“SS. The skull worn proudly to show that they defied death and were not frightened by it. But to the Poles the SS were the Angels of Death, the winged skeleton who comes for your bones and drags them out of you while you squeal like a hog being butchered.”

When the Oberführer arrives in the village, Magda thinks of how differently he and other SS officers appear depending on an observer’s perspective. What looks brave to a Nazi insider is barbaric and almost supernaturally terrifying to vulnerable populations. Magda’s stark imagery exposes the violence of their policies.

“‘And think, Telek. They just live out here. They can walk around and are free and eat and play and have the whole forest to be their home.’ ‘We have the forest too, child.’ ‘But we don’t have it the way they do, Telek.”

Gretel muses aloud about the relative freedom that animals enjoy compared to the people of Poland under Nazi occupation. When Gretel and her family are in the forest, they constantly are alert to the dangers of any other human’s presence. This quote is especially poignant because of the violence Gretel encounters when she is raped in the woods. No matter what precautions she takes, Gretel cannot exist in the forest without making herself vulnerable.

“Telek said the Nazis were a rabid dog in Poland’s house that was biting and killing the family. Now a Russian black bear, lean from winter starvation, savage and wild, knocks on the door. The bear will kill the dog, but how do the Poles get rid of the bear?”

Telek uses wild animals as a metaphor for the difficult position Poland occupies in World War II. Though the country benefits from Russian offensives against the Nazis, its citizens worry about the eventual price they will pay for accepting Russian aid. 

“When she tried to think it was like being in a room and running into walls wherever she turned. She lay there for a long time, but her mind had become a single, light-filled room that kept her very still.” 

Gretel’s rape and the memory loss that follows it are significant turning points in the novel. This quotation describes how her mind attempts to protect her from recognizing her violation by temporarily closing off her memory of the event. The image of a sterile, walled-off room evokes the Nazis’ cruel usage of control and institutionalization. 

“God didn’t come down and kill us. I don’t see God shooting children and priests. None of us met God beating up Jews and showing them into railroad cars. This is men doing the murdering. Talk to men about their evil, kill the evil men, but pray to God. You can’t expect God to come down and do our living for us. We have to do that ourselves.” 

Starzec, an old man who joins with the partisans to sabotage German tanks, chastises a young comrade who blames God for damage the Nazis have done to Poland. He illustrates the rationale of a person could maintain faith in a God while witnessing atrocities. Starzec’s words have a strong affect on his comrade. The young man decides to pray again after avoiding it for three years.

“Those men who had been at the Russian front would all have to be killed someday. Their loyalty to the Führer and the larger plan had been compromised by the stress of battle. Their usefulness was over.”

The Oberführer believes that German soldiers are more loyal to one another than they are to their superiors. His words show the disconnect between Nazi leadership and the soldiers who the leaders require to implement their plans. They also show the ruthlessness with which men like the Oberführer evaluate the worth of human lives.

“‘I am the Chalice,’ he whispered. The great truths had been poured into him, the selected one. He held the knowledge, and if the war was lost, he would be able to teach the next generation. But he must be pure. He must be the purest of the pure […].”

The Oberführer’s fanaticism and egocentrism become more pronounced as the Germans lose ground in Poland. His discovery that he has transfused Gypsy blood into his body through Nelka sends him over the edge. The Oberführer’s obsession with purity is tied to his desire for personal glory and acclaim. It suggests that the Nazi emphasis on control and order is unsustainable even within the movement’s own leadership.

“He welcomed the clean terror of battle after the years of sitting in the mud of this village. He felt like he was going to a lover.”

As the Major prepares to leave Piaski, his relief at returning to combat implies that he is less invested in the implementation of Nazi systems of order and more interested in fighting alongside his men. His feelings illustrate the conflict between Nazi leadership and the soldiers ordered to carry out its agenda.

“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.” 

For much of World War II, Magda has lived alone in the Polish forest. But, when she is taken from her hut to a concentration camp, she is hit will the full force of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The weight of that force is strong enough to make Magda wish the world would end.

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

Magda’s anger at the state of the world abates slightly when she considers Nelka, Telek, their baby, Hansel, and Gretel. She ultimately decides that the world is worth keeping for the love and goodness that persist in it despite the evil she has witnessed. 

“Faces flipped through her mind like a book of pictures being thumbed. Brother. Sister. Grandmother. Mother, and the face of a child. A boy. Curly hair dyed blond. Black eyes. The flickering vision of life stopped with the boy, and his dark eyes stared into her own as she lay trampled and gasping, and then she was dead.” 

Magda’s death in the gas chamber is a major plot point in the novel. Although she does not burn in her own oven like the witch in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Magda still experiences a painful end. Her powerful connection to Hansel is solidified when his is the last face she pictures before dying.

“The camp inmate didn’t stop to wipe off the sweat that ran into his eyes. He tugged at the bodies. There weren’t many children anymore. Most were dead already, he guessed. He wondered if there were any children left in the world, but he stopped his mind from the thought. Thoughts were a luxury that led to death.” 

This quotation highlights the vulnerability of young people during World War II. It also emphasizes the scale of the suffering that the war has brought, and the impossibility of functioning under the weight of so much grief. To continue performing basic tasks, the inmate cannot allow himself to think.

“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 narrator uses the imagery of a flood to describe the return of Gretel’s memories. This imagery is fitting because Gretel lost her memories during an ice storm. Now that winter has passed and the ice has thawed, Gretel’s mind has also been unfrozen.

“He spoke their names over and over, and watched these gifts brought out of darkness, these bits of flesh, this blood of his blood and bone of his bone, his children, begin to smile as they became, once again, themselves.” 

Moments after he reunites with Hansel and Gretel, the Mechanik tells them their original names. His words have power: the children immediately reclaim an aspect of their identities that had been lost. The phrases “blood of his blood” and “bone of his bone” allude to the book of Genesis in the Bible and imply the creation of human life.