The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

  There were three knives. The carving knife was worn so thin it might break. The second knife was small, for paring vegetables. The third knife was his newest, a gift from the butcher when he said his confession before Christmas. Father Piotr put the knife in the pocket of his coat and slipped a small jar of homemade vodka in his other pocket. He looked at the clock, and impulsively took it off the hook where it hung. The Russians would steal it. They liked clocks. He threw it on the floor and stamped it to trash with his boot. Then he went out, closing the door carefully.

  “I should have waited another hour,” he muttered, but he was afraid to wait. He might fall asleep. He might be too tired. He might lose his nerve.

  The woods were so dark that Hansel fell into the ditch twice when he wandered off the road. It had been hard keeping awake until Magda finally fell into a deep sleep, her breath rasping like she was breathing underwater. Her face was flushed, and Hansel knew she was sick.

  If he was caught on the street after curfew, the soldiers would shoot him. Hansel shook his head. He could slip behind the houses. The shadows were dark, and he didn’t care if he got caught. He had to tell Father Piotr. Father Piotr was Magda’s brother. He was the priest. Priests were supposed to help people. Hansel ran faster toward the silent village.

  Hansel stood at the bottom of the steps. He was panting, but he gasped it out. “You have to help them. Help them. They’re going to die, Nelka, Telek—”

  Father Piotr raised his arm like he would strike the child. “Go home. Go back to Magda. Tell her to go into the woods. Run. Don’t let the sentry on the road see you. Get back to the hut and take Magda and Gretel to the secret place in the forest. Take them now. Run!”

  Something in his eyes made Hansel turn and race back toward the forest. He slipped behind a house and then suddenly stopped. He couldn’t bear not seeing what was going to happen. Hansel turned back and crept from house to house in the dark of a moonless night.

  Father Piotr didn’t see the small shape of the boy come up behind him. He walked down the street, not bothering to stay in the shadows himself. The soldiers knew that he visited the sick at night. He moved, lurching, almost as if he were drunk. He was glad the dogs had been shot. If the dogs had barked at him as he walked down the street, he might have lost his nerve.

  Hansel followed Father Piotr and nearly called out, but now it all seemed very scary and serious. The boy followed, creeping, his mouth dry, watching for the sentries.

  The house where the Brown Sister slept was near the far end of the village. It had a wooden porch that lay in shadows, and Father Piotr saw the soldier. He had been there since eight when the guard began for the night. At dawn he would be relieved.

  Father Piotr smiled at the young soldier who didn’t stand when he saw it was the priest.

  “You’re breaking the curfew, old man,” he said in bad Polish.

  The soldier had only been shaving a few years. He was the boy whose arm was injured at the Russian front. The arm had healed, and he picked up enough Polish to be useful, so the Major kept him.

  “Jolanta’s child is dying. Please let me go on,” Father Piotr whispered.

  “No one is allowed on the street. Major’s orders. She’ll have to die without you.”

  The priest sank down on the step as if exhausted. Thank God the boy spoke so quietly.

  “Let an old man rest, my son.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out the jar. “A sip of this will give me strength to get home.” He offered the jar to the boy.

  “Against the rules to drink on guard duty.” The boy smiled, took the jar, and drank deeply. As the jar tipped up, Father Piotr took out the knife and hid it beside his knee.

  Hansel, lying flat in the shadow of a house, saw the flash of metal. His legs began to shake, but he couldn’t stop watching.

  When the sentry tipped the jar a second time, Father Piotr reached up with a stabbing slash, the full weight of his shoulder turned into the blow, and cut the pale throat that curved outward slightly and bobbed with the swallowing. The soldier made a bubbling noise, and the jar fell onto the mud beside the steps. That was the only noise except for the splash of blood on the wood.

  Father Piotr held the boy so he wouldn’t fall while his blood pumped out, his hand over the young man’s mouth to hush the gurgling. The priest was soaked with the hot liquid, and the stench was all around them. The soldier was limp, the blood seeped slowly, and Father Piotr still held him.

  I have to move, he thought, but he stayed very still with the boy in his arms, feeling the blood soak into his coat and wet his skin. He forgot to say a prayer over the dead body.

  After what seemed to Hansel a long time, the priest stood and, as quietly as he could, let the soldier’s body bump down a step so he could be propped against the post that held the handrail at the bottom. If anyone saw the guard from down the street, he might think the boy was asleep.

  Father Piotr climbed the stairs. The house had not been repaired before the Brown Sister moved in, and the policeman who had lived there before the Germans killed him never had a strong bolt. No one would rob the police.

  If they put on a new bolt, she’ll scream before I can get in, the priest thought, but his shoulder crashing against the door ripped the bolt off at the screws where the wood was rotten. He was inside.

  The woman struggled out of the dress she had been taking off, and that gave Father Piotr the second he needed. As she flung off the brown cloth, her arms up in the air, mouth open in surprise, he stepped to her and slashed at her throat.

  It caught the chin and part of her throat. She fell backward onto the bed, and Father Piotr fell on top of her. A choking scream came out of her mouth, but he dug the knife into her throat and twisted it with the ferocious strength of his own terror. The woman’s scream became a gurgle as she thrashed against him. The baby began to cry from its box in the corner, and the woman battered his back with her hands while he turned the knife against the gristle of her neck.

  She finally lay limp, and he staggered back from the bed, leaving the knife in her neck. Her eyes followed him as he moved to the wall and leaned against it gasping, and her eyes stayed open after she died. Whimpering, he moved to a corner of the room to avoid her stare. The baby cried louder, and Father Piotr heard steps outside. The door, flopping loose, pushed open slowly, and Nelka was there.

  “My God! My God!”

  “Take the baby,” he croaked. “Get Telek. Run.”

  She moved to the baby and picked him up. Clutching him to her, she stared at Father Piotr.

  “Come with us,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “But they’ll kill you.” They stood in the house, the smell of blood around them, the sound of the hungry baby growing louder. “You have to run too.”

  “If they catch the murderer, they won’t follow you until morning. They may not find me here for hours.”

  “If you go home and clean yourself, they won’t suspect you. Who’d suspect you?” She was sobbing. “Telek wanted to run. I said they’d kill all the village if the baby disappeared. The SS would kill them all. You want them to find you here?”

  “They have to kill someone for this.” He was terribly tired. This beautiful girl. This beautiful child.

  “Take the babe and find Telek. Run.” She moved to embrace him, but he couldn’t bear for the sticky blood to mark her and threw his arms out to keep her away.

  She gave him a last look, turned, and moved swiftly out the door. She pulled open her coat and blouse and pushed the baby’s mouth onto her nipple as she moved. His wails turned to sucking as she disappeared down the porch steps.

  Father Piotr didn’t like to stay in the room with the dead woman. He went outside and sat on the porch at the top of the stairs and waited. A man would come at four to relieve the sentry. The priest wished he had the rest of the vodka. He stared out into the darkness, sitting above the crumpled body of the soldier.

  Still hidden, in the shadows, Hansel knew h
e had to move. Nelka had taken the baby and gone, and he had to go back to Magda. He had to tell her.

  The child crept up the stairs, trying not to look at the soldier’s body. “Father Piotr?”

  The priest didn’t recognize Hansel at first.

  “It’s me. Hansel.”

  Father Piotr stared at the child.

  “I’m going to tell Magda. They’ll be mad now. The Major and the Nazis.”

  “Tell Magda.” Father Piotr ran his hand over his face, leaving streaks of blood on the pale skin. Hansel shivered. Father Piotr rallied for a moment and remembered his sister.

  “Oh God! Run, boy. Tell Magda that I am a dead man. Tell her to hide in the woods. Tell her to take both of you with her. They’ll find me and want to kill her because she is my kin. Run!”

  “You should run too.” Hansel moved forward and took the old man’s cold hand, trying not think that the wetness was blood. “You can come with us.”

  “There isn’t time to speak of this. It’s done. Now run, boy! Don’t look back, and don’t get caught. Tell Magda and go into the forest. There’s time to hide. Run!”

  Hansel dropped the man’s hand and turned. He ran behind the house, into the shadows, and didn’t stop running until he came to the bend in the road. Then he slowed, breathless and aching, creeping into the trees to avoid the sentry. Magda was so sick. He had to wake her up. He had to get her and Gretel out of the hut. Hansel began to run again, ignoring the pain in his side.

  The whole village lay in silence, not even an owl breaking the peace. The sentries stayed near the Major’s offices and were nearly asleep. Father Piotr was the only fully awake person in the village, and he was like a man awake but dreaming.

  I didn’t ever tell her how much I love her, the priest was thinking. His mind was confused for a moment. Did he mean the woman? The beautiful woman in the field of wheat ? The only one he had ever loved? Surely he had told her.

  “I told her I loved her, and it was true,” he muttered. But he hadn’t told Nelka.

  He knew he was going to be cast into the outer darkness when he died. He had murdered in cold blood and had never told Nelka that he loved her. It was the final, crushing sin.

  At first he thought it was his heart he heard as he sat crying, but it was deeper than heartbeats and slower in rhythm. It was the booming of massive artillery. The Russian line was moving, and of all the villagers, he was the first to hear the guns as they came closer.

  March 21, 1944

  At three in the morning, the Major saw the priest sitting on the steps. The Major called out to him, and when the man didn’t move or speak, the Major walked up the steps past the bloody body of the young soldier who was so obviously dead that the Major didn’t even roll him off the steps and examine him. The door hung ajar, and it swung open slowly. He saw the knife in the woman’s throat, the empty box where the baby had slept, and knew what had happened. He left the priest sitting. He had seen men in that condition at the Russian front. The man wouldn’t run.

  The Brown Sister had been a cruel bitch, but a German bitch nevertheless. She had to be avenged, but it was the soldier’s corpse that made the Major angry. To endure Russian bullets and blizzards and die on a porch for nothing, butchered like a hog. It was too unfair. Going back down the street, the Major called softly, and the soldier posted at his office ran toward him.

  “Take the priest. He’s killed the boy and Sister Rosa. Wake the others. Get Wiktor, but don’t wake the Oberführer and don’t tell him about this yet. Let him sleep. This is our concern.”

  He went inside and sat at the desk. It created terrible complications. The Oberführer would want to kill the whole village, but there were only sixteen—no, fifteen, he corrected himself—fifteen soldiers. The fucking Poles. They had guns hidden. He knew it. “I won’t have my men killed in this dung heap,” he muttered. Germany was going to need them.

  And his orders were clear. No bodies were to be left for the Russians to find. He had just disposed of all the old corpses. They were to leave nothing to photograph.

  The Major spit on the floor. It was insanity. They should stop this and pull back into Germany. Make a line and hold it. All this delay while soldiers dug up bodies and made bonfires. And they said the trains still carried Jews eastward when they should have filled every train with supplies to help the army’s retreat. Madness.

  Wiktor came in, wearing no coat in his haste. “Heil Hitler.” He saluted correctly.

  “The priest killed Sister Rosa. And Corporal Elend.”

  Wiktor sucked his breath in. It was bad. He wanted to run, but he didn’t dare move.

  “Both dead, and the priest sitting on the steps. Covered in blood.” The Major massaged his face with his hands. The trucks were coming. They didn’t have enough time. “Take three soldiers and find that girl, Nelka. It was her baby.”

  Wiktor nodded. If only the girl was cowering somewhere with the brat. The Oberführer would get to take them as planned, or kill them. They’d die either way, and it might save the rest of the village. It might save him. He left running.

  “He won’t find her,” the Major muttered. “She has Telek. They’re in the woods by now.”

  And there wasn’t time to burn the priest’s body. The trucks could come by noon. The Oberführer might insist on some semblance of a trial. The man kept acting as if this collapsing world was all some great plan that worked normally. The reality was that the Poles wanted to kill every German on the earth. The Russians had broken through the German lines and were moving down on them. A hundred thousand Germans had been sent to Siberia, and millions had died, and the Oberführer was spending his time measuring babies’ noses and having transfusions of blood. The Major groaned and spit on the floor.

  He opened the drawer of the desk and took out a flask of brandy. He sipped it slowly. There was the problem of the priest. That he could take care of by dawn. The woman and baby were gone. He was sure of it. He sipped and stared out at the darkness. Dawn was hours away. Anything might happen before dawn.

  The guns were shelling all the time now. The Russian and the Mechanik and the others stayed in front, looking for stray units of Germans, usable guns and trucks, clearing abandoned tanks from the road, checking each village for German soldiers. The Russian troops killed every German they found. Wounded Germans, Germans barely breathing, Germans with hands up and guns thrown down, the Russians killed them all. Like shooting rats.

  For days now they had backtracked. Soon they would be at the village called Piaski. The Russian said that was the village closest to where he had left the children in November. Someone would have seen them. She was a smart girl. She would have found the village.

  “Mechanik! Get your ass up here!”

  They had found another tank. He had to try and start it so it wouldn’t block the road when the main force of men and equipment needed to pass. He climbed up on the cold metal and hoped that no one was inside. He hated working on the machine with a dead body beside him.

  “What’s the date?” he asked the Russian.

  “It’s about the fifteenth of March, Mechanik. Maybe the sixteenth.”

  “How long until we get to that village? Piaski?”

  “Maybe by the twenty-first. Maybe sooner if you get the damn tank off the road.”

  The Mechanik opened the lid of the tank and looked in. No corpses. It was a good sign.

  The Oberführer had woken up. He heard the sound of voices, dressed quickly, and went outside. The trucks must have come already. He hoped so. He’d been in this village too long.

  “What’s happening?” he asked a soldier running past. “Are the trucks here?”

  “The Major could tell you, sir. I’ve been ordered to his office.”

  The Oberführer sighed. The man was lying. The soldier knew what was happening, but he was too loyal to the Major to answer a simple question. 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.

  When he walked in the office, the first thing the SS man saw was the priest.

  “The priest has murdered a soldier, Oberführer. The boy who served so bravely at the Russian front. He also killed Sister Rosa.”

  The Oberführer stared at the priest. “Why—” he began, and then he knew. The man was the great-grandfather of the chosen baby. That made him Nelka’s grandfather.

  “Where’s Nelka? The baby?”

  “Gone, Oberführer. The man Telek is also gone.”

  “Kill the priest. Have the village present, and then kill every third person. Nelka had other family? An old woman? Two children who lived with her? They’re related somehow. You’ll have to send soldiers to get them. None of the family can live now. We’ll kill all of them.”

  The Major breathed hard. His hands trembled. The bastard with his orders. He’d never fought a single battle. “There are problems with that, Oberführer. My orders are to leave no bodies. We just dug up those that were shot when the village was taken and burned them. There isn’t time to burn all those people before the trucks get here, and the trucks can’t wait.”

  “Shoot them in the forest. It’s deep enough to hide anything.”

  “If we begin shooting women and children now, we might not see Germany again.”

  “Are you telling me that a German woman and a German soldier were murdered in cold blood, and there will be no reparations?”

  “I have only fifteen soldiers. There are fifty men who are able in this village, and women who would fight if we start shooting children.”

  “They have nothing to fight with.”

  “God knows what they have. I don’t want to find out. I’ll kill the priest. He’s the murderer. He admits it. That’s justice.”