The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

  Piotr and me. Both of us so old that death has been sitting on our noses for years. All they could do is kill him and send me off to a camp, but our young ones are alive in the forest.

  Magda wanted to tell Rachele what she knew, she wanted to have someone rejoice with her, but the woman sat with her eyes shut. The other people in the truck were strained and dirty, some of them had bruises and dried blood on their faces like they had been beaten.

  Their look of despair, their helplessness, moved Magda. 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. Her tears began, and she was angry with herself. She needed to be strong, but she couldn’t stop the tears.

  “End it,” she whispered to God, not praying but demanding. “Come and end this world.”

  But Magda thought of Hansel struggling toward the hidey-hole. She thought of him leading Gretel on, and she couldn’t wish that the world would end. She pictured Nelka holding her baby and fleeing with Telek, hiding in the earth and comforting Hansel and Gretel. As long as those young ones walked on the earth, she wanted it to exist for them.

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

  She shut her eyes and sat silent for nearly an hour as the truck lurched on the muddy roads. It was moving more slowly now, and she heard voices from the cab of the truck. The motor coughed and they came to a stop.

  “Because of Hansel you can let the world live,” she whispered. “But if they kill him, I say that you must come down with all your angels and end it. I charge you with this.”

  The tailgate of the truck dropped.

  “Raus! Raus! Raus!”

  One of the bearded Jews lifted Magda as easily as a log of wood and set her on the ground. Her legs buckled, and Rachele put her arm around Magda. She had to get to wherever it was they were going. If she could just live for a month or two in the camp, the Russians would free them.

  The sound of a train grew louder down the tracks. She hoped they could sit down soon. If she could rest in the train, drink a little water, then she could face the camp with some energy. The pain of her rib stabbed her with every step, but she ignored it. It was time to gather her strength for survival. Perhaps she would fool them all yet.

  They were being driven by shouts and prods. Magda had to force herself not to look back. She didn’t want to see what they did with her brother’s body. The doors of the cattle car rolled open. Magda shook her head. The bodies of the prisoners were packed so tightly that it was impossible to fit in more people, but the soldiers began hitting them with clubs and screaming.

  She didn’t climb into the boxcar but was pushed from behind until she was up and wedged in tightly. Rachele was beside her, the two of them smashed together. The door crashed shut, and a man screamed as it closed on his foot. The door bounced on his flesh and bone, and then slammed. Magda heard the bolt shoved down and knew they were locked inside.

  “But we can’t even breathe,” she whispered.

  Magda thought of her notion of sitting in the train and sipping water, and she knew that nothing was going to be like what she had imagined. For a moment she was terrified and nearly began to scream. They were going to be killed.

  “Where are they taking us?” a woman called out.

  “Birkenau. The new camp,” someone said. “Everyone goes to Birkenau since last year. History will remember us.”

  History is the bookkeeping of murderers, Magda thought, but she didn’t say it aloud.

  Magda stood, held up by the bodies around her. It wasn’t cold because so many of them were packed together. Her mouth was very dry, and she wished it would rain so that some of the water might run into the boxcar, but it was clear and dry outside as the train moved on toward the west.

  The worst of it was that she had to urinate. She held it as long as she could, and then she had to release the urine and let it run down her legs. The humiliation of it bothered her.

  “Stop fussing, old fool,” she muttered. “What’s a little healthy urine in this place.”

  The sounds inside the boxcar didn’t penetrate to the world outside, the mechanical chugging of the train covering up the cries. Only a single vixen in a field stopped trotting and turned her head as the train passed. Her hackles were raised, the fur roughened over her shoulders, and she bared her teeth warningly, ears pricked forward, ready for flight.

  When the doors opened, Magda hadn’t realized they had stopped. She felt the rush of air, cold but not fresh. It was air with a tinge of smoke and another smell in it, sweetish and cloying, that she couldn’t identify. She was swept out of the car by the surge of people, and her legs were so swollen, her joints so stiff, she couldn’t have walked except for a man who took her around the waist and half carried her.

  “Come on, Grandmother,” he said in a perfectly calm voice. His beard was filthy and matted. His face was ravaged as Magda knew her own was, but he nodded at her, and Magda found the strength to walk a little.

  They were driven like pigs. Blows from sticks. Dogs lunging and barking. Driven so fast that she only got a glimpse of a series of large redbrick buildings. Steep roofs. Dormer windows. Neat walks. All the mud was shoveled off the walks, and huge piles of firewood, hundreds of yards long, were stacked against the brick side of the building.

  “They have factories at the camp,” she said to the man.

  He said nothing but kept his grip on her, and they moved at a trot now. Magda knew that even with his help, she couldn’t go much farther. But they kept on. He spoke to her occasionally.

  “Little Grandmother, you are doing well.”

  “I chopped my own wood and drew my own water,” she tried to say. Her mouth couldn’t form the words properly, and it came out a garbled noise.

  “Good. Good, Grandmother.”

  Then she fell when a soldier hit the man holding her with a stick. He was driven to one side, and she, managing to pull herself erect, was driven to the other.

  “Line up!” The people were whipped into rows of five and walked past waiting SS men. The male prisoners were on one side, the women on the other.

  Looking at Magda and the young woman next to her who held a baby, the SS man screamed, “To the left, bitches! Left!”

  The young woman hesitated. She stared down wildly at her baby.

  “He’s dead,” she cried out. “My baby is dead.” She tried to go to the right with a man who held his hands out to her from the men’s lines.

  “He’s dead,” she screamed as the SS soldier ran toward her.

  “Jew bitch!” The soldier lifted his stick and hit her such a blow that she dropped to the platform, blood streaming down her head. He kept hitting her until Magda knew she was dead, but Magda was in a line, and she moved on until the young woman, and her baby, and the man beating her, disappeared. A woman next to Magda, almost as old as she, put her arm around Magda.

  “The woman told the truth. The baby was dead. I begged her to put it down in the train. We’ll walk together, Bubbeh,” she said to Magda.

  Magda was barely conscious. The woman had called her grandmother. She knew that was what she had said. She had heard the Yiddish word before from the Jews in the village.

  “I’m not a grandmother,” Magda said, but the words were still just a gargle of sound.

  The older men and all the young boys were walking with the women now. Magda couldn’t understand this place. There were wooden barracks and barbed wire everywhere. It was much larger than she had thought it would be. It was a city.

  The concrete steps under their feet led down, down until they entered through a door and went into a room underground. The soldiers stood on each side. They shouted and screamed, and the people around Magda tried to move faster down the stairs to avoid the whips and clubs. The woman helping Magda stumbled and nearly fell. The ja
rring cleared Magda’s head a little, and she saw they could spread out some in the room.

  She took a deep breath and frowned. There was a smell she couldn’t place. She breathed again. Something burning. Something sweet like pork. Against the wall was a bench with numbered hooks above it. Magda wanted to sit, but the soldiers kept shouting.

  “They want us to undress, Bubbeh,” the woman said.

  Magda stared at her. “But—”

  The woman smiled, and something in her smile made Magda wonder if this woman was insane. It was such a calm smile.

  “Here, Grandmother.” She unbuttoned Magda’s skirt and blouse, and Magda stood like a child and let her do it. All around them the people were taking off their clothes. “We’re going to shower.”

  The woman undressed herself as quickly as she had undressed Magda. She hung all the clothes neatly and then took Magda’s shoes and tied the laces together and hung them up on another hook. She tied her shoes up and hung them with Magda’s. The room was filled with naked people, and they stood quietly now, some of them trying to cover their genitals, most standing with no modesty, stunned and not knowing what to do.

  “I hope the water is hot,” Magda said to the woman, who again smiled her gentle smile. Magda was relieved that her voice was clear enough to understand. She would recover from the train and work. If you could work, the Nazis would let you live.

  “Remember the number on our hook,” Magda said. “We’ll have to dress quickly if they don’t give us uniforms.”

  The woman put her arm around Magda’s shoulders. Then the shouting began again. They were herded into another room.

  “Look! Water taps. We can drink. And nozzles to shower.”

  The woman tightened her arm around the older wo man’s shoulders. Magda tried to support herself, but her feet stumbled over each other.

  “I need a drink,” she said, but the woman was staring back at the door where they had entered, and she tightened her grip even more. The door closed with a great crash of the heavy steel, and Magda heard the bolt slam down. Then she heard something above their heads. Voices.

  “What are they saying?” she asked.

  “I think they said ‘Give them something to chew on.’ I’m not sure.”

  Magda heard the sound of truck engines outside. They were revved up until the roar filled the room. She heard a rattling sound in the metal pillar next to where they stood. Pellets poured into the pillar from above and struck the perforated metal sides like gravel, and then she couldn’t breathe. The air was full of something that burned her skin and lungs. She kept opening her mouth and taking air in, but the air wasn’t air anymore.

  The room was full of screaming. Magda was on the floor and others climbed on top of her, trying to get to the fresh air left at the ceiling. The shrieking and howling was muffled outside by the engines of the transport trucks which revved to drown out the sound of the people being gassed.

  Pictures flew into Magda’s mind. The giant hornbeam trees. A cup of water from the creek, trembling under her lips. 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.

  The mass of naked bodies became a mound that trembled only occasionally. Arms stretched out, fingers reaching for nothing, legs akimbo, heads thrown back, tongues out and eyes staring, the shivering mass lay still, and the room was silent. For a few minutes they lay there, and then the SS doctor, watching from his peephole, gave the signal to turn on the ventilators that pumped the gas from the room. The air cleared, but the men who came in, pulling at the mass of tangled corpses, wore masks. There were pockets between the bodies that still held gas.

  Magda’s body was under many others. A man leaned over her, pulled open her mouth and stared inside. There were almost no teeth, and no gold. He cut her hair with a slash of the dull razor and put the white locks in a bag. He turned to the man next to the old woman and smiled. Two teeth were gold. The camp worker knocked them out with two blows and looped a strap of leather around the man’s wrist. This gassed Jew was too bald to bother cutting his fringe of hair.

  The worker dragged the body with some difficulty to the elevator and went back at a run for Magda. She was as light as a child. He threw her on top and the elevator moved up.

  The upper room was trembling with the noise of the flames. The fires that burned night and day were stoked with such violence, the ovens had become living creatures that roared and rumbled. The heat was so oppressive that the soot-stained workers felt battered by it.

  A camp inmate threw Magda’s body off the top of the pile of corpses packed into the elevator and it fell onto a metal stretcher. Working as fast as he could, he dragged off a man, almost as fleshy as a normal person, and threw him on top of the old woman.

  The orders had been explicit. The best load for rapid burning was one fat body that burned well, one starved that couldn’t burn much, and a child. It had been worked out and was proven to be the most efficient.

  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.

  Not finding a child, he threw a small woman onto the stretcher and another worker grabbed the end of it. At a run, they took it and set it on rollers in front of the oven door. Five ovens in a line. Three compartments in each red mouth.

  The oven door cranked upward like a metal curtain. Another inmate, as thin as the corpses he burned, shoved coke under the grate. The two workers pushed the metal stretcher into the roar of the oven, the flames so hot that their eyes dried from the wall of heat.

  The stretcher lay on the grate, and in a smooth movement, one worker pushed a metal fork against the bodies. His partner pulled out the stretcher with a hard jerk, and the fork dug into the flesh, keeping the bodies inside the oven, letting them fall onto the grate.

  The door rattled down. There was no time to rest. The men ran with the stretcher to the elevator and began to pull out more bodies. Some days it seemed the whole world was in line downstairs, waiting to come up on the elevators.

  The short white hair left on Magda’s head lit around her face and burned first. It was a puff of light for a second, and then the skin began to burn. It took only twenty minutes for her shoulders and torso and legs and her pitiful, twisted feet to turn to ash. The heat was so great that even the bones turned to ash and only an occasional tiny lump showed that the ash had been a person.

  It was a while before the ash was raked from beneath the grate. Magda’s ashes were raked out and mingled with the ashes of hundreds of others. And she had one last journey before the wheel of her life in this world stopped completely.

  Her ashes were dumped with the ashes of thousands of others into a truck and covered so they wouldn’t blow out. The truck drove off, one in a long line of trucks, to the banks of the river Vistula. There the workers shoveled and dumped the ashes on the water, but unlike a casting of bread onto water, no sins were forgiven by this act.

  Magda, that which had been Magda, swirled into the air and fell lightly, drifting with the breeze which occasionally had a hint in it of the coming spring. The white ash fell on the surface of the river and lay for a moment, and then was gradually moistened by the water and slipped under the surface and washed down to be caught and moved in strong sweeps of current, icy with the runoff of snow, to disappear.

  The men threw the shovels in the trucks. It was late in the day, but that did not mean that the work was over. There was no end to the work of the furnaces. The ovens had to be fed day and night or grow cold and useless. Any break in the burning was inefficient.

  The trucks turned back towa
rd the long brick buildings and the setting sun reflected in an orange glitter on the dormer windows as they drew close. The chimneys cast their smoke up into the sky, and the workers, inmates of Birkenau, saw none of it anymore.

  They sat hunched on the floor of the truck and knew that they must not see it because if they saw this thing and thought about it, it would begin to eat at them. The furnaces would work their way inside them and char them from the inside out. Then they would weaken and be thrown into the fire by their fellow workers who had not looked at the chimneys.

  But above the buildings, had they only dared to look, the air was disturbed, beaten, torn apart. The waves of heat lifted into the sky, and some said it was the natural dispersing of the heat from the ovens. The waves of hot air moved over the camp night and day, and one man in the truck weakened when they were nearly back at the buildings. He looked up.

  He saw the dark smoke and the columns of vibrating heat in the sky, and the thought came to him that the moving air was the souls of all the people. There were so many of them going back to God, so quickly, that the air rippled, the smoke tossed by the heat of their souls rising.

  The man shut his eyes. He knew that this single thought had made him fuel for the ovens. But he was too weakened, and he gave up and allowed himself to think of life before, the sweet face of his wife turned toward the child, a meal on the table, and then he looked up again at the chimneys and thought he could already see his own soul above the roof, rising in the hot air. He knew that he was a dead man, but he smiled and just sat smiling as the truck stopped, and all the others climbed out and began to run toward the fires.

  Leaving

  “Magda will worry. We have to go back to the hut.”

  “The hut’s gone. They took Magda.”

  Gretel shook her head. “She’ll be back soon.”

  Hansel stood and listened. A raven’s call rattled over his head, and the creek gurgled. His back hurt, and the red marks on Gretel’s legs must hurt too, but she didn’t seem to notice it.