“Gretel, what was my name? Before the forest?”
She was silent and tears came into her eyes. His name was as lost to her as her own, and she couldn’t bear telling that truth to her brother.
“We have to call each other Hansel and Gretel. The Stepmother said. You know that.”
He nodded his head. The Stepmother had said. Gretel didn’t want to say his name because it still wasn’t safe. Someday it would be different, and she could tell him. He fell asleep and slept deeply for the first time in months.
Bread
For three weeks they walked. Now that the Germans were gone, it was a little easier. People fed them, and they could walk openly on the roads. Gretel asked directions and begged food, and there was something in her insistence that made people point the way. A man once walked a mile with the children and showed them a dirt road that would keep them away from the stream of Russians moving toward the city.
“They captured the city at the end of July,” the man said. He looked at the beautiful girl child. “But don’t trust the Russians. Stay away from them.”
“We’re going to find our father and stepmother.”
The man watched the children walk away toward the north and the city. Everyone was looking for someone. And most of them would be disappointed. He shook his head and turned back to his fields. He wondered who would steal his crops this autumn. Probably the Russians. He was too cynical, his wife said, but the world wouldn’t care about Poland when war was over.
The road outside the city was full of trucks and tanks. The Russians poured into the city and onward toward the west.
“They don’t look like soldiers,” Gretel said.
“They beat the Germans. How are we going to find Father?” Hansel waved at the ragged soldiers who sometimes waved back.
“We’ll go to the house in the ghetto and wait for him.”
Hansel remembered being in the apartment with a lot of people and the cantor singing under the window. But that was all. He didn’t remember anything much before the forest. There was just the forest and Gretel and Magda and Nelka and Telek and him.
A Russian soldier tried to speak to the children in broken Polish. He finally gave up and simply said, “Bialystok?”
Gretel nodded.
The soldier waved at a passing truck and when it stopped, he picked up the children and put them in the back. “Bialystok,” he shouted at the driver. The Russian soldiers in the back grinned at Hansel and Gretel, and Hansel grinned back until his face was sore.
“They smell bad,” Gretel whispered.
“They have to chase the Nazis. There isn’t time to wash.”
Gretel watched the buildings which were larger and larger and closer together as they drove into the city. She knew it was Bialystok, but everything had changed.
“It’s big.” Hansel shivered.
“I don’t see anything I know.”
The truck rattled over a damaged bridge, the railing shell-pocked and broken.
“Bialy Lake,” she shouted. “We have to get out. I can get home from the park.”
The men laughed when she tried to climb out, and they shouted to the driver, who stopped. Hansel and Gretel were lifted and dropped down on the far side of the bridge. They walked and walked, and she finally sat down on a patch of dirt and thought.
“This is the Bialy Lake. It has to be the park, but it doesn’t look like the park anymore. They cut so many trees. And the buildings—”
Hansel looked at the buildings of the city beyond the dirt area. He shivered. Half of them were blackened and empty, burned out and roofless. The others had no windows and stood abandoned.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know. Shut up, Hansel.”
But he didn’t shut up. He walked down a street with Gretel trailing after him, and he began to ask people questions. Tugging at a woman’s sleeve, he would demand, “Where are all the people who used to be here? Where did all the people live that the Nazis made live here?”
Hansel didn’t dare say the word Jew. He asked in dozens of ways but he was afraid to say that word to anyone. An old woman stopped and stared at the child whose hair was half dirty blond and half brown. She shook her head.
“Where is the ghetto?”
“Burned, boy. Burned and gone. All of it.”
“Where are the people?”
She shrugged and turned away.
“The city isn’t like it was.” Gretel sighed and sat down on a curb in the busy marketplace.
“What was it like?” Hansel put his head on her shoulder and watched the people bartering for vegetables and even an occasional lump of butter.
“There was a man with a monkey.”
“What does a monkey look like?”
“It was little and brown and furry, and it took the coins out of your hand and tipped his hat at you.”
“I want a monkey,” Hansel said. “I want my own monkey.”
“And you could get on the trolley and ride out to the woods. And the horses were lovely that pulled it. And the market on Piaskes where you could buy—”
Hansel stood up tiredly. They had to find the ghetto. He walked to a man who was carrying an old tire in his arms. Tugging at the man’s shirt, Hansel asked again.
“Where are the people who lived here? When the Germans came? Where was the ghetto?”
The man turned, and Hansel looked up at him. For a moment they both stared at each other without moving. His hair was longer, more shaggy than when Hansel had seen him last, but the dark eyes and long eyelashes were the same, the handsome face was only a little dirty.
“Run, Gretel! It’s him! Run!”
She saw the man and leapt up. The two children ran between the crowds of peasants, stepping on food laid out on blankets, uncaring about the shouts and curses that followed them.
The man was close behind them. He had thrown down the tire and was loping after them. The man was dressed as a Polish peasant but he had the face of the Oberführer.
Hansel didn’t look over his shoulder. In the mass of people crowded into the square, he and Gretel managed to lose the man at first. They ran down a long street and stopped, panting, their hearts banging.
“Run! He’s coming!”
The Oberführer had turned into the street with long strides and came after them. Hansel couldn’t look back again. They ran and darted down one street and then another. Once they turned into an alley with no way out, and Gretel helped him climb through a little hole in the fence to get to the next street.
“Stop, Hansel.”
He stopped and looked back at his sister. The Nazi was not in sight.
“This is it. This is where the ghetto was.”
It was even worse than the rest of the city. The chimneys were torn from the building in front of her. To their right was a line of bombed buildings, the bricks blackened by fire.
“The cobblestone pavement,” she muttered, looking down. It led to the alley where you turned. “The third floor, second door on the left. That was our apartment.”
“We have to keep going,” he begged. It was getting late. The sky was darkening. It was going to be night soon. The Oberführer might find them if they stood on the street.
They had run into the desolated section of the city until there were no people around them. Only the blasted buildings stood, their shadows falling on the two children.
“It was the Oberführer.”
“Yes.” She shivered.
“He’ll kill us. He killed—” Hansel stopped. He didn’t want to think about whether the Oberführer had killed anyone else. It was a big city. They would never meet him again with so many people.
“We’ll sleep here, Gretel. Tomorrow we’ll ask where the people went.”
“There aren’t any people left. I don’t know if these are the right cobblestones. The buildings all look different now.”
“Come on.”
They climbed over rubble and went into the front of a house. It ha
d been divided into apartments, but all the doors were gone, and the glass was broken out. The children walked up the stairs that still stood.
“Don’t get close to the edge,” she told him. The railing had been broken off and lay in pieces at the bottom.
They walked up to the next floor, and Gretel looked for a bed or a blanket to lie on. One room had an iron bed, but the springs and mattress were gone. Another room was full of feathers from a mattress that was ripped open, the cloth rotting and spotted with mildew.
Hansel picked up handfuls of the goose down and threw it in the air. It clung to his hair and shirt, and he laughed. There were photographs on the floor. A boy holding his dog. People sitting on a blanket outside wearing bathing suits for swimming.
“Look.” Gretel showed him the photograph. “They were having a picnic.”
“The Germans let them?”
“It must have been before the Germans.” Gretel laid the picture down and covered it with feathers. “Come on.”
They went up until they came to a stair that led onto the roof. It was a hot night. The air barely stirred. Leaning over the parapet, Gretel looked out at the gutted buildings standing close together, and she didn’t see a single person. “Let’s sleep outside.”
Hansel nodded. He didn’t like being inside anymore. It made him think about the hut and the stove. And Magda. He closed his hand over the bottle in his pocket.
They took some sacks out of a room downstairs and carried them up to the roof. The sacks were rough, but both children were too tired to care. Gretel fell asleep immediately, but Hansel twisted and turned. Finally he got up and crept down the stairs. He took Magda’s bottle from his pocket and looked for something to use to tie it. Finding a piece of string, he tied it on to the bottle. Then the boy set the bottle on a broken piece of wood and put the string across the stair. He looked at his work for a moment and climbed back up to the roof.
Hansel fell asleep then, curled up close to his sister, both of them sweating lightly from the heat rising off the roof, until dawn when the breeze cooled them and they lay limp and dreaming.
It was still dark, but a gray sort of darkness, when the sound of glass splintering woke Hansel. He didn’t stop to think but grabbed Gretel and shook her.
“Run,” he whispered. “It’s the Oberführer.”
Groggy with sleep, Gretel stood, but his terror seized her and brought her to full alertness. They looked around, and Hansel took her hand.
“The roofs. We can jump.”
Running to gain momentum, the children jumped off the edge and landed with a hollow thud on the next roof. It hadn’t been a bad jump, only a few feet. The silhouette of a man came into the doorway leading onto the roof behind them.
Hansel had landed running. There must be a door, some way to get down. But the door was heavy and slumped on its hinges, blocking the stairs.
Gretel looked behind and saw the Oberführer’s pale face looking across the gap in the buildings. “Why does he chase us? The war’s over.” She sobbed.
Hansel didn’t care why. He took her hand and they ran across the roof, running around holes. The light was paler now, but it was still hard to see clearly. They jumped three more times until they came to an edge that was too far from the building next to it.
Hansel measured the distance with his eyes. Then he looked back. The Oberführer was moving more slowly now, but he kept coming over the roofs toward them. His beautiful pale face shone in the gray darkness. Gretel was close to tears.
“I want Telek.”
“We have to jump, Gretel. He can’t do it. He’s too heavy.”
“He’ll catch us. We’ll fall.”
“No we won’t.”
The boy stared across the gap in the buildings. He’d never jumped so far before.
“That roof is all burned. We’ll break through and fall. We’ll die.”
“No we won’t.” He was screaming. “Hold my hand. We’ll run and jump. Quick.”
The Oberführer began to run when he saw they were going to jump again.
Holding hands, the boy and girl ran toward the edge and simultaneously leapt into space. Light-boned and starved, their bodies hung in the air, and the Oberführer stopped to watch. They disappeared from view, and the man ran to look.
Both children lay on the edge of the roof opposite. He looked at the distance and the holes in the roof and cursed. “Fucking Gypsies!”
Gretel was sobbing. Hansel had cut his leg where it had gone through the shingle of a burned place on the roof. He stood up, ignoring the blood trickling down his leg.
“Come on.” He trotted toward the far edge of the building, and he was ready to jump again, to jump hundreds of buildings, to fly if he had to, but he saw the old metal steps used as a fire escape clinging perilously to the side of the building. Hansel climbed onto it, and Gretel followed, still crying, but moving fast behind Hansel.
They climbed down for what seemed a long time, and finally had to drop six feet when the ladder ended above the alley. Hansel waited for Gretel, and they hugged.
“We have to get back where people are.”
She nodded, and they walked toward the street.
Rising out of the dawn light, at the mouth of the alley, the Oberführer stood and waited for the children. He blocked their exit, and there were only tall buildings on each of the other three sides. Hansel looked back at the ladder, but it was too high for them to reach.
The man was on them. He picked up Hansel and slapped him, holding the boy with outstretched arms. “Nelka told you about the blood. You dirty Gypsies are going to use it against me. Trash. Mud people. Filthy Gypsies!”
The Oberführer was screaming, and he ignored Gretel who was beating against his side. The SS man reached in his pocket. Hansel saw a flash of metal and kicked out wildly.
He pointed the knife blade at Hansel’s throat, and the boy froze. Staring at the child, the man twisted his mouth and spit full in Hansel’s face.
“Fucking Gypsy bastard!”
Hansel stared back, and then his rage came up in him. “I’m a Jew! I’m a Jew!” And he spit in the Oberführer’s face twice, hard.
Gretel was battering the man with her fists, and Hansel kept screaming, “I’m a Jew,” as the Oberführer tried to hold him still enough to get the knife to the boy’s throat.
And then there were men behind them on the street, and the voice that penetrated the screaming was lazy sounding, almost amused.
“Put ‘I’m a Jew’ down. Now.”
The Oberführer turned, still holding the struggling boy. The Russian soldier in the street cocked his pistol.
“Put him down.”
The SS man dropped Hansel in the mud of the alley, and Gretel fell on him, covering him like a hen covering a chick. Hansel threw her off and stood up, enraged, screaming.
“I’m a Jew, and he’s the Oberführer. He stole Nelka’s baby, and he’s a German.”
The Russian soldier was joined by several others. They stood and watched and grinned. Afraid to speak, the Oberführer stood silent.
“How do you know he’s German, boy?”
“He was in the village. He’s bad.” Gretel stood up and pointed at the Oberführer. “He wore the black and silver uniform. He’s SS.”
“Ask him to talk. Just ask him.” Hansel stared at the Nazi. The boy knew why the man was silent. “He talks like the Germans do. You’ll see.”
“Speak, man.”
The Oberführer opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he gave it up and began to curse in German.
The soldiers laughed until Hansel laughed too.
“Well, I’m-a-Jew, you’ve caught yourself a real, live Nazi.”
A truck came down the street, and the Russian whistled it over. The Oberführer was loaded into the back, joining other men already caught, and the Russian grinned at the children.
“He’s going to be a birthday present for Papa Stalin, kids.”
“I want you to kill him,” H
ansel said. “He and that woman took Nelka’s baby, and they took Magda away.” His voice trembled and his face still burned from the slaps.
“Papa Stalin is smart, boy. He’s thrifty. The German will go to Siberia and we’ll get some work out of him first. They don’t come back from Siberia.”
The Oberführer rose up in the truck and leaned toward the children, shaking his fists. “I’ll never die. You can’t kill me.”
The Russian soldiers slammed the metal gate of the truck shut in the man’s face and slapped the side to tell the driver to move on.
“Don’t worry, boy. He’s gone.”
Hansel watched the truck drive out of sight, and he called after the soldiers, using the word openly for the first time when he asked directions.
“Where are the Jews? Where can we find Jews?”
The soldiers looked at one another. The leader sighed and took a few steps toward Hansel.
“Try the refugee center. It’s where the old age home was. Ask. Everybody knows it.”
They walked for blocks until they came to streets where people were moving about. Already the bricks from bombed buildings were being cleaned and loaded into wheelbarrows.
“The old age home? The old age home?”
Hansel shouted it over and over, and the two children followed all the pointing fingers until a man nodded at a building with a banner on the front.
REFUGEES—SOUP KITCHEN
Holding Gretel’s hand, he ran up the steps. There were men inside sitting at tables, and people stood around the tables, twenty deep, talking.
“Come on,” Hansel said. Dropping on all fours, he crawled between the legs of the people and under the huge tables. Gretel followed, and they came out on the other side. He didn’t care about the men at the tables now. Hansel was following his nose which was twitching from the smells in the building. It was the hot yeasty smell of bread baking, oil spattering in a pan, and some other smell he barely remembered.
“They’re cooking meat,” Gretel whispered.