The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (44 page)

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,” Hansel 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.

Hansel walked faster now. He followed the rich scent that thickened the air, and he turned into a large room, pulling Gretel with him. The room had tables and chairs set up in rows. Women walked to and from the kitchen, which was behind the room, putting out plates, and spoons, and bowls on a long table next to the wall.

“Look! Oh, Hansel! Look!”

He looked. Stoves with shining pots almost as large as he was. Soup cooking. Meat roasting. Best of all, metal racks reaching nearly to the ceiling. Racks full of bread baked before dawn in the ovens.

Hansel stared and felt the saliva run down his chin. He wiped it away and reached his hand out to steal a loaf of bread. There were too many people in the room. He would be beaten and driven off. And that’s when he saw it.

“Gretel, the breadcrumbs. They won’t care about the crumbs.”

He remembered now. The breadcrumbs he had thrown on the ground in the forest. The night. The owl calling. There were breadcrumbs on this floor, but a lot of them. A long path of crumbs leading to the back of the kitchen. Women carrying racks of bread walked past the children and more crumbs fell onto the floor.

“Magda said I threw away our luck. I tore up the bread and threw it on the ground.”

“It was me,” Gretel said. “I stepped on the line in the dirt. I stepped out of the circle the first day. When we found Magda. It was bad luck.”

He was crying now. He moved away from his sister and crouched on the floor, sweeping the crumbs up and putting them in his pockets, trying to get every one. He followed the trail of flakes from the dozens and dozens of loaves of bread brought out of the ovens, and he was determined to pick up all the bread, all the luck that he had dropped and thrown away. He crawled across the floor, white-faced, intent, not missing a crumb.

Along the back wall was a line of ovens. Men stood with flat wooden paddles, and occasionally they opened the doors and shoveled out the loaves of bread cooked golden by the fires. Two men turned to stare at the boy and the blond girl who followed him.

One of the men, thin and dark-bearded, a round scar on the right side of his chest, let his paddle fall from his hand, and the crash of wood on the floor made Gretel jump. Hansel looked up and saw the man fall to his knees beside the oven.

The boy’s face puckered. He frowned and clenched his fists. Then slowly he got up and walked over the crumbs into the arms of the man.

“You left us,” Hansel said. “You went away.”

The man sobbed and he held the boy out so he could look into his face. He ran his fingers over the poor, dyed hair and the pale skin. He touched the dark circles under the boy’s eyes and the bruise on one cheek.

Gretel couldn’t move. She stood and watched her father sobbing and Hansel standing rigid in his arms. She looked at the two of them, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

The Mechanik was able to stand then. He looked at the girl. His eyes were so tear-filled that her face blurred, and her hair became a pale light around her head and shoulders. Keeping his hand locked on Hansel’s shoulder, he moved to her.

“Father?”

He nodded and pulled her to him.

“It was cold,” she said. “She tried to cook us, and I never saw the bison.” Gretel was shaking all over, and her mind was chaotic again as she tried to take it in. It was her father.