The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy

Her efforts, moreover, are noteworthy because she writes about the heroism and tragedy of characters that usually play lesser roles in much of the previous Holocaust writing. For that honesty, Murphy should be lauded. Just like each life lost, each artistic interpretation of that loss is different. Today, one can visit the gas chamber at Auschwitz or read Elie Weisel’s “Night,” but reading parts of this novel might be no less difficult. It’s these painful incidents that vividly re-create some of the depravations Jews, Gypsies and ordinary Poles must have gone through during the war that particularly stick in the mind months after reading the book. The details of life in the village are fascinating, such as the general’s order forcing three female Polish villagers to clean his office with the clothes off their backs. Murphy’s three years of research at San Francisco’s Holocaust Library for this book, her second, paid off. The ending is perhaps the most unbelievable part of the book, but, hey, this is supposed to be a fairy tale. Meanwhile, the children’s father and stepmother connect in the forest with a local resistance unit that gradually closes in on the village.Īfter getting through early dialogue that seemed implausible for hungry, cold and exhausted refugees to utter, the need to find out if the family is reunited is difficult to resist. The action centers on a Gypsy woman’s attempts to hide the two children’s Jewish identity from the rest of the small town, which is being overseen by a grizzled German soldier who longs for a real military assignment on the Eastern front. It’s a compelling read set in a Polish hamlet where all the Jews have already been taken and murdered at nearby Auschwitz. There’s a witch, an oven, breadcrumbs and a real, real bad guy.īut this tale, set during the Holocaust, isn’t bedtime reading for children.

Thus begins Louise Murphy’s adaptation of the classic fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, to World War II. Pursued by vicious German motorcyclists and dogs, two Jewish children are hidden by their father and stepmother in hopes that they might reunite after they elude the Germans. It begins with a chase that lasts the entire length of the novel.

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy