The tale of two little children, lost in the woods, who stumble on a candy-coated cottage that actually houses a hungry, wicked witch is familiar to all of us—but boy, is it ever a dark, creepy story when you really think about it. Author Louise Murphy takes it one step further with her True Story of Hansel and Gretel by setting the story during the last months of World War II in Nazi-occupied Poland. “Hansel” is a seven-year-old boy and “Gretel” is his eleven-year-old sister; their father and stepmother were forced to abandon them in the Polish forests but begged them never to repeat their Jewish names. Adopting the monikers from the famous fairy tale, the children do indeed find a “witch” in the form of Magda, a village woman with a reputation. Instead of being devoured, the children are taken in and hidden—as harrowing situation as being locked in a cage by a cackling storybook witch would have been. In crisp prose and cut-to-the-quick dialogue, Murphy weaves a life in hiding with all the hunger, desperation, frustration and fear that entails. Other villagers enter the story, as do the distant journeys of the children’s father and stepmother. Whether or not the separated family and their saviors escape from real wicked witch—a cruel Nazi officer—is something a reader of a Holocaust novel can never be too sure off. Lyrical, haunting, and liberally sprinkled with superstition, folklore, and shades from the dark side of fairy tales, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel is one that won’t easily be forgotten.

posted Feb 19, 2010 at 6:57PM

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