54 pages • 1 hour read
Louise MurphyThe True Story of Hansel and Gretel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-35Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “Leaving”
Hansel sees the remains of Magda’s burned hut and knows he must hide in the woods with Gretel. Gretel reluctantly follows him. They reach the hidden shelter. Soon, the Oberführer also arrives at the shelter with soldiers and Halina. The soldiers throw a grenade into the shelter. Halina faints, and the Nazis depart. The narrator reveals that Hansel and Gretel were not in the shelter. Instead, they are hiding nearby. After Halina awakens and returns to the village, Hansel and Gretel begin walking away from Piaski. They see the partisans from a distance without realizing that their father is among them.
Telek and Nelka look for Magda and the children. They find the burned hut and the destroyed shelter. Telek sneaks into the village in search of information. Feliks tells him about the killing of Father Piotr and the burning of the hut. Feliks believes that Magda and the children have all been taken to camps. Nelka is devastated and wants to search for them, but Telek convinces her that they are already dead. Telek and Nelka resolve to leave Poland together.
The Russian encourages the Mechanik to stay with the partisans instead of leaving them to search for his family. He and the Mechanik encounter Jedrik, the villager who turned in Jewish villagers to the Nazis. Jedrik rants about Jews and points a pistol at the Mechanik. The Russian says he will kill Jedrik if he harms the Mechanik. Jedrik shoots the Mechanik, wounding him. The Russian kills Jedrik and hopes his friend will live.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Swans”
Hansel and Gretel reach a barn and hide in it for two weeks as retreating German soldiers clog the roads. When the farmer’s wife discovers them, she forces them to leave. It is now April, and spring has reached the forest. The children return to the woods near Piaski and find the hidden shelter. They wash in the creek and observe a flock of swans. Though Hansel would like to catch and eat one, Gretel dissuades him. He decides that they should try and return to the city now that the roads are mostly clear of soldiers. As they leave the forest, Gretel regrets that she never saw the bison that Telek promised to show them.
Hansel and Gretel walk east. Because of her striking appearance, people give Gretel food when she asks for it along the way. The children reach a field and see a large white tank. Gretel thinks it is a swan, but Hansel realizes that it belongs to the Russians. The friendly soldiers help the children cross a river by loading them into the tank. Hansel and Gretel sleep in a field. Gretel gazes at the night sky and tells Hansel that the stars in it are from the coats of executed Jews.
Chapter 33 Summary: “The Wheat Field”
In the summer, Hansel and Gretel continue walking through rural Poland. They pass army machinery and dead bodies. Hansel sometimes grows frustrated with Gretel’s lack of understanding. In August, the children find a dilapidated piano abandoned in a field. Gretel plays it and does not want to leave it, so they sleep near the piano. As they rest, armed men enter the field. The men exchange gunfire with German soldiers the next morning. Hansel, exhausted by his recent experiences, begins walking toward the gunfire, screaming for the men to stop. Watching Hansel mortally endanger himself, Gretel suddenly recovers her memories and presence of mind.
Gretel tackles Hansel and soothes him by humming as Magda did. Her mind continues to fill with memories, though she cannot remember her original name. She also does not remember the rape. When the men leave the field, Gretel speaks to Hansel, and he is relieved that her confusion has lifted. Gretel resumes her role as the older sibling, telling Hansel that they must return to the city of Bialystok to look for the Mechanik and the Stepmother. She does not admit to him that she cannot remember his original name. Instead, she pretends that she must wait to reveal the name because of the Stepmother’s warning not to use their real names.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Bread”
After three more weeks of walking, Hansel and Gretel ride into Bialystok with a group of Russian soldiers. Hansel asks strangers for directions to the ghetto where they once lived, though he avoids using the word “Jew.” Gretel tells her brother how much the city has changed. Hansel asks another man for directions and is shocked to realize that the man is the Oberführer disguised as a Pole. The Oberführer chases Hansel and Gretel until, by chance, they arrive in the ghetto. The children walk through abandoned apartments to the roof, where they try to sleep.
The Oberführer finds the children early in the morning. They run from him again, jumping from roof to roof. Though they briefly escape him, the Oberführer catches them as they climb into an alley. He screams about Nelka’s gypsy blood and holds a knife to Hansel’s throat. Defiantly, Hansel yells that he is a Jew, claiming his long-hidden identity. Russian soldiers hear Hansel’s cries and force the Oberführer to release the children. Hansel tells them that the Oberführer is a Nazi. Though Hansel asks them to kill the Oberführer, the Russians assure him that they’ll send him to labor in Siberia, and he will never return. A soldier tells them that they may find Jewish people at the city’s new refugee center.
Hansel and Gretel walk to the center and are awed by the crowds of people and huge amount of food there. Hansel sadly remembers the breadcrumbs that he scattered on the forest floor and how Magda said he “threw away [their] luck” (294). Gretel consoles him, blaming herself for their bad luck because she stepped on the protective circle that Magda drew around them. Hansel begins to gather breadcrumbs from the floor of the refugee center. A man baking bread notices the children and drops to his knees in shock: it is the Mechanik. Hansel goes to him, but Gretel briefly falls back into confusion. The Mechanik tells his children their real names. Hansel and Gretel smile.
Chapter 35 Summary: “The Witch”
Magda concludes her tale and emphasizes that it is true. She muses on the importance of love. After loosely concealing her identity in the first chapter of the novel, she explicitly reveals it here: “I am Magda,” she says. “I am the witch” (297).
Chapters 31-35 Analysis
In Chapter 31, the narrator creates suspense by withholding some of what she knows from readers. She tells how the Oberführer explodes the hidden shelter without immediately revealing that Hansel and Gretel never actually descended into that pit. Just as the narrator briefly keeps readers in the dark, the story leaves some characters without accurate knowledge of events. For instance, Nelka and Telek spend their last scene in the novel devastated by the supposed deaths of Magda, Hansel, and Gretel. They have no way of knowing that Hansel and Gretel have survived, and likely never will. In addition to the violence and death that the war causes, it also creates a cruel vacuum of information. Nelka and Telek’s misapprehension echoes earlier scenes in the novel within which the Mechanik and the Stepmother passed within feet of Hansel and Gretel without seeing one another.
Memory remains a central theme and plot point in the novel’s final pages. Gretel finally regains mental clarity when it matters most, jolted out of her vacancy by an immediate threat to Hansel’s life. However, she remains unable to recall her original name or Hansel’s. It is only when Gretel and Hansel reunite with their father that they can know their original names. “He spoke their names over and over,” the narrator says, “and watched these gifts brought out of darkness” (296). The Mechanik gives his children their identities back by naming them. The power of his words suggests the collective aspect of memory. Hansel and Gretel may never actually recollect their original names, but in the presence of someone who does, their forgetting is no longer a significant problem.
While the novel leaves a handful of loose ends unresolved, it offers a surprising amount of closure regarding the Oberführer’s vendetta against Hansel and Gretel. As unlikely as it may seem for the children to encounter the SS officer in the city of Bialystok, far from Piaski, his relentless pursuit of them is consistent with his obsessive character. In a novel full of disappointment and unfulfilled promises, the Oberführer’s ruin at the hands of Hansel and Gretel is a rare and satisfying victory.
The novel’s brief final chapter firmly answers a question posed on its very first page. At the beginning of the novel, an unnamed narrator pledged to tell a true version of Hansel and Gretel’s story. The last chapter joins with the first to create a narrative frame and reveal its narrator: “I am Magda,” the narrator says, “I am the witch” (297). In death, Magda unapologetically claims her identity. This action further aligns her with Hansel and Gretel, who learned their own names and “became, once again, themselves” just one page earlier (296).
