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.
Themes
The Complimentary Roles of Memory and Love
When Magda delivers her final statement on what matters in life, she ties love and memory together: “We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again” (297). Though Magda has seen tragedy and bears the weight of brutal memories, she concludes that humankind cannot afford to forget if it means losing love. As she narrates the story of Hansel and Gretel, Magda continually emphasizes the power and danger of memories.
Gretel’s relationship to memory is the most complex in the novel. Before her rape, she shares bittersweet memories of life before the ghetto with Hansel, who was too young to remember that existence. The memories, as Magda says later, are a “gift” because they convey love and truth (297). Although he is only 7 years old, Hansel recognizes the value of his sister’s gift: “If Gretel forgot, he wasn’t sure if he’d remember. She was the one who knew things” (147). But Gretel’s rape changes the range of memories to which her mind has access and the ways that she accesses them. She “began to remember things from the past, the distant past” just after her violation, “but all the last months and hours were blank except for the names of Magda and Hansel” (134). Her mind blocks threatening memories and replaces them with ones that evoke love. She recalls her grandfather in detail and believes she tastes the oranges he always brought her. It is love that brings Gretel’s memories back when she fears for Hansel’s life, and love that grants her access to the past and present in proper proportion. She achieves balance in her mind when she and Hansel finally reunite with their father.
The narrator links Gretel’s major mental shift with that of the Stepmother, who lays dying in the snow just feet away from Gretel. While Gretel loses memories, the Stepmother simultaneously grapples with hers. The Stepmother’s “mind was moving back in forth in time, randomly,” causing her to confuse her dead son with Gretel. Though the Stepmother has sought to avoid memories during her recent life—she believes that the present has tarnished all recollections from her past—they fill her thoughts with images of love as she dies. One memory remains out of the Stepmother’s grasp. She knows that she forgot to tell the Mechanik something important but cannot remember what it is: that Hansel and Gretel were alive near Piaski. The Stepmother’s final moments are spent trying to remember for the sake of her loved ones. Taken together, the Stepmother’s and Gretel’s experiences with memory support Magda’s assertion that remembering is bound up with love.
War as a Waste of Talent and Potential
The author of The True Story of Hansel and Gretel clearly conveys the violence and brutality of World War II and its accompanying Holocaust, but she also draws attention to the smaller costs of war. Through the characters of the Mechanik and Gretel, especially, Murphy suggests that World War II was an enormous waste of knowledge and talent. In the second chapter of the novel, the Mechanik bitterly thinks of the effort he made to become educated and contribute to the scientific community. “It was unfair […] College in France. Work as an engineer. New knowledge for new times and new people” (3). The Mechanik expected his intelligence and determination to lead to progress for himself and for humankind. Instead, he realizes, “Other engineers had been busy while he lay hiding in the ghetto. His hands itched to open the hoods on the trucks and see what they had been inventing since he had been trapped in the irrational world of war” (209). The closest the Mechanik gets to making good use of his skills with the partisans is building a bomb and repairing a tank. When the Mechanik returns to Bialystok, he spends his days baking bread in a refugee shelter. While this is a worthy occupation, it requires none of his specialized training.
Like her father, Gretel takes pride in her knowledge but has few options to put her training to use: “I can read Polish and some German and some French,” she tells Magda, happily thinking of afternoons reading in the ghetto. Gretel must disguise her skill with language to avoid attracting the attention of the Nazis; “…you aren’t able to read anything but a little Polish,” Magda tells her. “The shop signs and a little from the Bible” (63). Although Gretel’s education and intellect should have led to achievements and praise, World War II has changed the value of her knowledge. It is a hindrance instead of a tool for advancement.
The waste of the Mechanik and Gretel’s skills suggests the indiscriminate damage of World War II. Though the Nazis in the novel claim to value usefulness and intelligence, neither attribute is enough to protect a person from persecution by the Germans. The enormity of this waste strikes Magda as she finally leaves the forest for transport to Birkenau: “She thought of all the Poles who had died,” the narrator says. “All the Jews who disappeared, all the Gypsies, the priests, the mayors…The kidnapped children” (247). Surrounded by other suffering humans, Magda recognizes the staggering cost of World War II.
The Vulnerability of Children
When the Mechanik and the Stepmother leave Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the children become reliant upon the goodwill of strangers. They have no means of growing or gathering food in the snowy forest and cannot access weapons as the Stepmother and the Mechanic do. The children are vulnerable to Nazis, scared villagers, and most anyone they might encounter in the Polish woods. They are fortunate to find Magda’s hut before they might have reached the village of Piaski.
Hansel and Gretel’s vulnerability is not unique to them, or even to Jewish children. In the village, Magda counts only 31 Polish children and notes how most of the babies “died from lack of milk” soon after their births: “All the good food had been stolen away into Russia,” she thinks, so that “Polish women’s tits were wrinkled sacks, empty like the cupboards in the houses” (72). The children who have survived infancy are subject to kidnapping or extermination by the Nazis. Their extreme vulnerability is made clear when Telek and five other men meet to discuss the Oberführer’s plan to kidnap all children who meet the Nazis’ standards of perfection. Without their knowledge, the children are marked for violence by the adults who care most for them. As Telek injures them to protect them, the children often are drugged or knocked unconscious by force. Their pain and powerlessness permeate the novel, turning its mood especially dark.
Village children are violated not just by their well-meaning parents, but also by the Nazis. The Oberführer sees children as tools ripe for manipulation. When he obsessively hunts for Hansel and Gretel, he uses Halina to uncover the hidden shelter that he suspects the children have entered. Halina cries and even faints because she has been forced to betray her friend. The Oberführer exploits her vulnerability and allows her to live with the thought that her actions led to Hansel’s death.
