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 11-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Sugar”
Major Frankel, a Nazi war veteran in charge of Piaski, questions Magda about the children. He dislikes working in the village and wonders how a “pure” girl like Gretel could be descended from a “twisted and subhuman” woman like Magda (67). The Major’s Polish clerk, Wiktor, examines and approves Hansel and Gretel’s documents. They will receive ration cards for an allowance of food. When the Major realizes that Gretel speaks German, he tells her about the Nazis’ vision and gives her a peppermint. He sends Magda and the children to the village store with orders for Gretel to distribute sugar rations. Although their forged documents were successful, Magda worries that the Major is too interested in Gretel.
While reading Nazi propaganda posted in the village, the children encounter Feliks. He scoffs at the posts. Magda explains that Feliks is often angry because his best friend had to flee the village when the Nazis arrived. The Nazis also killed Feliks’s mentally handicapped brother. Hansel and Gretel think of a man in the ghetto who the Nazis executed because of his mental state. They continue to the small shop to collect their rations. Magda notes that only 31 children have lined up outside to receive sugar and thinks how villagers now try to avoid pregnancy. With the Major watching from a distance, Gretel pours a teaspoon of sugar into the mouth of each waiting child. The narrator provides a look at how the village as a whole feels about Magda sheltering Hansel and Gretel. “It was her mistake,” the narrator says. “It was hers and they didn’t want it” (73).
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Car”
Gretel, Hansel, and Magda see an SS officer and a woman pass by in a car. Magda hurries the children back to her hut, expecting snow. She is pleased because snow will slow the war, but also disappointed that it may take longer for the Russians to drive out the Germans.
The Major nervously prepares his office for the SS officer’s arrival. He decides to wear a ribbon that he received for fighting the Russians, even though it’s not part of his assigned uniform. The SS officer arrives with his female aid and is higher ranking than the Major expected: an Oberführer. He and the Major critically appraise one another. The Major dislikes the Oberführer’s pretentious medals, and the Oberführer looks down on the Major’s ribbon and sweaty, battle-scarred appearance. The Oberführer requests lodging for his aid, Sister Rosa. He also asks for three women from the village to come clean the office. When they arrive, he touches one’s breast and makes them strip naked to use their clothes as cleaning rags.
The Oberführer thinks scornfully about the village until he spots Nelka through a window. He asks the Major about her family and indicates that he may want her brought to him. The Major and the Oberführer go for a drink while the cold women clean the room. Wiktor, ordered to supervise their work, ponders the village’s predicament: “how much worse it would get before it got any better” (82).
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Burning”
The Stepmother awakens and embraces the Mechanik. She thinks about how circumstances have long prevented their lovemaking. The other partisans discuss their plans to aid the Russians against the Nazis. As they leave their camp, the partisans pass the village Piaski. The Mechanik and the Stepmother silently wonder whether the children are there. The Stepmother tries to remember the surroundings in case she can return to look for Hansel and Gretel.
The partisans arrive at a large farm, which reminds the Stepmother of the one where she grew up. She remembers her life there, her parents’ casual practice of Judaism and her departure from the farm to study at a university. These memories are poignant for the Stepmother, who feels “a deep pang for the old countryside” that “made her whole body twitch” (87). The partisans are joined by another group of resistance fighters.
The Stepmother shouts for help to draw out the residents of the farm, and the rest of the partisans attack them. When the Stepmother enters the house, she finds the farmer’s wife and reveals the reason for their raid: the farmer and his family sheltered Nazis and helped them capture other partisans and refugees. The raiders spare the malnourished farmhands in hopes that they will tell of the raid and bolster the partisans’ reputation. They hang the wife and burn the farm buildings to the ground. A Jewish partisan runs into the burning barn in an attempt to save the horses inside. Though he rescues many of them, he dies in the panic as the barn collapses.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Drawing”
Telek joins a gathering of five other men from the village. As they wait for him to tell what he knows about the Oberführer, they reveal that Telek has mostly lived in the woods since his father left and his mother committed suicide. Telek says that the Oberführer and Sister Rosa are in the village to sort its children. The Nazis will take blond, “perfect” children to Germany and leave those whom they consider flawed. The men devise a plan to scar the children whom the Germans might otherwise take. They draw straws to decide who must hurt the children. Telek draws the short straw, which means the job belongs to him. He believes that he will be even more of an outsider after he completes the task. When he leaves, the other men justify the arrangement: “It’s better that he drew the straw,” one says. “Telek has never been one of us” (98).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Gretel”
Magda sends Telek to find the children playing in the woods. Hansel and Gretel talk about the animals they have seen, and Telek gives them a snack. He tells them that the forest has remained mostly untouched for all of its existence. He promises to show them a bison in the spring if they stop wandering so far from Magda’s hut. Telek shows Hansel and Gretel how to judge the direction of the wind. They watch a herd of wild ponies.
A waft of tobacco smoke alerts Telek to the presence of another person in the woods. He hides Hansel and Gretel and emerges to find the partisan group to which the Stepmother and the Mechanik belong. Telek and the Russian know one another. They discuss the Oberführer’s arrival. Telek notices the Stepmother and the Mechanik but does not know that they are Hansel and Gretel’s parents. After the partisans depart, Telek tells the children that he saw a wild boar instead of saying that he encountered the partisans. He again makes the children promise not to venture into the woods by themselves. As they return to Magda’s hut, Telek thinks fondly of Gretel and believes she understands the forest and its creatures as he does.
Chapters 11-15 Analysis
For women in Nazi occupied Poland, the admiration of powerful men is both an opportunity and a curse. Gretel’s blond hair and delicate features help convince the Major that she and Hansel are not Jewish. The Major doesn’t send them to camps and allows them ration cards for food, but his attention is dangerous. By paying closer attention to Gretel than to other children, the Major is more likely to find out that she has deceived him. Gretel’s predicament mirrors Nelka’s problem with the Oberführer. Like Gretel’s, Nelka’s physical appearance makes her appealing to a German official. The Oberführer dehumanizes her immediately, calling her a “mythic girl, fertile and ripe” (81). Eventually, his admiration for her beauty and vitality will induce him to steal her blood. The Nazis seek a sort of ownership over the women to whom they are drawn.
In Chapter 12, the narrator reveals some of the cracks that have formed within the German ranks by pitting the Oberführer and the Major against one another. The Oberführer’s disdain for the Major’s attitude and appearance parallels the Major’s disdain for the Oberführer’s lack of experience in battle. Though the men ostensibly are on the same side in World War II, they are willing to subvert Nazi systems to spite one another. Their rivalry suggests the limits of loyalty and duty. It also foreshadows the eventual end of the German force’s dominance.
Depictions of wild animals in these chapters function as another critique of the Nazis’ belief system. While the Nazis idealize usefulness and strict standards of purity, Gretel, Hansel, and Telek take pleasure in the wildness and unpredictability of the animals. They observe forest creatures from ponies and beavers to foxes and deer and hope to spot an elusive bison. When Telek speaks with the partisans in the woods, he tells Hansel and Gretel that he was tending to a wild boar. This lie only underscores the friction between Nazi ideals and the animals. The partisans resist the Nazis, and the animals are a counterexample to the Nazis’ central tenets.
Though the novel’s mood has been somber from its earliest pages, Chapter 14 takes the story to an even darker, more foreboding, place. In that chapter, Telek and other men from the village draw sticks to determine who will maim children to prevent the Nazis from taking them. The knowledge that the children will be hurt and Telek’s resignation to hurting them creates a devastating mood. Even as the other villagers convince themselves that Telek is best suited to hurt the children—“[he] has never been one of us,” a man says—they, too, are deeply troubled (98).
