Myrna Blyth is Editorial Director of AARP and recent graduate of the Master of Liberal Arts program at Johns Hopkins. She started the program during the pandemic. These fairy tales published here were inspired by both a Contemporary Writing Course and a history course on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
Grim Tales, 1941
Myrna Blyth, Johns Hopkins University
My True Story
Walking down the hallway the girl from 3A stopped me. “You look nice,” she said. I did. I was wearing my black coat with the Persian lamb collar. I only get it out for special occasions.
“Where are you going?” She is young, nosy, with pink streaks in her stringy hair. It was already getting dark. She knows I don’t go out much.
“Dinner.”
“Special occasion?” Very nosy.
“Yes,” I said and added, “My anniversary.” I knew I shouldn’t have said that.
“How many years?”
“Ha! Years and years and years.”
“So how did you meet?” she asked, getting out her key from one of those big ugly bags the young ones carry.
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
“Everyone knows.” I said, very softly.
“Me? I’ve tried everything. Hinge, Match, Zoosk. Men are dogs,” she added as the door slammed behind her. No longer interested.
If she had stopped to listen, maybe, just maybe, I would have told her the way it really was. How that damned glass slipper rubbed my heel. How both of those damn slippers hurt like hell and how it was different in so many ways from the story everyone thinks they know and how in some ways it was exactly the same.
C and me were meeting at Café 82. We went there once a year. I was looking forward to their beef brisket hot sandwich with fries, my favorite. I knew he would have blueberry blintzes. I would cut them up and help him eat.
Walking very slowly down Broadway in the cold—I am afraid of falling—it made me think of that long ago time. It had been a very cold night, too. Maybe I should tell someone the whole true story before it is too late. Not the girl with pink streaks who could never understand. Someone who would care about the details because the details were important. Details matter.
It really is annoying because the first thing everyone gets absolutely wrong is that my father was rich, and my stepmother was poor. My father, the schnorrer, was a merchant with a lousy failing business. She was the one with the money who needed a husband and Papa, going bankrupt, was glad to make the deal. He even changed his name to hers. From Goldberg to Goldman and changed my name from Esther to Ella. You get the drift. It didn’t save him.
And as for the Fairy Godmother crap, all nonsense. When we heard about the ball, a friend of my poor, dead mother, may she rest in peace, who had expected to be the second wife and was mad at my father for dumping her and hated my stepmother for catching him came to see me. She said she felt sorry I was being treated like a servant girl and deserved to have some fun, too. She would get me a dress, arrange a way to get me to the ball that everyone was talking about. I was very pretty, that I knew, and she wanted me to show up my ugly stepsisters, piss my stepmother off. What did I have to lose? I said, okay, sure, thanks. I was planning to leave town anyway. I kind of wanted to know what they served at the Palace.
As for the night of the ball, all I really remember was how damn uncomfortable I was. It was so cold, and I didn’t have a coat. Those crappy slippers hurt, and the gown was two sizes too small. I said I was a six. She could only get a four, half price. In truth, I was an eight. When you clean off plates at every meal, you scarf up all the leftovers.
I guess I looked good enough. C made the rounds. Poor guy, he wasn’t very tall, so half the girls towered over him. I sort of felt sorry for him, but I was mainly there for the food. As I was reaching for my third smoked salmon canapé, he caught my eye. I gulped it down. He sidled over, “I like a girl who enjoys her food.” He led me onto the dance floor. I pressed against him. What the hell. I said, “You know you are very cute. I like you. I bet we could have fun together.” What was the point of being shy?
He quivered. That is one of the moments I never forgot. One of the best. His shaking a little, flushing, and the beads of sweat on his upper lip. The poor guy just needed some love.
Then the fireworks started. I mean the real fireworks. Bang! Bang! I had to go. The coach was charging overtime after ten pm. She wouldn’t pay. I couldn’t pay. I ran and that damn slipper hurt so much I just kicked it off. When I got home and looked at my foot my heel was bloody.
It took him a week to find me. C wasn’t the sharpest, but he wasn’t that dumb either. Compared with others in our little kingdom, which mapmakers sometimes tucked into Greater Poland, sometimes pushed inside Ukraine, and most of the time considered non-existent, he was okay. On his rounds, he wasn’t looking for fit but blood. Blood had dried on the edge of the slipper, another important but ignored detail. When he saw my mangled heel, he knew.
We married fast. We had to. The Einsatzguppen had cleaned up the Polish villages to the east and were looking for action. His parents had already fled to London, taking most of the treasury. We took the rest. My father begged to come along. So sorry. They shot him in a field near the palace. My stepmother and stepsisters, guilty by association, were carted off to Auschwitz. One survived. She found me after and wrote me. I didn’t reply.
I decided on New York, and he agreed. From the start, C just went along with my decisions. We never fought. At first it was hard for him, but I told him to stay on the sunny side. I liked that song. He had skills I told him. He certainly knew bespoke tailoring, and, after all, he was damn charming.
He ended up working at Brooks Brothers for years. Had his own customers. They thought he was a prince. And I never minded cleaning. First as a maid at the hotel on fifty-fifth and then as assistant head of housekeeping. A woman owned the hotel that looked like a palace. A real bitch. She reminded me of my stepmother. We got along just fine. But that was long ago too.
C was already sitting at a booth in the back when I, half frozen, got to Café 82. They know me there. It’s dusty, still fairly cheap, and everyone is Upper West Side old. The aide who brought him was at another table, already tucking into his hot turkey and fries. I would pay for that and for the two desserts I knew he would order. I tipped him, too, each time I went to visit, about once a month. C didn’t talk. He can’t talk any more. But he smiled when he saw me and reached out his hand. Maybe he still knew who I was. I am not sure. I kissed him on the top of his head. He still had his hair. Sipping my tea, I could tell he really enjoyed the blintzes because I had to order extra sour cream.
There is one other thing everyone knows about besides that damn glass slipper. That we lived happily ever after.
Of course, we didn’t.
But we lived. We lived. And isn’t that enough?
Red, Red, Nazi Hunter
“What’s wrong with her?” Those were the first words my mother said about me. The neighbor woman who had come in to help with the birth just shrugged. “Nothing.”
I had two eyes, two arms, two legs and I was crying. So, what was wrong?
“On her head,” my mother said, half sitting up, pointing. “What is that?”
The woman laughed. “Her hair. It’s red.”
“How can that be?” My mother’s hair was blonde. My father’s hair was blonde. My three brothers and two sisters were blonde.
The woman shrugged, rolling up the rags, pouring out the water. “But nobody has red hair,” my mother said. That was true. Not in our village. Not in the next village. “It’s ugly. Horrible.”
“She can wear a cap. Make her a cap,” the neighbor woman said, “When she is older a shawl, maybe, or a hood. Nobody will notice. But start with a cap. “
“A cap?” my mother said.
“You know like that peddler wears,” said the neighbor woman, trying not to smirk.
Once a year a peddler came to the village. He sold thread, pins, and pieces of cloth. He had red curly hair and green eyes and wore a little black cap on the top of his head. He told jokes and made the women laugh. A Jew.
My mother screamed. “No, no!” and I screamed too while the neighbor woman just laughed and took her rags and left, slamming the door.
The next day my mother got out of the bed and walked to the river near the village and threw herself in. It took days to find her body. My father, a practical man with six children, married the neighbor woman. She fed me goat’s milk and made me caps and bonnets and then a little red hood that almost completely covered my red curly hair.
I knew I was different but not that different. I played with my brothers and sisters. I went to school and did what I was told. I knew I shouldn’t stand out and so I didn’t. I prayed every night and went to church on Sunday. I felt I was waiting for something to happen, but I didn’t know what. I told myself I should just be quiet and wait.
We all knew there was a witch who lived in the forest, so hidden away that there were no paths to her house. She was a witch, certainly, and maybe worse, a demon or a sorcerer. We knew that the Bible said we should not let a witch live, but everyone was afraid. Once or twice a young man from the village, and once or twice a young man from the neighboring village, brave and foolish, had gone into the forest to find her, to kill her we thought, but had never returned. Of course, there were wolves in the forest too. But we knew it was the witch. The priest did not talk about her. How could he? She had the power to make us afraid. But only God was supposed to have the power to make us afraid. The priest kept quiet.
I was almost sixteen when the peddler came back. Maybe it was the same peddler or a different one. I wasn’t sure. He wore a black cap, and his hair was a little red in places but mostly gray. He was very, very thin. “Things are bad for my people,” he told my father, who nodded but shrugged. “We don’t want anything,” said my stepmother, shooing him away.
I knew I shouldn’t but when no one was looking I followed him to the edge of the village. I didn’t think he noticed I was behind him, but he turned suddenly and caught my arm. “So, it’s you,” he said. I couldn’t answer. “There’s an old woman who lives in the woods. Do you know who I mean?”
“The witch.” I whispered, shaking.
“Go visit her. She’s your grandmother,” he laughed and was gone.
I waited for days, for weeks, for months. I was almost seventeen. My stepmother wanted me to marry the son of the goat herder. Since she had fed me goat milk maybe she thought I was already part of the family.
The goat herder’s son came to sit with me. He was tall, thin, but he didn’t talk much. We sat together in silence. This was not what I was waiting for.
One day I was making bread, three loaves. I left two cooling on the table and put the third in a basket, covering it with a cloth. I was wearing my hood. I always wore my hood, and I put on my warm red cape.
Everyone was busy. My father was in the field. My stepmother was talking to a friend. My brothers and sisters were scattered around, doing their daily chores No one noticed when I walked to the edge of the village and stepped out on the only path. I was alone. Soon I was hidden by the tall dark oak trees. I felt brave, maybe more myself than I had ever felt before. Was this what I had been waiting for?
I walked on and on and it got darker and colder. The path ended but there was an even narrower overgrown path that I was able to follow. I could hear some sounds. Was it the wolves? But then suddenly a man was standing before me. Big, and heavy, wearing a uniform that I had never seen before. He had a long coat, a helmet, and a rifle. He came towards me, speaking a language I didn’t understand. He seemed to be smiling, showing long dark teeth and then he was on me. I tried to push him away. He was biting me, my neck and my breast, and pulling at my clothes, my skirt, and my underpants. I tried to fight. I tried to scream. He pulled my legs apart. And though I kept fighting and crying I knew what was going to happen. But then a shot and then another. I knew the sound. He slumped over me, his hands suddenly still. I began to feel blood seeping into my dress.
“Can you get up? Try to get up,” she said in a quiet, calm voice. I struggled from under him, scratching my back on the branches I was lying on. I was dirty, bloody, sore. I went to pick up my basket and the bread lying in the dirt. “No,” she said, “grab his leg. Hurry.” At that moment I knew I should have wanted to go home, back to the village, back to safety; but I didn’t. It was the witch, and I did what she told me to do.
We dragged him for a long time to the cottage, her cottage, so very deep in the woods. He was heavy and my arm hurt. “In the back,” she said. “The wolves should take care of him in a couple of days.”
She gave me water to wash, gave me a shirt and a pair of soft pants. I had never worn clothes like that before. She laughed when I took off my hood and my long, red, curly hair flowed down to the middle of my back. The back of my hood was soiled.
“I remember hair like that,” she said. “Give it to me,” she said, and took the hood. “Now go to sleep. You need to sleep.” She indicated some pillows by the fire. I lay down and closed my eyes. I did not want to think about what had happened. She moved around and then finally sat nearby on a rocking chair, smoking a pipe. She looked like a little old woman, not a terrifying witch. But then I remembered she had shot the man who was attacking me, not once but twice.
In the morning two young men came to the cottage. They looked familiar. They were the young men from the villages who had gone away. “What is she doing here?” one said, sounding angry. The witch shrugged. “Come outside. We need to talk.”
I watched them through the little window. She pointed to the half-eaten remains of the soldier. One kicked the helmet and part of his skull fell off. They whispered together for a long time as if they were arguing. Finally, the bigger one, the taller one who I remembered the most from my village because he was handsome, and everyone had thought he was smart, nodded his head as in agreement and they came back inside.
“Here’s the plan,” he said. “You lure them. We kill them.”
“What are you talking about?” I stood up. I knew they were looking at my body under the soft boy’s clothes.
“The war, stupid. Don’t you know anything” the handsome one said. He did the talking. “The Nazis.”
I tried to remember. Months ago, my father had said something about soldiers to my stepmother. But then he said they won’t come here. There are no Yids.
“We are partisans,” the handsome one said. “Communists.”
“Reds,” the other one said finally with a laugh. “Like you. Are you red all over?”
The witch reached up and slapped him hard across the face. “Don’t talk dirty,” she said. He slunk away with his head down but did not protest. She went to the stove. “First, I make soup. Then I will make your explosives.”
She gave me my dress back and somehow made me another to wear. I learned fast. I lured them. They shot them. It was the plan. Sometimes before they raped me or while they raped me. When there were two or three after at least one had raped me. We wandered through the forest and sometimes even went into the nearby towns.
The handsome one whose name was Peter became my lover. But he didn’t seem much different to me when he fell on me and moaned than the soldiers. The other was called Jan. He watched. We became famous. People talked about us. We counted kills. Twenty-seven, thirty-two, thirty-nine, fifty-one.
The two men went off sometimes by themselves to meet other groups, to blow up a bridge, to steal more weapons. I stayed with her. We didn’t talk much but we were comfortable together. I worried about getting pregnant. She seemed to know. She gave me something bitter to drink that burned my throat and burned going down. It always made the blood come.
I asked her to teach me her spells. She shook her head and said she didn’t know any. She tended a garden and fed the animals with scraps, even the small wolves that prowled around the door and sometimes circled her feet. She could even pet them. “Wolves kill to eat,” she said. “Men kill to kill.” Once a week she lit candles and prayed over them, muttering in a strange foreign language. I liked to watch.
One summer night I woke up and the door was open. I went to look, and she was outside, surrounded by the wolves. The biggest one was as tall as she was, and his head was close to her. She was stroking him and murmuring. I wanted to cry out but stopped. But in the morning when I thought about it, I wasn’t sure it had just been a dream.
Peter, Jan, and I went away for a long time. There were soldiers to find and soldiers to shoot. I worried about her alone in the woods. Yes, she was a witch and people had been afraid, but I had seen terrible things, starving children, men being shot and screaming, falling into pits, women crying as their babies were bashed against walls. Far more terrible things than any witch would even want to try to make happen.
Weeks later, going back to the cottage, we knew something was wrong. The path was wider as if too many boots had broken the branches and trampled the dry leaves. The cottage door hung on its hinge half broken. Two soldiers were lying in the front, a sack with her things spilling out was between them. They hadn’t gone far before the wolves had attacked. Their throats were torn.
“Where is she?” I screamed and rushed Inside. She was on the floor. They had beaten her. It had not taken much. “We have to go,” said Peter, pulling on my arm. I was crying. “They might still be looking for them.”
“We have to bury her.”
“The wolves—” Jan began.
“The wolves won’t touch her. We have to bury her. I want to put her things away—” Peter knew I would not leave until it was done.
Jan groaned but Peter shrugged and went to get the shovel. They both knew how strong I had become.
When the war ended, we went to the city. We were all given awards and honors, Heroes and Heroines of the Resistance. My father and stepmother came for the ceremony. It had been years since I had seen them. They said they were proud of me and that I should come home. I told them not yet; I had things to do but I was not exactly sure what I meant.
Like most who are confused, I went to school and became a teacher. Peter married a rich girl. Nobody was supposed to be rich anymore, but people were. Her father had owned factories and was very rich. Now he was the Minister of Production, even richer. I taught reading and writing to the first-year students at the University. Peasants come to town to better themselves like me. My specialty was a course in folk tales, but nobody much wanted to take it. The young were interested in chemistry and math. They needed the facts of the future, not forgotten stories. I didn’t blame them.
Peter would come to my small apartment to drink vodka and complain. He didn’t even try to touch me anymore. We were getting old. He said he wished it could be like it was when you could just kill your enemies and not argue with them over a conference table. He and his father-in-law were accused of being disloyal to the Party and put in jail. His father-in-law was shot. They said Peter killed himself. I doubted that.
I knew when it was time to go home. I had a pension, enough to live on. My father and stepmother were dead. My brothers and sisters were scattered. I could live in the house I grew up in. But I knew I needed to find somewhere else. One day I went to the same trail at the end of the village. I walked and walked. It was even darker and more overgrown. It took hours and I was very tired. It was harder for me to walk now but I finally found the witch’s house.
The door was still hanging on the hinge. Inside was very dirty, the window broken, animal droppings everywhere. I needed someone to help. Jan had come back to the next village. He had never been comfortable in the city. He was a loner, a little crazy, the killing did that to some. I told him what I wanted to do and that I would pay him.
It took us a long time to clean and repair the cottage. He built chairs, a table. We brought a bed through the woods on a wagon like old times. I made soup on the old stove that still worked, and we sat down to eat the night when it was all finished.
He looked at me and smiled. “No more red, are you? Gray all over now” he laughed.
“Should I slap your face?” I asked. We lay on the bed together. I knew it would be the last time I would ever do that.
Now I live in her house in the forest. I hear the people in the villages nearby are afraid of me. Not because they think I am a witch but because they think I still have important friends in the city. That gives one power now. That makes them afraid.
I sleep. I eat. I tend the garden. The wolves come close but never too close. They are two or three generations from her wolves. Not friendly but they won’t bother me.
The other day, I went to the old dresser near the back wall, the only piece of her furniture that had survived. In the back of a drawer. I found my hood, washed, smooth, topped by a dried sprig of lavender. There was also tucked inside a small old black-and-white photograph of a little boy with curly hair. I could not tell if his hair was red. I like to think it was.
Lies My Mother (Gretel) Told Me
He was the driver, a very bad driver. She was the cook, a surprisingly good cook. A man from their village had found them the jobs. He said they had references. They had no references. They worked for the widow whose husband had started a large candy company. His sons now ran the business. They needed servants to work for her. The old lady could be difficult. She lived in a big house in Charlottenburg, not surprising. The neighborhood was full of Jews.
They called it the Candy House. Above the front door there was a plaster frieze decorated with shapes like lemon drops. It continued to be one of the company’s biggest sellers.
The sons were busy with their wives, their children, their mistresses. They came to visit but only once in a while. “Take care of her,” they said to Hansel and Gretel, and always tipped them generously. When they first came there were two maids in the house. “We don’t need them. My sister is strong, she can clean too,” Hansel said. “I can do everything. We love her,” Gretel said and gave the sons boxes of her excellent pfeffernüsse for their children, as if they didn’t have cooks of their own. Still the sons were pleased.
The old lady liked her food. Poppy seed rolls, butter, and jam for breakfast, fish and pudding for lunch, and always meat and fresh vegetables for her early dinner. But she didn’t eat much. Still Gretel ordered each week roasts and chops, chickens and ducks, even hams which, of course, the old lady would never eat. And there were pounds of potatoes and butterbeans and apples and grapes from the greengrocer sent to the house. Sugar and spice and flour, pounds and pounds. Gretel liked to bake. They were told by the sons Hansel could write checks and have the old lady sign for what was needed. How much could it be, the sons had thought. Much of the extra food Hansel sold to stalls in the Market Hall across town with the help of their friend from the village. The brothers and sisters agreed. They had very good jobs.
The old lady rarely went out. But then one day she said she wanted to go to the bank and get some money. She wanted to buy her oldest granddaughter a birthday present at one of the department stores on the Kurfürstendamm. Several were owned by friends of her husband. “Yes” she said, “this is what I want to do.”
“But you don’t have to go,” Gretel said. “Surely your daughter-in-law can buy the present. It is cold outside. You shouldn’t go.”
But the old lady, for once, was strangely stubborn. She didn’t argue but dressed herself in a black silk suit and a lace blouse. Her dark stockings and French shoes. She even put on two strings of her pearls. Then she went to the closet by the door and put on her fox coat and a large hat. “We are going,” she said firmly. “Tell Hansel to get the car.”
Always before when the old lady went to the bank, everyone had made a fuss. The manager had come out of his office, invited her to sit down on a couch in a special lounge. Invited her to drink a glass of sherry, like the English drank. But not this time. At first, she was ignored even though she asked for the manager. It was as if no one had heard. Then she was told to stand at the end of a long line.
Gretel held her arm. She knew what was going on. “Let’s go,” she said. “They are busy. We will come back.”
“Too busy for me? Ridiculous. Get me the manager,” she said again to the guard standing nearby and who scoffed before he walked away.
“What is going on?” the old woman muttered “Is everyone going crazy?” Finally, she was by the teller. She said her name. “I want a hundred marks. Now. Quickly.”
“That is impossible,” said the teller, a small man with a moustache, without even checking. “Your account is overdrawn.”
“That is ridiculous,” said the old woman, “Ridiculous. Get me the manager.”
“He is too busy,” said the teller. “Too busy for someone like you.”
“Too busy for me? Impossible,” said the old woman. “I am rich. I have had an account here for fifty years. You knew my husband; you know my sons.”
“You are making a scene,” said the teller. “I will have to call the guard.”
“What are you talking about?” the old woman said, her voice rising but no longer so firm. “Why are you treating me like this?”
Gretel pulled on her arm, “Madame, please, let’s go.”
The guard was there. “Out,” he said, “Out.”
“Where is the manager?” she said again as Gretel pulled her toward the door. People were staring, laughing. “Where is the manager?”
“The old Jew,” one said. “Crazy old Jew.”
She did not say a word in the car. Hansel drove home slowly and badly. Gretel took her upstairs. Helped her take off the suit and blouse and pearls and put a nightgown over her head. “I’ll bring some tea and cake,” she said to the old lady. “It will be all right.”
Gretel and Hansel shared the money from the food that was sold. She didn’t know he was stealing even more. She wondered how big the checks were that he made the old lady sign. And where was all that money? The bastard.
They were eating supper in the kitchen. Gretel had cooked a lot to calm herself down. She felt sorry for the old lady. Well, maybe just a little. Noodle soup, schnitzel, and roasted potatoes. An apple cake was cooling near the stove. Just when they were finishing the schnitzel, the old lady came into the kitchen dressed. At least half-dressed, her suit on without the blouse, her shoes without the stockings.
“I know what you are doing,” she said. “You two, you are stealing from me!” she said quite softly. But then she began to shout, “YOU ARE STEALING FROM ME!”
“Madame, no—” Gretel tried to say.
“I have called my sons. They are coming.” Quiet again, then screaming. “THEY ARE BRINGING THE POLICE!”
Gretel looked at Hansel. Hansel looked at Gretel.
“YOU WILL GO TO JAIL! YES, YOU WILL GO TO JAIL!”
Hansel, without a word, went to the stove, picked up a pot, the heavy iron one, and hit the old lady hard on the back of her head.
Gretel gasped. The old lady fell, banging her head on the stove. “You shouldn’t have—” she began.
“Shut up,” Hansel said. “Get your things. Now. Fast.” Then he took a kitchen towel, touched it to the flame in the stove and lit the old lady’s skirt. Gretel screamed but she ran. By the time she packed her bag the fire was roaring through the kitchen and was burning the wood paneling in the dining room. But she had just enough time to run back upstairs and get the pearls. And she certainly wasn’t going to tell that bastard Hansel.
Outside the street was full of people. Had they come already to see the house on fire? But another house down the street was on fire as well. The air was full of smoke. There were sirens blaring and music playing, and the crowds were chanting and cheering. The sons could have never made it to the house with the police. But then how could they? They were being arrested. It was November. It was Kristallnacht. So much was burning.
Hansel and Gretel went back to their village. They had plenty to live on though Gretel knew he never gave her a fair share. He spent his time paying people off, trying to avoid being drafted into the Army that was already headed for Leningrad. But then their friend in the village said he had found a perfect solution. He was always doing favors for Hansel. Gretel didn’t let herself wonder why. He could get him a job at one of the new concentration camps. Good salary, good living conditions. He would have to go East, but still. They were just building a work camp called Auschwitz, a big one. A steady job for years and important. All the big wigs were involved. The army would leave him alone. Hansel thought himself lucky and was on his way, without even saying goodbye.
Of course, he became one of the cruelest guards in the place of the greatest cruelty. He loved the screams, the cries, the whips, the dogs, the rifle. On the day the Russians liberated the camp he, who slept when everyone else had run, was still there, hiding behind a barrack. The prisoners, weak and starved, still managed to surround him. They debated. The crematorium or the fire. Both were still burning. They threw him in the fire. Quicker. He was too dumb to even note the irony.
Gretel’s story was different. Not much smarter, but yes, she was somewhat nicer. And she could cook. She failed the exam to make her a guard at Ravensbrück. But, as usual, she brought her pfeffernüsse. Delicious, everyone agreed. Perhaps she could cook for the guards and the female doctors who performed experiments on the Polish and Jewish prisoners. She could order the food—oh, yes, she said, she had experience with that—and oversee the prisoners who kept the kitchen clean. She was there three years and baked and baked. It was another good job.
But they all knew it was ending. The prisoners who could still walk were marched out. The doctors and nurses left, going back to their homes, pretending they had never left their pre-war hospital jobs. The guards ran away. She knew she should pack and leave hurriedly too. But she had an idea. Just one idea.
She went to see the lady tattooist who put the numbers on the prisoners when they came. Fortunately, she was still there, just packing her equipment. The tattooist had loved her chicken and noodles. “Put some numbers on my arm,” Gretel said.
“Are you crazy?”
“Do it. Please.”
The tattooist shrugged and turned on the switch.
She went to Berlin. No food, and the Russians were there. A nightmare. But then the Americans came. Better.
She tried to get a job, cleaning and cooking at a club for the officers. She held up her arm. “I am a survivor,” she had learned to say in English. She got the job. She started peeling potatoes. Soon she was baking strudel.
She began to learn their words and she smiled at them. There was one soldier and then another. She said she had been in Ravensbrück, and she kept changing her story. Sometimes she said she had been arrested because she was against the Nazis. Sometimes she said it was just a mistake. But one assumed she was a Jew because he was a Jew and nice enough. She got pregnant on their first evening together.
She cooked the food for him she remembered she had cooked for the old lady. No meat and milk together. Kugel and potato pancakes and blintzes. She made blintzes the night she told him she was pregnant. He cried. He was very young. He said he was glad something good had come out of these terrible years, out of what she had suffered. He wrote his mother she was a lovely Jewish girl, and it all was a miracle. His mother was not so sure.
They were married by an Army rabbi when she was six months pregnant. He wanted a boy. They had a girl, but she agreed to name her after his grandmother, Rachel. From the beginning, she called her Mitzi and spoke to her in German.
It took a year before she was allowed to go to America. She thought he lived in New York. He lived in Des Moines. She thought he was rich. He worked in his father’s grocery store. But the people were nice enough and only her mother-in-law was suspicious. She didn’t know the prayers. She didn’t know the holidays. “You were secular?” her mother-in-law asked. “Ya, ya, secular,” she learned to say. But she was a good wife, a good mother, a good cook, thrifty. They sold the cookies and cakes she baked at the grocery store. They even opened a small bakery next door because of her. She never wanted to talk about the past and only said her family had once been rich, owned a candy company. She had a couple of strings of pearls.
At fifty-five she got ovarian cancer. Her daughter was thirty with two small daughters of her own, but she took care of her mother through those two long, very painful years. When she died, they mourned her in the synagogue, praising her as a good woman and a survivor.
When Mitzi’s daughters were grown, both very smart, with scholarships to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota Law—and with nothing much to do, she decided to find out more about her mother’s past.
She started with Ancestry.com, certain her DNA would be 99% Ashkenazi. Wrong. It came back 50% Northern European, pure German. There had to be some mistake. She tried the other company that even could find the town your relatives came from. Again, a town her mother never mentioned. She said she came from Berlin.
She decided to do more research. It should be easy, she thought. The Nazis were so efficient. She looked up the prisoner lists at Ravensbrück. There were 150,000 names. It took her weeks. Her mother’s name was not there. It was a little unsettling. She decided she would go to Germany, and she would take her older daughter, now a lawyer, very organized. It would be a little vacation trip, she thought. It didn’t take them long. Mitzi still remembered her German. At Ravensbrück there was a list of all who had worked there. After all several of the guards had been hung in the 1950’s. Her mother’s name was on that list, the administration’s cook, 1942–1945.
It was even easier in the village. There were still three old women and two old men who remembered them, the brother and the sister, Hansel and Gretel. “He was a lout, a no-good. Worse than that,” they said. “And she, she was not much better.” Mitzi cried all the way back to Des Moines, shocked and horrified. She wondered if she should tell her father. But he was half-gone with dementia. What was the point? And her daughter had shrugged it all off. She didn’t remember her grandmother but looked a bit like her. The rational daughter, a tax lawyer, already a partner, explained she probably did the best she could. It made Mitzi crazy. Did she know her mother at all? And her uncle was horrible.
She couldn’t let it go. She did more research, trying to find Auschwitz survivors who might remember Hansel, women who had been in Ravensbrück. She learned a few stories, maybe true, maybe confusing her mother and her uncle with others from those years. She couldn’t really be sure. She wrote a book, a little book about it all, her confusion, her anguish, and what she knew, and self-published it. Nobody read it. Just as well. It made her husband angry. “Don’t you see? It means you aren’t Jewish,” he said. “Our daughters aren’t Jewish. Thank God, my mother isn’t around to find this out.”
But somehow a small German publisher read her little book and called her. She could understand their German well enough to realize they wanted to translate the book and publish it in Germany. She agreed. What difference could it make? They invited her to Berlin for the publication, and they would pay her way. Even though it made her husband even angrier, she decided to go. Why not? She thought he was having an affair with one of the women from the synagogue anyway.
Amazingly, they got her on television on two shows. There was a spread in the Bild with her picture and the picture she had brought with her of her mother. She was invited to speak at a symposium called “No More Guilt: We Are All Survivors.” She liked the attention. “It’s the names,” said the PR girl, with the weird haircut, who drove her around in a small car and smoked cigarette after cigarette. “Hansel and Gretel, the twins who follow us. The little horrors.” The book sold ten thousand copies. There was talk of a TV series in Germany, and maybe one in Israel. The publisher was very happy. She was surprisingly happy, too.
Getting on the plane for the long trip to New York and then to Chicago and then to Des Moines, business class, she knew it had been the most interesting week of her life. “I should hate you, mutter,” she thought. But now wasn’t she the daughter of someone, a rather famous Gretel. “Danke, mutter, danke,” she was thinking as she took the drink and the menu from the Lufthansa attendant who was welcoming her aboard with what seemed like a familiar smile of recognition and approval.