The True Story of Hansel and Gretel in Into the Forest

Oct 05, 2009 Christine rated it it was amazing

Shelves: hansel-and-gretel, diverse-and-women-authors, historical-wwii, work

Update 12/3/2016 - Still a wonderful book to teach. Students love it.

Many writers make use of fairy tale motifs in their writing. Murphy isn't even the first writer to make use of such motifs in a tale set during the Holocaust. Yolen's Briar Rose pre dates this.
Murphy's tale has all the power of Yolen's novel.

Murphy does not deal totally with central characters; in fact, she does not reveal the true names of four of her central characters. Instead she uses labels that become names. Even Hansel Update 12/3/2016 - Still a wonderful book to teach. Students love it.

Many writers make use of fairy tale motifs in their writing. Murphy isn't even the first writer to make use of such motifs in a tale set during the Holocaust. Yolen's Briar Rose pre dates this.
Murphy's tale has all the power of Yolen's novel.

Murphy does not deal totally with central characters; in fact, she does not reveal the true names of four of her central characters. Instead she uses labels that become names. Even Hansel and Gretel are like this, for the names are the equivalent of John and Jane Doe. This suits the tale better than actually giving the real names to the central characters. In many cultures and tales, names are power. Knowing someone's name gives a person power over the other. By keeping the key family unit nameless, not only is Murphy making a statement about the universality of the experience, at least for a segment of the population, but the absence of the names keeps the reader and, strangely, the Nazis from having power over the central characters. Labeled and nameless, Hansel, Gretel, and their adults become independent.

Murphy makes good use of the rather horrific tale by manipulating the motifs. She makes a major change to how the oven is used,who the step-mother is, among others. But she keeps the core of the tale the same. It still is that story about two siblings working together instead of at each other throats. Like the source tale, Murphy switches the children's roles halfway the book. In the original, for instance, Gretel is weaker than Hansel at the beginning of the tale, but stronger towards the end. She saves him as he saved her at the beginning of the tale. Murphy does not overlook this key element of the tale.

Murphy's use of the oven is particularly powerfully poignant, for the actual fairy tale of H&GM was suppressed, along with other Grimm tales, after WWII. In the case of H&G it was primary the element of the oven that lead to its suppression. Today, such fairy tales are considered to "dangerous" for children because of the violence and the threat.

Murphy's book with be placed in that category as well. Despite its fairy tale structure, it is a harsh book. It is a truth that bad things happen to good people, especially in a time of war. Murphy does not mince words when describing what occurred. Tough, hard, wrenching choices are made. In particular is Murphy's use of the Stepmother and the abandoning of the children. The original story, critics believe, deals with parents having to abandon children during a time of famine, a historic reality. In Murphy's book, the children are "abandoned" so the adults can led the Nazi's away. The family is in flight, the adults willing to give themselves up for the children. It is a believable, heart breaking, and wonderful twist on the original.

Murphy's book also raises questions about choices, sacrifice, and right and wrong. It is a wonderful, sad, stirring book. I'm glad I read it. ...more

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Apr 18, 2010 Julia rated it really liked it

Shelves: based-on-folksong-myth, historical-fiction, holocaust

This is a Holocaust/ fairy tale retelling like Jane Yolen's Briar Rose. In it, “Hansel” and “Gretel” are Jewish children given new names and told to wander in a forest and find a farmer to take care of them. They find Magda, a healer, who lives alone, whose grandmother was a Gypsy and is called a witch. Their parents join the partisans. Magda has a large baker’s oven, which she shoves the children into to hide them from the Nazis. Magda and the stepmother aren’t evil, the stepmother saves Gretel ...more

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Apr 18, 2012 Melanti rated it liked it

Shelves: fairy-tales-folklore-and-mythology, 2013, group-reads

I feel guilty about giving books with such horrific but true content a lower rating. Somehow it feels as if I should rate the historical content and not the book itself.

I originally read about this book through Margarete Landwehr's essay "The Fairy Tale as Allegory for the Holocaust: Representing the Unrepresentable in Yolen's Briar Rose and Murphy's Hansel and Gretel" which I found in Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings. Perhaps this being paired with Briar Rose in that essay set I feel guilty about giving books with such horrific but true content a lower rating. Somehow it feels as if I should rate the historical content and not the book itself.

I originally read about this book through Margarete Landwehr's essay "The Fairy Tale as Allegory for the Holocaust: Representing the Unrepresentable in Yolen's Briar Rose and Murphy's Hansel and Gretel" which I found in Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings. Perhaps this being paired with Briar Rose in that essay set an unfair expectation in my head that the two novels would be similar.

Unfortunately, my experience of the books are drastically different. All Yolen had to do to get me to shudder in horror was to recite a few paragraphs of something very close to the original tale and leaving me to fill in the gaps of what she meant myself. Whereas Murphy is drastically more graphic and doesn't flinch from telling the full extent of the horrors the average person went through in Poland, yet the majority of it didn't make me shudder at all.

Maybe it's because we're launched immediately into difficult decisions (the parents abandoning Hansel and Gretel in the forest as they're being chased by Nazis) without a chance to really get to know the characters. Truly, I didn't start to feel for the characters as characters until the last 2/3 of the book or so. I felt sympathy for the historical figures they paid homage to but not to the characters for themselves.

Or maybe it's because Murphy seems to feel obligated to tell EVERYTHING that could have happened to the average town in those years. Sometimes less is more. I really would have liked fewer characters/plotlines but more time to get to know the characters that were there in depth. In other cases, there seemed to be excessive detail. For instance, in the final scene with Magda, if one knows history, one knows what is going to happen to her. (view spoiler)

But I guess that's not the sort of book Murphy was trying to write. She's trying more to be historically accurate and complete where my suggestion would have been rather stylized. (It occurs to me that Yolen's story is rather stylized too...) Unfortunately, I think I prefer stylized books where I can connect with the characters to things that are historically accurate but remote. For the latter, I'd much rather go with some non-fiction - especially something autobiographic in nature.

One good thing that this book has brought to light is that I haven't read too much about life in occupied Europe during the war. I've read plenty of Jewish and concentration camp accounts and quite a bit about life in England or life as a soldier during the war. But nothing (or very little) about non-Jew, non-Rom, non-Aryan experiences. I'm obviously going to have to correct that soon. ...more

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