The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Read Online Free PDF

They were too starved to move steadily.
    He felt the air grow even colder and the snow began to sift down on their heads. Large flakes. She smiled at him, and he was almost able to smile back at her. The silence was total and unnerving.
    And then it was dawn. The light went from black darkness to gray like velvet against his eyes and faded to silver with no touch of pink. It was snowing hard now, and soon they would stop and try to find a place to sleep.
    She was almost happy. No sound of dogs all night. They might not find the motorcycle in the brush until the next day. If they waited too long, the machine would be covered by snow.
    They both heard the click of the pistol being cocked before they saw the man. He was ahead of them and had stepped out from behind a tree. He had a pistol in his hand and a rifle strapped to his back.
    She heard her husband catch his breath in a sob, and turned to see his face. His features were twisted and frozen in a grimace of pain. She took his hand and squeezed it.
    “City Jews!” The man with the pistol spit on the ground as he said it. “Useless, fucking, city Jews.”
    “I grew up in the country—” she began.
    “Do you have a gun? Do you have bullets? Do you have a tank that you just happened to capture?”
    The husband and wife stood silent.
    “No winter clothes. No guns.”
    “We waded in the water.” She was getting angry. “They can’t follow us.”
    “At least there aren’t any brats. I wouldn’t be talking now if there had been brats.” The man spat again.
    “The children are dead,” the husband said.
    “Thank God. You think I should help you? You’re walking corpses.”
    “We’re not dead.” Her body held too much cold and pain to be dead.
    “The Nazis don’t have to kill you now. Winter is the Nazi in this forest. If I let you go, you’ll lead them right to us.”
    The woman was filled with rage again. He was right. They had no guns. But he had a gun.
    The man with the pistol leaned against a tree and pulled from his coat pocket a cigarette, which he smelled delicately and then placed between his lips and lit. The smell of tobacco was like food entering her body. Then he walked to her, put the gun against her head, felt her breasts and hips and ran his hands in her coat pockets and between her legs. The husband moved to protect her, but the woman knew it was nothing. The man didn’t touch her with any interest.
    Then he ran his hands over her husband with the same intent and smiled. “Not even a carving knife. And I should just leave you? Let you walk on? What happens when they catch you? When they say to you, ‘We won’t kill you if you show us where you saw the partisan. Lead us to the spot and you can live.’”
    “I wouldn’t tell. Never.”
    “What about him?” He looked at her husband, and she knew it was true. Her husband would not watch her being killed and maimed just to save this man with a pistol.
    “He wouldn’t tell,” she lied.
    He drew on the cigarette again and then lightly ground out the glowing tip against the tree. He put the unfinished cigarette in a leather bag, tenderly, like a woman places her pearls in a silk case, and shook his head.
    “We’ll see what the others say. But don’t get hopeful. You’re useless.”
    They walked in front of him, going as he ordered. With the sun a silver ball behind the clouds, she could get her bearings enough to tell that they were circling. We nearly walked over them, she thought, and shivered. It would have been death to surprise these people.
    “Who are you?” she asked.
    He didn’t answer, and then she saw it in front of her. Her eyes could barely differentiate the structures from the forest floor. Bark roofs covering holes dug in the dirt. Burrows. Like the holes where foxes hide when the hounds chase them.
    The other men were around them now. She counted six, seven.
    “Who are you?” she asked.
    “What does it matter?” A man moved close to her, and she knew from his