It seems like the perfect setting for a fairy tale, a place where stories might both emerge and endure, almost outside of time. How did you find out about this forest, and have you ever actually been there? I have never visited the forest.
I learned of it while watching television! It was a program on the Bialowieza Forest, and it was like watching a film about a country in your dreams. I saw the program several years before I began the book, and vaguely thought it would be a wonderful place to set the Magda story, if I ever wrote it. Many people identify the Holocaust with Germany and have less information about the events that took place in Poland.
Is this a reason why you chose to set the story in Poland rather than in Germany? The German master plan was to kill all the Jews, Gypsies, dissidents and leaders in Poland, then starve off the old and the very young, leaving a work force to build cities for the new German world order.
At the end of the building, all the remaining Polish workers would be killed in the camps. Setting a novel in this place allowed me to show the horrors of war against children and civilians and put my characters in situations where they had to make hard decisions daily.
With other characters, including some of the Polish citizens and Major Frankel in particular, you step away from such absolute characteristics and tread more in the realm of psychological ambiguity. Guilty though these characters are, you make them human beings.
Was this difficult, especially when writing about such an iconic and horrific event? Major Frankel is a very different type. He is a man in a dirty war who began as a patriot. He is every soldier, a normal man caught up in the dehumanizing actions that war demands. Did you ever get just plain depressed by the actions some of the characters take or are forced to take , and did you ever feel the urge to make parts of the book less graphic and therefore less painful?
How difficult was it to envision a happy ending? The research was so chilling that sometimes I would leave the library and take a walk in the sun, but writing the story, I could create a rescuer like Magda. I could save the children from death, which made a happy ending tempered by tragedy. When I finished the writing, I realized that I had not killed a single child in the novel.
You hear of children dying, but do not see it. This was unconscious on my part and quite unrealistic since Poland lost over twenty percent of her children.
It was terrible to kill a character I loved so much even though she is only a part of my imagination. Though the novel is called The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, it is also the story of the father and stepmother, of Magda and her brother, and of the entire village of Piaski.
How did you incorporate so many different voices into one narrative? Were any of these characters based on real people? None of the characters were based on people I know. When I write a novel, I seem to create characters who are people I would like to meet, people I hope exist, people I hope to become myself someday, or people that frighten me.
How important was it to you, as the author, to let there be satisfaction for certain characters, and justice for others? Did you feel a responsibility to lend a kind of moral balance to a situation that was distinctly unjust?
Like most people who read about the Holocaust and the circumstances of any people occupied and at war, I long for justice. The story of Father Piotr and his final actions is a very complicated effort to show a man yearning for justice for himself and his family. The responsibility of the artist is to try and find the truth, regardless of whether it is comfortable or not, but the moral balance is ultimately on the side of good people who manage to save children by courageous action.
The ultimate goal of the story seems to be to pass on hope, and to praise the value of love; this is certainly how Magda, as the narrator, frames the tale. How difficult was it to keep the idea of love meaningful while also writing so unflinchingly about evil?
I never really thought in terms of what abstract ideas I was presenting or not presenting while writing. Most novel writers become so involved in creating the characters and the plot, we leave the analysis to others. It is after the novel is completed that we find out what we, in our deepest heart, believe about life, and that is our own truth we give the world in our art. I believe there are as many truths about life as there are artists.
You dedicate this novel to your son. What are your thoughts about passing on memories and knowledge about the Holocaust to younger generations? Is this topic one that you plan to keep to in future writing, or do you feel that now you will move on?
Watching my son and a daughter become adults, I have been impressed with how much harder their decisions are than when I was growing up. The fluidity of values, the availability of drugs, the commonplace of divorce and the movement of people every few years to find work has changed our world.
I hope, perhaps too optimistically, that by showing the darkness of the Holocaust to our young adults, we will teach them to reject racism and war. I was born in , perhaps the darkest year the world has ever seen. Because I was born in the United States, I survived, but felt compelled to understand the time of my own birth.
It is too huge, too terrible to categorize or comprehend, but this novel is the best I can do to present the period that so deeply disturbs me. I doubt that I will write about this again.
Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. Share: Share on Facebook. Add to Cart. How is she a traditional witch? What abilities mark her as such? How does she display her unconventional morals when considering the affairs of others? Why does Murphy make her a kind of narrator?
The primeval forest of Bialowieza is itself a character in this novel. How does the forest enhance the fairy-tale sensibility? Does the forest have a personality; and if so, how would you describe it? The forest is filled with wild beasts: the wild ponies, the elusive bison, the mad boar. Think back to some of the encounters characters have with these animals.
How do wild animals function as symbols in the story? How do they connect characters? Do they serve as indicators of change at certain crucial moments in the plot? Nelka and Telek are the romantic center of the novel. Each is forced to undertake harrowing actions in order to protect their families and the villagers.
Telek in particular is forced to inflict harm in order to prevent an even greater wrong. What do these sacrifices bring them? How do you think they are able to endure these horrors and still imagine a future for themselves as lovers? She does, however, make some excruciating decisions for the Mechanik and his children, decisions that have major consequences for them all. Consider different points in the story when she is forced to make painful choices; do you agree with those choices?
Could she have acted differently? Do you think her fate—she is, after all, the stepmother—is a necessity of the fairy-tale genre? At the start of novel, the children are given new names by the stepmother; they will struggle after a while to remember their original ones. Other characters receive new names too: the father becomes the Mechanik, the stepmother the White Wolf. Why do so many of the Partisans go by aliases? Memory is a key theme, especially for Gretel.
At the start of the novel, she is already complaining that time in the ghetto has marred her memories of life before the war. By the end, those memories become key to her emotional well-being.
How does memory serve the children during their quest to stay alive and find their father? Do you think Murphy implies there is a symbolic or real relationship between people and memory?
In many ways, this novel details a fairy-tale world, one with magical animals, the true love of Nelka and Telek, and a woman known as a witch. A traumatized Gretel spends part of the novel in the realm of madness, and for her it ultimately becomes important that she leave behind her immersion in fantasy and face reality. Hansel, too, has to give up playing war and lead his sister in a very real struggle for survival.
Do you think that Murphy is suggesting that too much belief in fantasy can be an obstacle to maturity or to finding resolution? Or do you think that she shows how belief—in fairy tales, magic, and beauty—can help us overcome trials? Will Gretel continue to be an unusual child, or do you imagine her as more ordinary—more normal—as we leave her at the end of the book? Both religion and magic infuse this story.
Often traditional church-centered worship and a more female-oriented magic or paganism have been in conflict in Europe and America; here it seems that a more immediate experience of evil erodes that conflict, at least for some of the central characters. How does this story allow church and magic to coexist? What does this say about the nature of spirituality for some of the characters? On the other hand, the Partisans are distinctly antireligious; they dream of a godless communism to supplant the bloody passions of a world they view as too irrational.
The father became an assimilated, nonreligious Jew, and throughout the book he struggles with his own inability to believe in God. At the same time he is trying with all his might to believe, against all logic, that his children will survive. How did the ending resolve this conflict in him, or did it? And what is Murphy suggesting about the place of religion in an ethical society, whether it be postwar revolutionary communist, or family-based?
What place do you think religion will—or should—have for the main characters in their new lives? The village of Piaski is populated by many types of people: there are ordinary Polish citizens, collaborators, and secret revolutionaries, alongside Nazis and their imported workers.
Who in the town did you sympathize with? Try to recall villagers you would characterize as collaborators. Were their actions understandable to you? What might you have done in a similar situation? Which characters do you think achieved redemption? Since the shooting took place within the short time of 25 days, during winters, the cold and wet weather proved to be a major challenge. The production made use of several other locations across Dublin for filming.
However, the information about these locations has not been revealed yet. While the principal photography was wrapped in December , additional filming and reshoots took place in January in Langley , British Columbia, Canada.
Ireland has been a staple for the horror genre for ages. After all, it makes for a perfect setting for horror, with its pagan history, and its abundance of haunted houses and deserted castles.
Along with, of course, its traditional villages that take us back in time, and vast, isolated forests that continue to enchant us till date. Tejasvani Datta. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reddit Email. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website.
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