Set in Poland during the German occupation, "The True Story of Hansel and Gretel" is told as a fairy tale, using many of the elements common to fairy tales. This book reflects the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, "Hansel and Gretel". However, in Murphy's parable, Hansel and Gretel are two Jewish children who are abandoned by their father and stepmother to save them from the Nazis. Setting the story in Nazi Germany creates an atmosphere of fear and anxiety and establishes a set of circumstances in which it is possible for people to act in ways that would be unacceptable in other circumstances. The stepmother is a good example of this. She is the strength of the family – she is the one who decides that all family members will have a better chance of surviving if they separate – the children leave together on their own and the parents go in another direction. Unlike the depiction of the stepmother in the Grimm fairy tale, this stepmother is not evil. She is strong-willed and determined, but not evil, even though she is protecting herself and her husband by abandoning the children. Using the stepmother as the villain is common in fairy tales, according to Stone in her article "Things Walt Disney Didn't Say to Us." She suggests that the woman of the family is almost always cast as the villain. But in Murphy's story, the stepmother's actions, although they may seem evil at first, can ultimately be interpreted as heroic, because she abandons the children only to save them. She also cares about the children's well-being, to the point of losing her life trying to find them. In this case, Murphy is reminding us that the horrors of the time were so great that… in the middle of the paper… we were not asked to use logic and therefore the emotional impact of the story is more direct and perhaps more powerful This book left me with a deeper sense of the horrors experienced by the Polish people, particularly the Jews and Gypsies, at the hands of the Germans, while illustrating the combination of hope and incredible resilience that kept them going. Works Cited Murphy, Louise, (2013). The true story of Hansel and Gretel. Penguin Books.Stone, Kay (1975). Things Walt Disney never told us. The Journal of AmericanFolklore, Vol 88, No 347, Women and Folklore pp42-50, University of Illinois Press.Hansjorg, Hohr, (2000). Dynamic aspects of fairy tales: social and emotional competence through fairy tales. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, Vol 44, No 1, Department of Education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology