APENDICES
I. Biography and Works of Louise Murphy
Louise Murphy was born in 1943 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her ethnicity is Scottish, Irish and German. Murphy‟s hobbies include playing the flute, classical music, and the opera.
Ms. Murphy began writing when she was five because she puts it, “I wrote because of the joy
holding in my hand and something that i had made, something that could never disappear again the way all my thought‟s did .” Louise Murphy also loved reading and still today tells her student
to read anything possible.
Murphy attended the University of Kentucky in 1964. Upon leaving the University, she
became a junior high English teacher in Newark, DE FROM 1966-68. After teaching at a junior high, she went to Francisco State University in 1977 where she received her Master‟s degree of
art and became a professor at the University from 1977-82.
She began writing the novels in 1980 when she wrote her first book (a children‟s book),
My Garden: A Journal for Gardening around the Year, a journal that has weekly entries about
gardening from January to the beginning of November. After writing her first book, she continued writing and also continued her teaching.
Her next was The Sea Within, a story of a woman who is depressed because of her destroyed marriage and inability to have a child, so he decides to start a new life in Kentucky. After writing The Sea Within, she went on become a teacher of novel writing at the Acalanes
Adult Education in Lafayette, California from 1986-91. She wrote many essays and poetry pieces in newspapers, magazines, and journal.
She then wrote a poem and a book in the same year: 2003. She wrote pilgrimare (a poem)
and then probably her most significant and acclaimed novel: The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A novel of war and survival. She caught both kids and adults readers in her story of the classic fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel mixed with the Holocaust and World War II. She won the
Writer Digest Award for Poetry and she also won the Shaunt Basmajian Award for books both in
2003. She is currently working on her latest novel, which is set in 1984 in California, Love
Stories.
ii. Summary Of The Novel The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival, captured the attention of
both adult and young-adult readers in its gripping retelling of a well-known fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm , which Murphy mixes with the history of the Holocaust and transform into
what Library Journal contributor Edward Cone described as “ a page turner as well as a moving testament to the human will to do good and survive despite all odds.”
As The True Story of Hansel and Gretel opens, readers are drawn back in time to the
Bialowieza Forest of Eastern Poland and the winter o 1943. Two children are brought to the edge of a forest by their father and step mother, where it is explained to them that they must hide in
the forest and if found, must go by the proper Hansel and Gretel, never revealing their Jewish heritage. So abandoned, the children go in searching food and shelter, Hansel leaving a trail of bread crumbs so their father can find them. They are soon taken in by a free-spirited woman
named Magda, who locals believe to be a witch due to her knowledge of herbal healing. Realizing that the children are in danger from the Nazis occupying the area, Magda helps Hansel
and Gretel avoid capture, at risk of her own life.
Meanwhile the children‟s parent join a partisan force in their efforts to undermine the
efforts of the German SS to round up and exterminate the region‟s Jewish population. The stepmother especially is haunted by the fear for the children‟s safety while he suffers the
brutality of both the invading force and the winter. The story of the two children and their
parents is framed against the struggle of other Jews hiding in the forests, the conflict faces by the Poles living in town who are sometimes forced to comply with the immoral demands of their
Nazi occupiers, and Magda, whose brother and other relatives also experience World War II in unique ways. Murphy explained the history underlying her story in an interview posted on the penguin Putnam Web Site: Poland was called the anvil of the devil during the war. 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.
Children who looked Aryan (-fair of complexion like German children-) must be kidnapped and „saved,‟ because the Germans did not have enough population for their grandiose scheme. 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.
