I am looking for classical fairy tales retold with the background of WWi, WWii and the Holocaust. This is a tough one, I know.

So far I have found:
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
Briar Rose
Winter Song
Phoenix and the Ashes
Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (maybe)
Anton the Dove Fancier and Other Tales of the Holocaust
Ingeborg Bachmann's Telling Stories: Fairy-Tale Beginnings and Holocaust Endings (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought)
Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed

Any help, including comments by people who have read any of these books, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

There may be more information available in the following book, if you can find it at a library or bookstore. Please note what I have made bold print near the bottom of the article.

The information below is from the following site: Project MUSE (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/v024/24.3haase.html)


Haase, Donald
Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales
The Lion and the Unicorn - Volume 24, Number 3, September 2000, pp. 360-377

The Johns Hopkins University Press (http://muse.jhu.edu/about/publishers/hopkins) Donald Haase - Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales - The Lion and the Unicorn 24:3 The Lion and the Unicorn 24.3 (2000) 360-377 Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales Donald Haase In childhood, only the surroundings show, and nothing is explained. Children do not possess a social analysis of what is happening to them, or around them, so the landscape and the pictures it presents have to remain a background, taking on meaning later, from different circumstances. --Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (33) The landscape that provided the background to Carolyn Kay Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was, in her earliest years, still that of World War II. As she writes in Landscape for a Good Woman, her remarkable "story of two lives"--her own and that of her mother: "The War was so palpable a presence in the first five years of my life that I still find it hard to believe that I didn't live through it. There were bomb-sites everywhere, prefabs on the waste land . . ." (29). In a comparative study of Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman and German writer Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood), literary critic Elizabeth W. Harries has shown how postwar women writers have used fairy tales as devices to interpret their childhoods -- Steedman's against the landscape of postwar London's working-class and Wolf's against the landscape of Nazi Germany and its aftermath. As Harries demonstrates,.

Thank you so much! This subject has really grabbed my imagination and the reimagining fairy tales with this background seems like such a profound way to not only remind people of what happened, teach children about the subject, but also possibly find a way for people to heal and better understand what happened. Maybe one day I will right a fairy tale with this background. Thank you for your guidance.

Ms. b:)

I do hope that what you find is helpful to you! :) I had no idea about the connection with those particular wars and the Holocaust concerning fairy tales. From now on, I will take a special interest in and also have a better understanding about some fairy tales when I read them to children in order to educate them better!