Colloquial Conversations In A Fairy Tale By Yolen's Poem

Gemma, Yolen’s protagonist, experienced an event that can be considered as one of the cruellest ones occurred in history, the Holocaust. She was, according to the tale, the only woman who escaped from Chelmno alive. After a “kiss”, Gemma wakes up from her “dream” without remembering anything except for a fairy tale. Although this could seem a happy ending to an internment story, she is not fully liberated from this consternation. In fact, the events lived during her stay in the death concentration camp are not forgotten but “repressed in a lapse of memory” (Lacapra 10) forming her trauma.
This term is used in colloquial conversations, normally to refer to a mental shock or a disturbing experience. However, this word with Greek origin initially
Despite this statement could be unperceived since this is the opening of the fairy tale, once the reader is completely set in the environment that this represents, it can be perfectly understood. This story is located in not the best period, the Second World War. The fairy tale continues following the traditional development until the presentation of the villain in the story. As Bettelheim affirms in his book devoted to this type of stories, “in practically every fairy tale good and evil are given body in the form of some figures and their actions” (8-9). In this book, evil is embodied in a bad fairy “in black with big black boots and silver eagles on her hat” (Yolen 19). This is the only physical description that appears in the fairy tale in relation to this figure that is labelled as “angel of death” (Yolen 19). Nevertheless, it can be easily connected to the uniform of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary organization that included the Gestapo. This connotation is confirmed afterwards by Josef Potoki who names this official secret police during the narration of his experience, as it was in charge of the concentration camps where he was confined. It can be pointed out that Gemma introduces this description unconsciously in her fairy tale to represent her own villain. However, it is worth noting that she does not modify the gender of the bad fairy and continues referring to this figure using the feminine. This can suggest that Gemma does not have an image of this evil as a concrete person in her mind but as a symbol of death. This bad fairy pronounces the words that should be analysed since they mean the turning point of history, the beginning of the pain suffered in the