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should take along — apart from the prohibited things, of course. The situation was very serious, no doubt about that; they didn’t expect it to be a paradise, but nobody had any definite knowledge. Mrs. Frankfurter thought in practical terms, too practical for his liking, solely of bed linen and dishes and things to wear, but he was reluctant to part with many items that she regarded as superfluous. Such as the drum on which at a highly successful performance he had announced the arrival of the heir to the Spanish throne; or Rosa’s ballet slippers from the time when she was five years old, to this day almost unworn; or the album of carefully pasted-in reviews in which his name is mentioned and underlined in red. Give me one good reason why I should part with them: life is more than just eating and sleeping. The problem of transporting them? In great haste he bought a handcart, at an exorbitant price, for at that time prices for handcarts shot up overnight, and now the little pile fills a corner of their basement.
    He lays aside one item after another, his wife watching him silently, seething with curiosity: What is he looking for? Maybe for a moment he studies the framed photograph of all his fellow actors at the theater, his portly figure over on the right, between Salzer and Strelezki, who in those days wasn’t yet so well known. But that’s not what he’s looking for; if he did study the picture, he puts it aside again and goes on reducing the pile.
    “That Jacob Heym is a fool.”
    “Why?”
    “Why! Why! He heard some news, marvelous, but that’s his affair. Some good news, very good news in fact: then he should just be glad and not drive everyone else crazy with it.”
    “I don’t understand you, Felix,” she says. “You’re not being fair to him. Surely it’s a great thing for us to know about it. Everybody should know about it.”
    “Women!” Frankfurter says angrily. “Today you know about it, tomorrow the neighbors know, and the next day the whole ghetto is talking about nothing else!”
    She may nod, surprised at his fury. But so far he’s given no reason at all to reproach Heym.
    “And all of a sudden the gestapo knows!” he says. “They have more ears than you think.”
    “Oh, Felix,” she interrupts him, “do you seriously believe that the gestapo needs us to find out where the Russians are?”
    “Who’s talking about that! What I mean is, all of a sudden the gestapo knows that there’s a radio in the ghetto. And what will they do? They’ll immediately turn every street upside down, house by house. They won’t give up till they’ve found the radio. And where will they find one?”
    The pile has been leveled. Frankfurter lifts up a cardboard box, white or brown, in any case a cardboard box containing the reason for a just and valid death sentence. He opens the lid and shows his wife the radio.
    She may give a little shriek, she may be horrified, certainly shocked; she stares at the radio and at him and is at a loss.
    “You brought our radio along!” she whispers and folds her hands. “You brought our radio along! They could have shot all of us for that, and I knew nothing about it.… I knew nothing.…”
    “Why should you?” he said. “Why should I have told you? I’ve trembled enough alone, and you’ve trembled enough even without a radio. There were days when I forgot it, simply forgot it, sometimes even for weeks at a time. So one happens to have an old radio in the basement and stops thinking about it. But whenever I did remember I would start trembling, and I’ve never been reminded of it as I was today. The worst part is that I never listened, not a single time, not even in the early days. Not so that you wouldn’t notice — I simply didn’t dare. Sometimes I wanted to; my curiosity would almost get the better of me. I’d pick up the key, and you remember how from time to time I’d go down to the basement. You would ask me what I wanted down there, and I told