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By Root 15409 0

also the day on which to her other frights and miseries had been added the almost intolerable burden of a challenge and a responsibility. And four years later, in a bar in Brooklyn, she spoke of the desperate shame that still engulfed her at the memory of how such a challenge and a responsibility had frightened her and finally defeated her. This was ultimately one of the darkest parts of her confession to me and the focus of what she called, again and again, her “badness.” And I began to see how this “badness” went far beyond what—it seemed to me—was misplaced guilt over her clumsy effort to seduce Höss or even her equally clumsy attempt to manipulate him through her father’s pamphlet. I began to see how, among its other attributes, absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In the end, Sophie recalled with anguish, her failure was reduced to such a cheaply trivial yet overwhelmingly important agglomeration of metal, glass and plastic as the radio that Wanda thought Sophie would never have the incredible chance to steal. And she blew her chance to pieces...

On the floor just underneath the landing which served as the antechamber to Höss’s attic was the small room occupied by Emmi, age eleven, middle member of the Commandant’s five offspring. Sophie had passed the room many times on her way up to and down from the office, and had noted that the door was often left open—not a remarkable fact really, she had reflected, when one realized that petty theft in this despotically well-regulated stronghold was nearly as unthinkable as murder. Sophie had paused for a glimpse more than once and had seen the orderly, dustless child’s bedchamber which would have been unexceptional in Augsburg or Münster: a sturdy single bed with a flowered coverlet, stuffed animals heaped on a chair, some silver trophies, a cuckoo clock, a wall with gingerbread picture frames enclosing photographs (an alpine scene, marching Hitler Youth, a seascape, the child herself in a swimsuit, ponies at play, portraits of the Führer, “Onkel Heini” Himmler, smiling Mummy, smiling Daddy in civvies), a dresser with a cluster of boxes for jewelry and trinkets, and next to these a portable radio. It was the radio that always captured her attention. Only rarely had Sophie seen or heard the radio in operation, no doubt because its charms had been superseded by the huge phonograph downstairs which blared forth night and day.

Once when passing by the room she had noticed the radio on—dreamy, modern ersatz-Strauss waltzes strained through a voice which identified the source as a Wehrmacht station, possibly Vienna, perhaps Prague. The limpid, muted strings were stunningly clear. But the radio itself bewitched her not by its music but by its very being—ravished her by its size, its shape, its adorable shrunken self, its cuteness, its miniatureness, its incredible portability. Never had it occurred to Sophie that technology could achieve such marvelous compactness, but then, she had overlooked what the Third Reich and its newborn science of electronics had been up to all these exploding years. The radio was no bigger than a medium-sized book. The name Siemens was written across a side panel in intaglio script. Deep maroon in color, its plastic front cover sprang up on hinges to form the antenna, standing sentinel over the little tube-and-battery-filled chassis small enough to be balanced easily in the palm of a man’s hand. The radio afflicted Sophie with terror and desire. And at dusk on that October day after her confrontation with Höss, when she descended to her dank quarters in the basement, she caught sight of the radio through the open door and felt her bowels give way with fear at the very idea that at last, with no more hesitations or delays, she must manage somehow to steal it.

She stood in the shadows of the hallway, only a few feet from the bottom of the attic stairs. The radio was playing soft murmurous schmaltz. Above, there was a sound of the booted feet of Höss’s adjutant, thumping about on the landing. Höss himself had left the house on an inspection tour. She stood