It’s still cold outside, so I’m sitting at the living room table again, drawing the things hanging on the wall next to the bedroom door. You may wonder why there’s only a clock on the shelf, with a wire running from nowhere to the floor. I could tell you that the wire is the ground for our radio, but that would leave you asking, where’s the radio?
Well, I originally wanted to draw the radio also, but Father wouldn’t let me. He took a look at what I was drawing, and he immediately got worried.“
Good heavens!” he said. “I didn’t know I had left the radio standing out. I’ll bet you are going to draw the radio next.”
I nodded, yes.
“Well, don’t do it,” Father said. “I should have put that radio away. If the police ever raid this place again, they shouldn’t see this radio--they shouldn’t even see a picture with a radio in it. Either way, Harry could get into big trouble.”
I knew what Father meant. Nobody is allowed to have a regular radio. Non-Jewish people can get a flat, ugly-looking radio, fixed to receive just two local radio stations that the Nazis control. But we are Jewish and we aren’t allowed to have any radio at all.
But we do! Our ugly old radio is one that hasn’t been fixed, so that we can get all the stations. Double risk! That’s why Father wouldn’t let me draw it.
He put it into its hiding place, which was built into the ceiling of the chickenhouse. And I took our alarm clock out of the bedroom and put it on the shelf to finish my picture.
We have hiding places for all our personal stuff, but except for the radio, we hide our things only when we expect a raid. The police have made several raids in the neighborhood to search for Jews and Resistance members. We go into our emergency act when Harry gets word that a raid is being planned. He gets warnings from the local Veldwachter, or “Constable,” Gerrit van der Heurik, who is a friend of his. The regular police, of course, don’t know that we get these warnings.
