N EXT MORNING, Hanna was dead. She had hanged herself at daybreak.

When I arrived, I was taken to the warden. I saw her for the first time—a small, thin woman with dark blond hair and glasses. She seemed insignificant until she began to speak, with force and warmth and a severe gaze and energetic use of both hands and arms. She asked me about my telephone conversation of the night before and the meeting the previous week. Had I picked up any signals, had it made me fear for her? I said no. Indeed, I had had no suspicions or fears that I had ignored.

“How did you get to know each other?”

“We lived in the same neighborhood.”

She looked at me searchingly, and I saw that I would have to say more.

“We lived in the same neighborhood and we got to know each other and became friends. When I was a young student, I was at the trial that convicted her.”

“Why did you send Frau Schmitz cassettes?”

I was silent.

“You knew that she was illiterate, didn’t you? How did you know?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t see what business the story of Hanna and me was of hers. Tears were filling my chest and throat, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to speak. I didn’t want to cry in front of her.

She must have seen how I was feeling. “Come with me, I’ll show you Frau Schmitz’s cell.” She went ahead, but kept turning around to tell me things or explain them to me. Here is where there had been a terrorist attack, here was the sewing shop where Hanna had worked, this is where Hanna once held a sit-down strike until cuts in library funding were reinstated, this was the way to the library. She stopped in front of the cell. “Frau Schmitz didn’t pack. You’ll see her cell the way she lived in it.”

Bed, closet, table, chair, a shelf on the wall over the table, a sink and toilet in the corner behind the door. Glass bricks instead of window glass. The table was bare. The shelf held books, an alarm clock, a stuffed bear, two mugs, instant coffee, tea tins, the cassette machine, and on two lower shelves, the cassettes I had made.

“They aren’t all here.”

The warden had followed my glance. “Frau Schmitz always lent some tapes to the aid society for blind prisoners.”

I went over to the bookshelf. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry—the literature of the victims, next to the autobiography of Rudolf Hess, Hannah Arendt’s report on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and scholarly literature on the camps.

“Did Hanna read these?”

“Well, at least she ordered them with care. Several years ago I had to get her a general concentrationcamp bibliography, and then one or two years ago she asked me to suggest some books on women in the camps, both prisoners and guards; I wrote to the Institute for Contemporary History, and they sent a specialized bibliography. As soon as Frau Schmitz learned to read, she began to read about the concentration camps.”

Above the bed hung many small pictures and slips of paper. I knelt on the bed and read. There were quotations, poems, little articles, even recipes that Hanna had written down or cut out like pictures from newspapers and magazines. “Spring lets its blue banner flutter through the air again,” “Cloud shadows fly across the fields”—the poems were all full of delight in nature, and yearning for it, and the pictures showed woods bright with spring, meadows spangled with flowers, autumn foliage and single trees, a pasture by a stream, a cherry tree with ripe red cherries, an autumnal chestnut flamed in yellow and orange. A newspaper photograph showed an older man and a younger man, both in dark suits, shaking hands. In the young one, bowing to the older one, I recognized myself. I was graduating from school, and was getting a prize from the principal at the ceremony. That was a long time after Hanna had left the city. Had Hanna, who could not read, subscribed to the local paper in which my photo appeared? In any case she must have gone to some trouble to find out about the photo and get a copy. And had she had it with her during the trial? I felt the tears again in my chest and throat.

“She learned to read with you. She borrowed the books you read on tape out of the library, and followed what she heard, word by word and sentence by sentence. The tape machine couldn’t handle all that constant switching on and off, a............