"The Picture (1942)" Summary

The narrator's family is packed, waiting for the air raid siren to summon them to the shelter. As they wait quietly, there is a knock at the door - Friedrich's signal. Mother lets him in. He is filthy and jumpy. He talks of loneliness and forgetting what his parents looked like. He has had to sell his watch and has only the engraved cap of the pen Herr Neudorf gave him for his thirteenth birthday. Friedrich wolfs down three sandwiches before asking for the snapshot taken at the amusement park. Mother finds a box of pictures and father sets to looking through them. Mother draws Friedrich a hot bath and lays out clean clothes for him. The sirens begin to wail, and the narrator's father advises Friedrich to stay in the apartment, because Resch will arrest them all if...