The moon hung white in the mystical blue twilight, illuminating the countryside of Krakow, Poland. Purple shadows shivered and swayed, and for one boy, who stole through the melting evening with a burden in his arms, whispered of Nazi soldiers. Edziu, he was called, and as his hasty footsteps echoed across his Tata’s farmland, he glanced at the large woven basket which he grasped. Cloths were draped around a bulky form weighting the basket, concealing a secret which Edziu knew could kill him.
    
His Mama’s and Tata’s voices drifted through his memory on the wind. The latest radio broadcast . . . the Nazis have stationed themselves in a village just west of ours. Edziu could picture his mother, grave but stoic. The families remain together, thank the Lord. Tata spoke, then. Edziu imagined his eyes as blue pools of concern. The resistance can’t keep up, with the masses of them fanning out so rapidly. An unasked question permeated the air, which Mama addressed: They took, among other valuables, the radios.
    
A quiet rustling shattered the memory of several nights ago—a conversation heard when Edziu was supposed to have been sleeping. As he now approached a faded barn at the edge of Tata’s property, his heart hammered wildly, and his mind raced, step after step, until he crossed that final threshold between security and peril.
    
Edziu drank in the cool darkness of the barn and felt its rough, splintery walls, making his way to a stack of oversized hay bales nestled in a corner. He removed the bale perched precariously atop the stack and set it down. The bale directly beneath it was torn at with Edziu’s agile but perspiring hands, a shower of straw decorating the ground at his boots as the bale was gouged out.
    
With meticulous attention, Edziu removed the cloths from the woven basket, exposing a shortwave radio, to be hidden inside a hay bale, superseding German propaganda.
    
The darkened sky was his friend as he swiftly exited the barn, hauling not a radio but a premonitory fear for himself, for his family, for his country, in his basket.