Photos I’d seen had invariably shown him at his wife’s side. And Ethel Rosenberg, it turned out, was less than five feet tall. No wonder her husband had seemed to tower. I’d been escorted from the counsel room and down the hall through several steel doors to the women’s east wing of the death house, three cells on a single corridor. Because Ethel Rosenberg was the only prisoner in the wing, talking to her from outside her cell had been deemed privacy enough. A prison matron sat down the hall from us, out of earshot but in sight of my straight-backed steel chair facing the cell door. On the other side the prisoner sat in an identical chair looking back at me between bars. As the lone prisoner on this wing, Ethel Rosenberg served a sentence of de facto solitary confinement, her cell maybe twelve feet by six with cot, metal table, washbasin, toilet, and the one chair. On the cot an orange-and-white paperback lay folded open—Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw—the only thing in there not gray.
