That same summer, Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted. The last time she saw her husband was minutes before he was taken to the chair, in a room where a screen separated the traitors so they could not touch. They were left alone; no one knows what they said to each other. But when the warden entered the room and separated the couple, leading Julius away, it is said he found the screen blotted with blood. They had tried to reach each other through the mesh; in a moment we can only imagine, they had pressed their fingers together with such passion that blood flowed down their hands. “Be comforted then,” she wrote her sons that day, “that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life.” Julius died in stantly in the electric chair, and when they cleared his body away and led Ethel in, she was so small that the electrodes couldn’t properly fit her head.
