In 1943, life for Jews in the ghetto is grim. Deportations in cattle cars have begun, and daily life is overseen by cruel guards. Jakob overhears a radio (forbidden in the ghetto) and learns that Russian tanks are advancing on his town and coming to liberate them. This news transfixes the ghetto. As Jakob is prodded for more news, he begins supplying information from a radio that now exists only in his imagination. He finds himself trapped in  his growing mesh of lies until he is driven to tell the truth. This fable is one of the great literary masterworks of the Holocaust.