Now Sarah trudged through her old city abounding in demolished storefronts and buildings reduced to rubble—but inexplicably alight in bustle and chatter. She sensed a palpable shift though when she crossed westward into the ruins of the Jewish quarter. As she walked the old familiar alleys, she was assaulted by chilling quiet. Once, not long ago, she couldn’t take two steps without running into a friend or an aunt. But now shops were destroyed, and others boarded up. The few people she passed weren’t Jewish, but unfamiliar Greeks.

There was the market where she and Rachel once scurried underfoot, haggling for textiles as entrusted by her father and translating sometimes for Italian soldiers. There was the Italian synagogue, decimated. There was the Romaniote synagogue, still standing but blackened ash marring its once vivid yellow siding.

And there, up the slope of Velissariou, was her father’s shop, one window shattered but the other intact. Sarah pressed her fingertips to the rain-smeared windowpane and noticed something unfamiliar and framed hanging there. Slowly she read it. JEWISH, in bold letters. A proclamation signed by the Germans and their Greek collaborators, ensuring no one would frequent her father’s shop. Without thinking, Sarah found herself bursting inside, yanking off the frame, and throwing it to the ground. The glass broke, skating across the floor. And then it was quiet again, the machines and textiles looted—empty inside.

Empty, and then teeming with ghosts.

With shaky steps, Sarah made it back outside. As a little girl, she’d stood with her face pressed against the glass, making silly faces at her father before scampering off to school. He’d chide her later, for how he had to scrub off her lip prints before customers arrived. But still, he always played along, sticking his thumbs in his ears and contorting his face into funny, ugly shapes in return.

What had Sarah thought, after all? That her father would be sitting in his chair again, threading a needle?

Sarah keeled over and had to crouch down. Her eyesight blurred with the cobblestones polished by all those vanished feet. She had thought it, that they’d be waiting here for her. Or hoped it at least—by slipping briefly into fairy tales.

But as Sarah grappled to stand and walked to the entry of her old apartment building, almost peculiarly intact amid all the destruction, she feared she was perhaps the last Jew alive on the island.