It took Sarah ten minutes to coax herself up the stairs. She turned the knob—locked. The air was sweet and a bit like sewage, not the charcoal scent of kitchen fire that used to greet Sarah at the entry, pointing to her mother over the stove, stirring something lovely in their great black pot. Sarah knocked softly, and an old, sour lady answered the door with a liver-spotted face and gray tendrils escaping her black kerchief. A lady who was not Sarah’s mother. “Yes?” The girth of her successfully blocked the doorframe.

“This…this is my home,” Sarah managed to say.

“This is my home now, Jew!” The lady flashed gums so red they were burgundy.

“But…but I used to live here. With my family.”

“Oh yes? Prove it.” The lady crossed her arms over her chest.

“We have a family chart on the wall.” Sarah strained to remember other things. “And my parents’ wedding document. A ketubah.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if I did know what you were talking about, I would suspect those things were gone.”

“Gone?” Sarah shuddered.

“Burned, probably.” She shrugged. “Hold here.”

The lady disappeared inside, giving Sarah a peek of the home that used to be hers, with their art, their cheap, stupid art, on the walls! The painting of pink roses that her mother adored—and then it was eclipsed as the lady returned.

She thrust a wooden cage into Sarah’s startled hands. “He is your rabbit, eh? You are lucky we fed him. Be gone now, or I will shove you in the ovens just like the rest of them.”

Sarah flinched at the spite. Ovens? She didn’t yet know of ovens. She came eye-to-eye with Penelope, the apple of her brother’s eye. The door slammed shut as she whispered, “It’s a girl rabbit, not a boy.”

Somehow Sarah stumbled down the stairs. With Benjamin’s bunny rabbit in hand, she wandered through the ruins of her town to the synagogue. They called it Scuola Greca. They were Romaniotes—the first Jews outside Judea. They’d been so proud of that once. It was always important to know they were Jews, Romaniotes. They’d cherished those labels, and then they were murdered for them.