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mystified by the German agenda; they lounged in the afternoon heat and sang to the sunset crinkling over the waves. But when the Italians surrendered, life on the island changed drastically.
    The night of June 5, 1944. Through the rustling darkness of the fields, late-night voices: a wife turns to her husband who’s already asleep telling him there will be another child by Christmas; a mother calls for her son across the sea; drunken promises and threats of German soldiers in the kafenio in Zakynthos town.
    In the zudeccha, the Spanish silver siddur with hinges in the spine, the tallith and candlesticks are being buried in the earth under the kitchen floor. Letters to absent children, photos, are buried. While the men and women who place these valuables in the ground have never done so before, they go through the motions with centuries of practice guiding their hands, a ritual as familiar as the Sabbath. Even the child who runs to bring his favourite toy, the dog with the little wooden wheels, in order to place it in the hold in the kitchen floor, seems to act with knowledge. All across Europe there’s such buried treasure. A scrap of lace, a bowl. Ghetto diaries that have never been found.
    After burying the books and dishes, the silverware and photos, the Jews of the Zakynthos ghetto vanish.
    They slip into the hills, where they wait like coral; half flesh, half stone. They wait in caves, in the sheds and animal stalls of the farms of Christian friends. In their cramped hiding places, parents tell their children what they can, a hurriedly packed suitcase of family stories, the names of relatives. Fathers give their five-year-old sons advice for married life. Mothers pass down recipes not only for the haroseth on the Seder plate but for mezedhes, for cholent as well as ahladhi sto fourno—baked quince, for poppyseed cake and ladhera.
    All night and day and night, on the floor next to the sea chest, I wait for the sign from Athos. I wait to close myself up inside. In the hot silence I can’t read or think past listening. I listen until I sleep, until I wake again, listening.
    It was the night the families of the zudeccha went into hiding that Old Martin’s son, Ioannis, and his family came to us. The following night, Ioannis took them to a better hiding place, on the other side of the island. At the end of the week he came again, with news. He was stricken. His narrow face looked even narrower, as if it had been squeezed through a pipe. We sat in Athos’s study. Athos poured Ioannis the last inch of ouzo then filled the glass with water.
    “The Gestapo ordered Mayor Karrer to write down the name and profession of every Jew. Karrer took the list to Archbishop Chrysostomos. The archbishop said: Burn the list. That’s when they sent the warning to the zudeccha. Almost everyone managed to escape the night we came to you. The next day, the streets were empty. I passed through the ghetto on the way to my father’s. In the daylight it seemed impossible that hundreds of people could have disappeared so quickly All you could hear were the trees rustling.”
    Ioannis drained the glass with one tilt of his head.
    “Athos, did you know my wife’s family is from Corfu? They lived on Velissariou Street, Velissariou Street, near Solomou….”
    Athos and I waited. The shutters were half closed against the sun. The room was very hot.
    “The boat was overflowing. I saw it with my own eyes. The boat was so full of Jews from Corfu that when it reached Zakynthos harbour the soldiers couldn’t cram on a single soul. The poor few they rounded up were waiting in the noon sun. Mrs. Serenos, old Constantine Caro¡ In Platia Solomou, right under the Virgin’s nose, with their hands above their heads, at gunpoint. But then the boat didn’t stop. My father and I waited at the edge of the square, to see what the Germans would do. Mr. Caro started to weep. He thought he was saved, you see, we all thought that, we weren’t thinking properly,