In the most personal text of his long journey, professor of European history Antonis Molcho recounts the adventures he experienced from ages four to six, when his parents, with remarkable self-sacrifice, saved him from the criminal plans of the German occupiers. He speaks of the help that he and his family received from everyday people who, risking their own lives, protected them.

The title of the book, inspired by the famous text of Hannah Arendt, pays tribute to these silent heroes, to their humility, and to their selflessness. Delving into the deposits of his personal memory, the author constantly confronts urgent questions: What do we remember? How do we remember? Whose are ultimately our memories? Is there perhaps a unique and unchanging self that we carry within us from childhood to old age?

At the same time, Antonis Molcho redefines the issue of the identity of Thessaloniki's Jews, before and immediately after the Occupation. To what extent did the Jews consider (or could consider) themselves Greeks? How did he manage to come to terms with the painful memories? In his case, the realization of the trauma of the Holocaust helped and helps him understand the course of his life.

“Chronicle? Memoir? History? No matter how one tries to name Antonis Molcho’s book, I believe it will be unfairly defined. Molcho, a great historian, plays with all the possibilities that writing offers him, to give us an exceptionally captivating narrative that is as educational about the relationships between memory and history and, above all, about what it meant to be a Jewish child in Thessaloniki in the 1940s.”

Kostas Kostis “Molcho writes that he feels he has had ‘a life filled with discontinuities.’ In a sense, these memoirs confirm that: he wandered from one place to another, from one language to another, from one country to another, and from one historical period to the next. But ultimately, thanks to this very touching text of his, I can’t help but feel that he had, perhaps, a life of remarkable continuity and adaptation, a life in which he bravely settled his accounts with the events described in this book, supported by the love of his parents, who struggled so hard to save him.”

From the introduction by Katherine E. Fleming