"Number 31328" is the very identity of the author, back when, as an eighteen-year-old, he was led by the Turks to the labor camps of the East. The book is a harrowing chronicle "written in blood," as Venezis pointed out, adding: "I speak of the burning matter, of the flesh that drips its blood and floods its pages." It was originally written in 1924 and reworked in 1931, when it was first published. The success it achieved then was immense, even outside the Greek sphere. Elias Venezis (the testimonial book is written in the first person and with the real name of the narrator-author) was born in Ayvalik in 1904. He came to Greece with the Asia Minor catastrophe. He is considered one of the main representatives of the "generation of the '30s" in modern Greek prose.