The chronicle of a Jewish man from Thessaloniki in the Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee, and the aftermath of liberation.

Born in Thessaloniki, Moses Eliou was sent, at the age of 17, to Auschwitz with his family. Only he survived from there, as well as from the terrible "death march" and the other camps he encountered afterwards. After his liberation in 1945, he found himself in Italy, from where he moved to Israel as an "illegal" immigrant. He enlisted in the army during the War of Independence, where he remained for twenty-two years. Throughout this period, he never visited Greece and Thessaloniki, only doing so in 1987, and he was extremely reluctant to talk about the Holocaust, even to his wife and children - a particularly effective rejection, at least outwardly.

When the dam finally broke, Moses felt the need to write a "history," to be as precise as possible and not to touch his emotions. Despite the difficulty, he now declares himself satisfied with the effort - "because it led me to completely new places." The pain of memory leads to the need for writing, to the joy of writing.