“You don’t have to fight and win battles to be a hero. You can do small chores around the house that people won’t notice…”

Born in 1939 in Thessaloniki, into a beautiful Jewish family of the city, middle-class and highly cultured, little Antonis, a Jewish child with a non-Jewish name – the story of his parents choosing this name in itself is great – will be forced to leave first his family, and then and his city in the face of the danger of being captured by the Nazi invaders and moved “somewhere in Europe.” Although the concept of the Holocaust or concentration camps did not yet exist, all the Jews of Thessaloniki, that once New Jerusalem, that cosmopolitan, multicultural, multilingual, colorful and rich city, knew that something bad, something terribly bad was about to happen. break out. We all saw these harrowing scenes when, in July 1942—about eight months before the first train to Auschwitz departed on March 15, 1943—the Nazis rounded up several thousand Jewish men on Svoboda Square to subject them to humiliating “gymnastic exercises.” One of them was the father of little Antonis Molho. And, perhaps, it was on the very day when he was impaled, when he asked in fluent German what all this was for, he and his wife conceived the great plan of their resistance to fate.

So his broken-hearted parents will give their son to a Christian family so that he will not be found in their house, and they themselves, so that they cannot keep their mouths open, will make a daring journey from Thessaloniki, a Jew, now a ghetto, to Athens: a journey that will last a few weeks, will be associated with betrayals and mortal dangers, will exhaust them physically and mentally.

Then, when they feel somewhat safe in the capital and receive counterfeit papers, in a different name and, of course, with a different religion, they will make sure that little Antonis also comes to them, who will travel many days by train, but not as a regular passenger, but inside one of the locomotive’s boilers so that he would not be seen and had his shorts pulled off to see if he was circumcised.

“Next to them”: just in the same city. Over the next year, he will not even see his parents, as he will live underground, either in a Catholic monastery or in Christian homes – often without compensation. The child will forget the face of his parents and will have to get used to the new faces that surround him every time. As for his parents, his father would go out on the mountain for more than a year with the rebels who fought the conqueror – in exchange for the help they offered during the couple’s Homeric descent to Athens – and his mother would work as a cook and servant in the houses not to mention music education and general culture. At some point, now an employee of the Red Cross, she will manage to take little Antonis to her in order to later save him several times, since the Germans and their faithful accomplices carefully searched even in the most unexpected places for hiding Jews. The cinematic scene on the tram where the mother leaves the Tony to an unknown passenger without any consultation, in the reckless impulse of the moment when two policemen go to check, will never be forgotten by the reader.

The Molho family’s odyssey would last more than two years: they fled in March 1943 and returned in April 1945. But when they return to Thessaloniki, the city is no longer what they knew and will never be their city again. They, like the rest of the survivors, will experience together about 2000 souls the terrifying “moment of the Apocalypse”. Everything was done quickly, “regularly”, with a plan and numerous allowances: “The extermination of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki was completed in just six months, less than it takes to bear a child.” Without its Jewish population mercilessly massacred in the death camps, with more than 50,000 weeping ghosts roaming its streets, but also with heavy guilt that haunted the eyes of its Christian residents, as some of them collaborated in the persecution, while many divided the property of the murdered among themselves – some steal a curtain, some an entire store, some a memorial plaque from a destroyed communal cemetery, or a house, or a business, or gold, making wealth and “prestige” overnight on the other – at the same time that few felt truly overwhelmed by the Event, or even interested in the details of what had happened, or even cared—so without their past, the city was now a foreign city. The Molchos will spend another eleven years in Thessaloniki until Antonis finishes school, and then immigrate to America, where another big chapter of their eventful life will begin – but also another test of their Jewishness, albeit without the risk of death. .

But what, besides courage, an indomitable will to overcome all obstacles, constant risk and, perhaps, good luck, kept Molchos alive? “It seems that at every stage of our adventure there has been someone ready to offer vital help and get us out of the dead end: a couple of soldiers (first two Germans who spent the night in our house, and then a Briton who brought my mother together), an abbess- a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox archbishop, a poor widow, a railway inspector and driver, and families who agreed to take me into their homes. […] More often than one can imagine, an honest person chooses help not out of heroism, not out of a desire to stand out, and not out of obedience to a strong moral imperative. It’s a matter of dignity. […] You don’t have to fight and win battles to become a hero. You can do little feats that people won’t notice and the crowd won’t applaud.”

Antonis Molho eventually survived, received a brilliant education, raised an excellent family, and taught at major foreign universities, becoming, among other things, “a respected historian, a world-famous scholar of late medieval Florence” (from an excellent foreword by Katherine E. Fleming). And finally, the time has come to give us this great “little book”, as he repeatedly humbly describes it, written in “layers of memory” as it jumps amazingly from one period of time to another. A new record of rare emotion, subtlety and sensitivity, and a treasure of memory and self-awareness that many will appreciate.