"Number 31328" is the very identity of the author, at a time when, as an eighteen-year-old boy, he was led by the Turks to the labor camps of the East.

The book is a shocking chronicle "written in blood," as Benetis pointed out, adding: "I speak of the hot material, of the flesh that drips its blood and floods the pages." In its original form, it was written in 1924 and reworked in 1931, when it was first published.

The success it achieved at that time was immense, even outside the Greek sphere. Ilia Benetis (the testimony 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.