“The silences of the archives are to be expected, yet sometimes they conceal other silences that are more difficult to explain,” writes Eleni Beze in a “standstill,” as her voice sounds as if she is soliloquizing amidst descriptions and interpretations. The author needed to pause to pose questions that had not been raised, to follow archival traces that would lead her to figures that seemed to have vanished, to challenge historiographical certainties, and to wonder about the silences of familial or collective memory.

Eleni Beze closely follows the events and the Jewish survivors, from the Liberation of the country until the early 1950s, mobilizing various archival documents and testimonies, and strives to answer “what happened and to whom.” She analyzes the discourse of official documents and the press and delves into the autobiographical accounts of survivors to reconstruct their journeys. The world she describes and interprets is in motion, complex, with nuances and contradictions. Nonetheless, it is an achievement that the author manages to clearly highlight the nuances of its complexity, and by challenging established perceptions, she invites us to rethink the past, which also means the present.

– From the Foreword by Rika Benveniste

COVER PHOTOGRAPH From left, Noulis Vital and Sam Levi with their friend Tilemachos Apostolopoulos, who helped them hide, in liberated Athens, October 1944. Photographic Archive of the Jewish Museum of Greece.