In the face of the traumatic event of the genocide of the Jews, which was planned by the Nazis and executed by themselves and their collaborators in the middle of the 20th century and in the heart of civilized Europe, marking European history forever, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and psychoanalysts position themselves and attempt to approach and interpret in different ways what for many decades remained the "unspeakable". The memory of this event, as it took time to emerge, triggers increasingly intense discussion, various approaches, and conflicts.

The texts of this comprehensive volume (written over a period of twenty years) reflect the course of the author's research and critical reflection, which approaches the issue of the genocide of the Jews from various perspectives. However, the thread that connects the texts, the question that hauntingly resurfaces, concerns the delay in the emergence of this memory and the causes of forgetfulness and silence.

Seven texts deal with the extermination of Greek Jews, proposing an interpretive framework for both displacement and the subsequent silence. Special emphasis is placed on Thessaloniki, from where the largest Jewish community in Greece was displaced. The depiction of the event in testimonies, historiography, and literature is studied separately. The dialectic of memory and forgetfulness, silence and writing, is examined both in the discourse of the witnesses and in major texts of camp literature, such as those of Primo Levi, for Jewish memory, and Jorge Semprún, for the memory of political prisoners.

The heavy silence of the first decades was followed by the explosion of testimony, later by scientific approaches, and in recent decades by the institutionalization of this memory. The most recent texts refer to mnemonic sites, museums, monuments, and anniversaries.