A poignant reminder of the ways enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners In The Holocaust Odyssey , Rebecca Fromer leads us through the experiences of Danny Bennahmias, a Greek Jew of Italian citizenship whose forced labor as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz included the disentangling of hundreds of thousands of gassed men, women, and children. The book is the result of a diligent collaboration. As it unfolds, it becomes a poignant reminder of the manner in which enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners. It is a story of human decency, the spark of which remains against all odds.

Relates the experiences of Elia Aelion, a Jew from Salonika born in 1918, as told to Fromer and written by her. In 1941 he fled to Athens; in 1943, when the Germans entered Athens, Aelion and his friends left the city for a suburb, where they lived for ten months in a villa whose owner agreed to rent part of it to Jews. In August 1944 they were discovered by the Germans; Aelion managed to evade arrest and to survive until the liberation. Many members of his family perished in the Holocaust. Includes a historical introduction (pp. 3-15) and notes by Fromer. Pp. 145-159 contain appendices, including a chronology of the Holocaust in Greece and statistical information on transports and the destruction of Jewish communities in Greece.