The Nazi forced labour in Greece and the torture suffered by Christians and Jews is the subject of Andreas Assael’s work. Focusing on the Karya Gorge in Lamia, the author recounts the horrors experienced on Greek soil by our fellow human beings who were taken hostage by the Germans in 1942 and 1943.

At the time of the war it was very common for German soldiers to have photography as a hobby. They photographed everything and the films were sent back and forth by military mail. The photographic material-350 or so unpublished photographs-found in Mr. Assael’s possession and belonging to a German engineer, supervisor of a project named Hans Ressler, who supervised slave construction sites in occupied Greece, was the impetus for the author’s preoccupation. 20 years of research followed, and so we now know for the first time the martyrdom experienced not only by Jews but also by Christians on railway, road construction, quarrying and other projects.

In 1943 more than four hundred Thessalonian Jews were found in Karya and worked at the railway construction site, while smaller but equally tragic projects took place in Styrifaka, Sedes, Vavdo and Domokos. The slave workers worked twelve-hour days with little food and water, with constant beatings and executions. A large percentage, over 20%, were crushed or murdered on the spot. The rest who survived were either murdered there en masse, or left with the stamp of death on their foreheads, skeletonized and ragged. None of them had the conditions to survive Auschwitz.

Andreas Assael has been involved from a very young age in historical research, mainly of the German occupation. His father’s family was one of the three families whose members were all rescued, hidden by heroic Christians of Thessaloniki during the German occupation.