In 1912, when the Ottoman city of Thessaloniki was turned over to Greece, Jews outnumbered Greeks, Muslims, Bulgarians and other residents. In 1917, fire destroyed much of the Jewish center of town. But by 1926, when the author was born, the city a growing Greek metropolis. Today, it has 1 million residents, but only 2,000 Jews. In 1939, the population of Jews living in the city of Salonika had dropped from about 90,000 to 56,000. In less than 12 weeks, all but 500 Jews were deported to death camps. By the end of August, 1943, the 500 Jews left owed their lives to the fact that they had kept their Spanish citizenship. Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's deputy in Greece, claimed that 60 to 65,000 Greek Jews were brought to Auschwitz. By September of 1944 only 2,500 of these were still alive and many more died before 1945, when they were marched to other camps. By far the largest proportion of those who were transported and who died in the camps were from Thessaloniki (Salonika). Erika Kounio-Amariglio, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish mother and a Salonikan father, owed her survival in part to her knowledge of German. Her father owned a photography business in the city. Her mother had fought hard to be accepted and seems to have succeeded in overcoming the family's initial distrust of her as a foreigner. Having given up her medical studies at Leipzig University to follow her husband to Salonika, her mother maintained a close connection with her Austrian jewish family and sent her children back to spend part of each summer with her parents in Karlsbad. In 1938, when the Germans occupied Sudetenland, Erika's maternal grandparents moved to Salonika. This is a story of the vanished world of the Sephardic community of Salonika. This is the author's history of the town and the stories of the ghosts of those residents who were killed killed at Auschwitz, and how slowly over time, people gradually reacquire those average human desires after tragedy.