Of all the theaters of the Holocaust, Greece is certainly not the one that has received the most attention in historiography, despite the near total destruction of Greek Jewry. Interest in the topic has risen in the past years, however, and this volume brings together some important perspectives from a range of Greek and international scholars working in the fields of Jewish history, Greek history, Holocaust history, and genocide studies. Quite a few of the book's chapters are based on ongoing projects, giving the reader the distinct feeling of being on the cutting edge of research—something that is not self-evident for an edited volume of this kind. The fourteen contributions are divided into four sections dealing with perpetrators, collaborators and victims, the question of property, and the aftermath (including the vexing question of property restitution). These multiple and simultaneously well-integrated perspectives constitute a great strength of this book.

Thanks to its combination of authors and topics, this excellent volume makes important contributions to different historiographical fields, addressing various blind spots of both Greek history and Holocaust history. As Katherine Fleming points out in her epilogue, it serves to refute many of the “pleasant lies” of Greek national history about the role of Greece and the Greeks in the Holocaust, confronting them with an “uncomfortable story” (361). Without denying the help and solidarity that some Greek Jews received from their Christian neighbors and from the leftist resistance, Fleming is right to refer to a “darker truth” (369) of this story that the contributions bring to light and that shatters entrenched narratives of “kind Greek Christians” (365) helping their Jewish neighbors during these times of persecution.

To be sure, help and rescue are present in the volume to some extent. In Giorgos Antoniou's chapter, we learn about the fascinating case of fifty-five Jews from the town of Veria, who were rescued with the help of ordinary villagers as well as collaborationist Turkish-speaking paramilitaries. But even this extraordinary story undermines established narratives, given its unlikely setup of actors and its many “gray areas” that Antoniou points out, which elude a simple heroic narrative.

However, most of the volume's chapters deal with issues of collaboration and complicity by Greek wartime authorities and ordinary citizens. The record of the city administration of Thessaloniki and the city's citizens with regard to Jewish property laid bare in the contributions by Andrew Apostolou, Leon Saltiel, Maria Kavala, Stratos Dordanas, Kostis Kornetis, Kateřina Králová, and Carla Hesse and Thomas W. Laqueur are particularly damning. Jewish properties were taken for “administration” during their owners’ “absence” in the concentration camps, expropriated, and in most cases not returned even if the rightful owners survived. It needs to be highlighted, though, that during the brief period of time that the National Resistance Front (EAM) ruled Thessaloniki after liberation, attempts at restitution were made (Kornetis, 241–42). Restitution of Jewish property was also part of the Greek Communist Party's agenda (Carabott and Vassilikou, 265). The injustice of the continuous expropriation of the survivors was a result of the reinstitution of rightist rule during and after the Civil War and thus a direct result of US and British intervention.

A recurring issue in different chapters is the destruction of the Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki to enable the extension of Aristotle University. Here the city administration seized upon the opportunity created by the circumstances of German occupation to implement a project dating back to the interwar period. This observation relates to another important historiographical contribution of the volume. Overcoming a more “traditional” form of narrow Holocaust history, issues like the cemetery's destruction provide the key to an integrated history of anti-minority policies and ethno-national violence in the region, the possible contours of which become visible in some of the contributions, especially the thought-provoking essay by Mark Levene.

This broader perspective, it should be stressed, takes nothing away from the horrors of the Shoah and the responsibility of the German perpetrators. However, it adds to our understanding of the role of different actors in this drama: the Greek collaborationist authorities, the Greek postwar authorities, but also the Bulgarian occupiers, who in most discussions of the Holocaust in Greece receive short shrift. What they have in common is a prehistory of forced homogenization of their respective populations targeting Muslims as well as the respective Greek or Bulgarian Other. This places their acquiescence to or participation in the destruction of the Jews in a longer continuity of anti-minority violence, but it also places the extreme violence of the Bulgarian occupation against the Greek population in a new light. Seeing both the Holocaust and the Katochi through the prisms of the Balkan Wars and of interwar Greece, as Levene suggests, provides us with truly innovative and inspiring perspectives on the interaction of the genocidal intentions of the German occupiers and the different degrees of compliance by local authorities and populations.