Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC!

Talking Until Nightfall was a difficult book to read. I have read many books about WWII this one broke my heart as I was reading the survivors' first hand accounts. It is still so unnerving how much brutishness and inhumanity of the Jews and other that the occupying Germans caused. These actual words as reported by Isaac were so very powerful.
I was a little confused by the introduction, and some of the translation I felt was a little jumbled but it gets the message across.

When Nazi occupiers arrived in Greece in 1941, it was the beginning of a horror that would reverberate through generations. In the city of Salonica (Thessaloniki), almost 50,000 Jews were sent to Nazi concentration camps during the war, and only 2,000 returned. A Jewish doctor named Isaac Matarasso and his son escaped imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Nazis and joined the resistance. After the city's liberation they returned to rebuild Salonica and, along with the other survivors, to grapple with the near-total destruction of their community. Isaac was a witness to his Jewish community's devastation, and the tangled aftermath of grief, guilt and grace as survivors returned home. The author presents his account of the tragedy and his moving tribute to the living and the dead. His story is woven together with his son Robert's memories of being a frightened teenager spared by a twist of fate, with an afterword by his grandson Francois that looks back on the survivors' stories and his family's place in history.

This was a fascinating book full of amazing detail by the author. Maybe it was because I was reading an ARC--thank you NetGalley and the publisher--but the format was hard for me to follow at times. Even with that issue, it was an well-written and footnoted with a lot more detail than even the body of the book. This story took place in a part of Europe not often written about in connection with the Holocaust.

Very interesting book. I have read a lot of books about WWII, but did not realize that the Third Reich’s efforts on ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people extended as far as Greece. There are parts of this book that will make you stop and think about how can one human treat another so cruelly.

Talking Until Nightfall is a very difficult book to read. It broke my heart when I was reading the survivors' first hand accounts. The brutishness and inhumanity of the occupying Germans was so palpable and could not be tempered in any way. Most of my reading of The Holocaust has been through novels based on eyewitness accounts. But the actual words as reported by Isaac were so very powerful. Also, the statistics near the end were mind boggling. Everyone knows by now of the millions slaughtered. But seeing the numbers broken down makes it all the more devastating.
My only criticism is that the introduction took up a quarter of the book and was rather confusing.

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Talking Until Nightfall by Isaac Matarasso does a good job of presenting the horrors those who endured the atrocities of the concentration camps of World War 2. I was a bit disappointed in the style of writing. At times it read more like a text book. I was not as invested in the people portrayed because of this. I would have enjoyed it more if it had been a clear story line and characters developed so that I felt attached to them. There are lessons to be learned from this book. Hopefully history will not repeat itself.

This book is marketed as a memoir or as a book on history, and as such its an important manuscript for humanities understanding and remembrance. It is uneven in its written style, all too often the narrator foretells the story that is given by the first-hand witnesses and ruins the impact of what the witness is sharing, making it repetitive and annoying, which is a shame, as the stories held within the covers of this book are significant and at times gut-wrenching.

In its very coolness without the hysteria that so often marks a Jewish memoir, the true brutality, cruelty, hideousness of what they endured, what they suffered, what they died from is starkly written down. Stories of what the main witness and his son (Isaac and Robert) saw should be read and noted in history. As said in the book, “There is more than one way to erase a person.” There is truth in the saying that if we do not heed the lessons of the past, we are destined to repeat the mistakes. The Nazis wanted to wipe out the Jewish people from the face of the earth and tried by physically destroying people and the artifacts and buildings of the race. Humanity needs to recall the crimes of the past to place better in our collective memories the existence, the importance of these people. We also need to do so for the nations in which genocide is a current affair in modern minds, such as for the Armenians which was the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey, the Rwanda massacre which was the genocide against the Tutsi, Twa and moderate Hutu peoples, Cambodia’s terror from the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Pol Pot and Ukraine's "Holodomor" or "Death by Hunger" orchestrated by Stalin to name but a few.

Read this newspaper article for a greater understanding of this crime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/24/it-wasnt-just-the-armenians-the-other-20th-century-massacres-we-ignore/

This book is not the easiest to read, being choppy in style, as it is the written reports taken by Isaac Matarasso after the war as a manner to make such horrors part of the modern-day knowledge, and the remembrances of Robert Matarasso in his old age of a time when he was a teenager during the war and the things he experienced and witnessed. It doesn’t flow effortlessly, but if the reader keeps in mind the source material that this is, it becomes easier to absorb. But this is another important document as to the horrors and misery inflected upon a people for no other reason than their religion. Humanity needs to keep this repugnant part of its history current and this book plays its part in this knowledge.