A quick acknowledgment by Dimitris Krallis of the often-unacknowledged trauma that World War I inflicted on the psyche of the people of Lesvos.

In our collective imagination, the Second World War, the heroism of the Albanian war and the resistance constitute our image of war. These past few days, while reading Life in the Tomb (this time in English and 35 years after the first reading), in order to discuss it with the North American students who will join me in Lesvos this summer, I cannot help but wonder how many stories we have lost from grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but also from their companions and their children, about their experience of the hell that Myrivilis describes in his masterpiece. Reading with Mariza Krallis a few of our grandfather’s letters, who passed from both the Macedonian front and Smyrna, but also parsing the letters of the soldiers from Molyvos to the ladies of the Agapi Association, who sent them care packages at the front, we slowly trace a history wrapped in silence. Nowadays there is a great deal of discussion about the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts war veterans. The so-called shell shock, described with such vividness by Myrivilis, has certainly left its traces in the village and in the society of Lesvos as a whole.