The authors of the book are Yakov Verkhovsky and Valentina Tyrmos - native Odessans, now living in Israel. As children, they survived all the horrors of the Romanian occupation of Odessa during World War II and only miraculously survived. Throughout their adult life, they collected evidence of the extermination of the Jews of Odessa (including their families), searched for rare documents in the archives - Romanian, German, Soviet - and conducted their independent investigation.