Mr. Gray can be recognized in a photo from the exhibition Perspectives on the Ghettos in 2014 at the Shoah Memorial © Shoah Memorial
A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, a survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp, and a fighter in the Soviet army, Martin Gray was best known for his bestseller On Behalf of All My People (1971), written with Max Gallo. He died during the night from Sunday to Monday, two days before his 94th birthday. The Shoah Memorial honors him.
On February 7, 2014, at the age of 92, Martin Gray visited the exhibition Perspectives on the Ghettos at the Shoah Memorial and recognized himself in one of the flagship photos of the exhibition, taken in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941. Born on 27 April 1922 in Warsaw, Martin, Mieczysław or Miétek Grayewski at the time, had well known life in the ghetto where he managed to make his family survive by becoming a smuggler at only 17 years old. But, the young Polish Jew will finally be deported to Treblinka with his mother and two brothers.
In his autobiographical book On behalf of all my people, Martin Gray testifies to the hell of the ghetto, then that of the extermination camp of Treblinka, where he is responsible for extracting the bodies from the gas chambers to bring them into the pits. He managed to escape from this chaos in a wagon before joining the Soviet army.
Group of Jewish men taking off their hats in front of the German photographer. The young man on the left in the background is Martin Gray. Warsaw Ghetto, autumn-winter 1941. Credit: Willy Georg. © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum WILLY GEORG
After the war, the only survivor of his family, Martin moved to the United States where he made a fortune as an antique dealer and met his first wife, Dina Cult. They eventually settled in the south of France, near Mandelieu, with their four children. But in October 1970, the forest fire of the Massif de Tanneron, near Cannes, took his wife and four children, leaving him once again sole survivor of this new tragedy.
Man, if he wants to (...) can always plant a tree of life next to a dead one, he wrote in "The book of life" in 1999. Nature and ecology, but also writing, will become engines for this committed humanist aspiring to happiness, who will eventually remarry and have five children. Our thoughts are with his loved ones today.
