Martin Gray, born as Mieczysław Grajewski (born 27 April 1922, Warsaw, Poland) is a Holocaust survivor and author.
In 1946 Gray emigrated to the United States, where his grandmother was living. Some 10 years after his arrival Gray had become a tradesman in replicas of [2] antiques, doing business in the U.S., Canada and Cuba.
He moved to the South of France in 1960, where he still lives.
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His first book, For those I loved, became a bestseller. Another 11 books would follow over the years. All of Gray’s books have been written in French. Several of them have been translated into English. Gray’s last book Au nom de tous les hommes (2005, In the name of all mankind) has not yet found an English translation.
Two of Gray’s books are autobiographies: the already mentioned For those I loved covers the period: 1922 (birth) - 1970, when Gray lost his wife and all four children in a forest fire. His second autobiography La vie renaitra de la nuit (Life arises out of night) covers the period 1970 – 1977, the year in which Gray found his second wife, Virginia. In this second autobiography Gray describes himself desperately looking for a way to live after the family disaster of 1970.
In 1979 the American photographer David Douglas Duncan wrote a book on Gray: The fragile miracle of Martin Gray.
Holocaust historian Gitta Sereny has dismissed Gray’s book as a forgery in a 1979 article in New Statesman magazine, writing that "Gray's For Those I Loved was the work of Max Gallo the ghostwriter, who also produced Papillon. During the research for a Sunday Times inquiry into Gray's work, M. Gallo informed me coolly that he ‘needed’ a long chapter on Treblinka because the book required something strong for pulling in readers. When I myself told Gray, the ‘author,’ that he had manifestly never been to, nor escaped from Treblinka, he finally asked, despairingly, ‘But does it matter? Wasn't the only thing that Treblinka did happen, that it should be written about, and that some Jews should be shown to have been heroic?’” [3]
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