Martin Gray

Memorial stone for Martin Gray in Uccle

Martin Gray , actually Mietek Grajewski (born April 27, 1922 in Warsaw , Poland ; found dead on April 24, 2016 in Ciney , Belgium ) was a French-American author of Polish descent.

He was best known for books like The Scream for Life and Life's Call to Us Will Never End .

Life

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Gray's family belonged to the Reformed Jews . He himself states that he had no special relation to religion.

Gray's résumé during World War II is based on contradicting and fictional self-reports that he was not prepared to verify himself. After the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and since the control of Warsaw by the SS , he lived with his family in the Warsaw ghetto . Under life-threatening circumstances, he procured food for his family, he also supported and cared for other fellow sufferers and later joined the resistance. Allegedly as a prisoner in the Treblinka extermination camp , he fought for survival every day. From there he managed to escape, as he had done several times before. He went underground as a partisan and later joined the Red Army as a lieutenant and was involved in the conquest of Berlin .

After the war he left the Red Army and went in search of his grandmother, the only survivor of his family. He found this in New York City . He moved to the United States and became a successful businessman. There he married Dina, with whom he had four children. After the birth of their first child, Gray and his family moved to France . In 1970 his wife and four children were tragically killed in a forest fire there . In 1976 he married a second time. From this marriage there were three children.

Gray began writing to pass on his experiences and founded the Fondation Dina Gray , a foundation dedicated to preserving nature and preventing forest fires.

criticism

There were repeated doubts about the correctness or truthfulness of allegedly autobiographical information in Gray's books, for example by the Polish resistance fighter Wacław Kopisto . Gray also did not contradict the fact that the French historian Max Gallo was extensively involved as a ghostwriter in the creation of Au nom de tous les miens .

The historian Gitta Sereny reports that she approached Gray in a promotion event for his book in London that what he had written about Treblinka was untrue. Sereny found out that the publisher Grays had asked him to dramatize the Polish part of his autobiography, after which Gray had withdrawn for months in the Jewish archive in Paris . In addition, he had evaluated the Treblinka book by Jean-François Steiner and adopted its errors. For his part, after the profound criticism, Steiner only wanted his book to be rated as a “novel” or “factual novel”. Sereny judged Steiner's and Gray's books, some of which were based on truths, to be even worse than the “personal” testimonials prepared by ghostwriters and editors for the readership market. Sereny admitted to Gallo that he had requested a longer chapter on Treblinka from Gray, because the book required something strong for pulling in readers . Gray, confronted by Sereny with the fact that he was never in Treblinka, asked: But does it matter? Wasn't the only important thing that Treblinka did happen, that it should be written about ...

Works

• La vie renaîtra de la nuit . 1977 ISBN 2-221-06304-X
  • Light at the end of the night . Translation Martin Schulte. Goldmann, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-442-09082-2
• Le nouveau livre . Paris: Laffont, ISBN 978-2-221-00528-6
  • Dictionary of life . Translation Angela von Hagen. Kreuz, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7831-0678-8
• Les forces de la vie . 1975 ISBN 2-268-05810-7
  • Planted like a tree by streams of water . Translation by Anne-Christel Recknagel, Helmut Weigel, Una Pfau. Kreuz, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-7831-0628-1
• Au nom de tous les miens . Récit recueilli by Max Gallo. Paris
  • The cry for life: the story of a man who conquered inhumanity because he believed in humans . Translation Roland Fleissner, Arno Aeby. Scherz, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-502-18284-1
• Le livre de la vie .
  • Life's call to us will never end. Translation from the French by Ulla Leippe. Kreuz, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-7831-0588-9 (continuation of cry for life )

Web links

Commons : Martin Gray  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Martin Gray in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Martin Gray in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Martin Gray in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual references / footnotes

1. ^ Writer Martin Gray is dead. In: wort.lu. Luxemburger Wort, April 25, 2016, accessed April 25, 2016.
2. ^ Martin Gray's website. ( Memento of the original from November 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: martingray.eu. Retrieved April 26, 2016. 
3. ↑ cf. Jacek Stachiewicz: Kim jest Martin Gray? , Interview with Wacław Kopisto , in: Nowiny Rzeszowskie, August 2, 1990, p. 9 ( accessed from Scribd on April 26, 2016)
4. ↑ Gitta Sereny: The German trauma. Experiences and reflections 1938-2000 . Allan Lane, London 2000, ISBN 0-7139-9456-8 , p. 164. First in The Sunday Times , December 1983
5. ^ Jean-François Steiner : Treblinka. The revolt of an extermination camp . Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-927170-06-2 , from the French by Marianne Lipcowitz, with a foreword by Simone de Beauvoir , first published in 1966
6. ^ On the Steiner affair in France 1966 see: Sebastian Voigt : Treblinka. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 159-164.
7. ↑ Gitta Sereny: The German trauma. Experiences and reflections 1938-2000 . Allan Lane, London 2000, ISBN 0-7139-9456-8 , p. 145. First in New Statesman , November 1979
8. ^ Text with autobiographical elements from the Warsaw Ghetto. Several new editions, also in other publishers (Goldmann, Bertelsmann, book clubs); most easily accessible in "Das Beste aus Reader's Digest " No. 382, ​​Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-87070-168-4 . Also as a comic version