For Those I Loved

“I saw them. They were everywhere. They were marching in serried ranks along Jerusalem Avenue and the Third of May Avenue. They marched slowly, their heels ringing on the cobbles of the narrow streets. I was walking along the pavement, behind the rows of curious bystanders; I wanted to see them, to understand.”

This is the beginning of the true story of a man who lived four lives in the space of forty-five years. It is the autobiography of one for whom the virtues of reason, purpose and self-esteem were not mere words on paper of philosophical abstractions, but practical necessities of action which kept him alive through a train of events too wild and fantastic to be fiction but too grotesquely evil to be real. But they were real, and this book tells their story.

The first of Martin Gray’s “lives” covers his boyhood in the infamous Warsaw ghetto where, at the constant risk of his life, he was a member of the Jewish resistance and daily smuggled flour and food into the Jewish sector from the “Aryan” part of the city, to his escape from Treblinka concentration camp where, to keep alive, he became a kapo, one of the Jewish work force who dragged the bodies of his fellows out of the gas chambers, stripped them of anything valuable, from their hair to their gold teeth, shoveled their corpses onto stretchers, and then dropped them into mass graves after first strangling those who remained alive through the gassing. On escaping from Treblinka at the age of eighteen, carrying out a plan which must be read in full to be believed, Gray joined the Soviet Army to fight Germans. At nineteen he had become a decorated officer.

The war over, he came to America where, teaching himself English, he slowly amassed a great fortune as a businessman. But the best, and at the same time the worst, events of his life were to follow: his marriage and the subsequent death by fire of his wife and children.

Throughout, Gray’s driving purposes were: to live, and to understand. The fact that he is still living today is a declaration of the power of these ideals over evil and irrationality. And his story may serve as a reminder to Americans of how lucky they are to be Americans and as a warning to them of the depths to which a culture can sink when statism reaches its culmination.

Reviewed by EDWARD REGIS, Jr. / Biography (416 pages) / BFL Price $8.95