Gray, Martin

Martin Gray (27 April 1922 – 24 April 2016), born Mieczyslaw Grajewski, was a Polish Jew who claimed to have been deported to the Treblinka Camp, from where he managed to escape. He then joined the Soviet NKVD and helped break up the Polish anti-communist underground. He initially immigrated to the United States in 1946, then to France in 1960. In 1970, he had a ghostwriter named Max Gallo write an “auto”-biography for him in French titled For Those I Loved (Au nom de tous les miens), which covers his alleged experiences at Treblinka. However, Gitta Sereny, a mainstream Holocaust scholar with a good knowledge of Treblinka’s history, had this to say about Gray’s book, written in an article titled “The Men Who Whitewash Hitler,” published by the New Statesman (Vol. 98, No. 2537, 2 Nov. 1979, pp. 670-673):

“During the research for a Sunday Times inquiry into Gallo’s work, M. Gallo informed me coolly that he ‘needed’ a long chapter on Treblinka because the book required something strong for pulling in the readers. When I myself told Gray, the ‘author’, that he had manifestly never been to, or 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?’”

Something similar could well have motivated many witnesses when testifying or writing their memoirs.