Martin Gray birthname Mieczysław Grajewski was born on April 27, 1922, and died on April 25, 2016.

He was a Polish Holocaust survivor.

He emigrated to the West and has published books in French about his experiences during World War II in which his family perished in Poland.

Martin was born in Warsaw, Second Polish Republic, Grajewski (Gray) was 17 years old when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

Later, Gray wrote, that he escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust.

Gray joined the Red Army during the Soviet counter-offensive and became an officer of the NKVD secret police.

Mieczyslaw emigrated in 1946 from Europe to the United States, where his grandmother was living.

After ten years his arrival Gray had become a tradesman in replicas of antiques according to what he wrote, doing business in the U.S., Canada and Cuba.

He then relocated to the South of France in 1960.

Gray moved to Belgium in 2001.

Martin Gray was found dead in his swimming pool at his home in Ciney, Belgium, on April 25, 2016, where had lived since 2012.

Gray’s first book, For Those I Loved (Au nom de tous les miens), 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.

His last book, titled Au nom de tous les hommes (2005) has not yet been translated into English.

However, two of Gray’s books are autobiographies: the already mentioned For Those I Loved covers the era from his birth in 1922 to 1970, when Gray lost his wife and his four children in a forest fire.

Martin second autobiography, tilited La vie renaitra de la nuit, (Life Arises Out of Darkness) covers 1970-77, during which Gray found his second wife, Virginia.

In this second autobiography, he describes desperately looking for a way to live after the demise of his family in the 1970 fire.

Martin Gray passed away at 93 yrs old.