Martin Gray > Quotes

“Ashamed at not being able to stop it. Sometimes, I felt that I too ought to lie on the pavement, dying of cold and hunger.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“My people were dead; I held their lives in trust. They'd bequeathed me their past, what they could have become and what they had known of joy and sorrow.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“A family's a funny thing—never had I realized what it meant to me as I did then. The Gestapo could have tortured me. I wouldn't have given my father away. And when the man struck my mother, even though I didn't stir, I felt as if I were shrieking, going mad. A family was the whole world; now, because of them, that world was in little bits. In the nights, I thought about how one day I'd rebuild a world of my own, a family.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“I observed the passersby and the passengers on the subway and saw the attitudes, weariness, and exhaustion in their eyes. They allowed themselves to be led from the beginning of their lives to the end, and they were chained to timetables, to places.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“A life is always an example. Without my father, without”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“They wanted us all dead, but they wouldn't have me and a few more with me. Father told me about Dr. Janusz Korczak's orphanage, and thanks to him, hundreds of children were avoiding starvation.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“his strength, I wouldn't have been anything, just a bit of wood floating with the crowd toward death.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“Thus, several times a day, I'd change my face, name, personality, and language, but I always had to remain on guard, observing how I acted the Volksdeutscher or the hoodlum, and also keeping an eye on the enemy to decide what I'd have to do before he did.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“But the fight to survive grew harder and harder. Each time I returned, I found our prison mutilated, another quarter had died.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“Selfishness was the weapon they'd given me, and I had seized it to use on them. For those I loved.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“lives of tens of thousands of our people, the things”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“smile. Ashamed at not being able to stop it. Sometimes, I felt that I too ought to lie on the pavement, dying of cold and hunger.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“Everyone was trying to protect his property as best he could, clinging to the past for a few hours, to what made up his life.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved

“I reproached myself for still being alive, for having eluded their fate.”
― Martin Gray, For Those I Loved