“What is your name?” asked General Mohammad.
“Matthew,” I said. I had stopped saying Matt a while ago because it means ‘dead’ in Arabic.
In 2012, Matthew Schrier was headed home from Syria, where he’d been photographing the intense combat of the country’s civil war. Just 45 minutes from the safety of the Turkish border, he was taken prisoner by the al Nusra Front—an organization the world would come to know as the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.
Over the next seven months he would endure torture and near starvation in six brutal terrorist prisons. He’d face a daily struggle just to survive. And, eventually, he’d escape.
In this gripping, raw, and surprisingly funny memoir, Schrier details the horrifying and frequently surreal experience of being a slight, wisecracking Jewish guy held captive by the world’s most violent Islamic extremists. Managing to keep his heritage a secret, Schrier used humor to develop relationships with his captors—and to keep himself sane during the long months of captivity. Along the way, he made lifelong friends—and unexpected enemies—among his fellow prisoners and witnessed both the best and the worst of human nature.
The Dawn Prayer (Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison): A Memoir is a tale of patriotism and unimaginable bleakness shot through with light . . . of despair and friendship, sacrifice and betrayal, in a setting of bombed-out buildings and shifting alliances. It’s the story of the first Westerner to escape al Qaeda—not a battle-hardened soldier, but an ordinary New Yorker who figured out how to set his escape plan in motion from a scene in Jurassic Park. From the prisoners’ fiercely competitive Hacky-Sack games and volleyball tournaments (played using a ball made of shredded orange peels and a shoelace) to his own truly nail-biting outbreak, Matthew Schrier’s story is unforgettable—and one you won’t want to miss.
Matthew Schrier is from Deer Park, New York and a graduate of Hofstra University, where he studied film production and English. The son of a Brooklyn basketball coach and raised by a single mother who worked two jobs to put food on the table, his upbringing was anything but easy. Upon completing college, he began working in the healthcare industry and eventually began his own consulting business that proved to be quite successful. However, working in an industry surrounded by people who did nothing but think of ways to profit off the sick and dying proved to be something he was not made for, which led to his gravitation towards photography, a craft where he could combine his two passions in life: traveling and history. Aside from writing, since his return home, Matthew has devoted himself to working with the US Military to help use his experience in Syria to educate on the conditions and tactics that he successfully employed while a captive of Islamic extremists.
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