āWhat is your name?ā asked General Mohammad.Ā
āMatthew,ā I said. I had stopped saying Matt a while ago because it means ādeadā in Arabic.
On New Yearās Eve in 2012, Matthew Schrier was headed home from Syria, where heād been photographing the intense combat of the countryās civil war. Just 45 minutes from the safety of the Turkish border, he was taken prisoner by the al Nusra Frontāan 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. Heād face a daily struggle just to survive. And, eventually, heād 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 worldās most violent Islamic extremists. Managing to keep his heritage a secret, Schrier used humor to develop relationships with his captorsāand to keep himself sane during the long months of captivity.
The Dawn Prayer (Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison): A MemoirĀ 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. Itās the story of the first Westerner to escape al Qaedaānot a battle-hardened soldier, but an ordinary New Yorker who figured out how to set his escape plan in motion fromĀ a scene inĀ Jurassic Park. From the prisonersā 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 Schrierās story is unforgettableāand one you wonāt want to miss.