The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (11 page)

For Hitler, who had fought in the First World War as a corporal and smarted under the humiliation of his country’s defeat, the conquest of France was a triumph to be relished. He ensured that the actual signing of the armistice be as symbolically painful for the French as possible. The clearing in the woods at Compiegne, where the German Empire had capitulated to France and her allies on Armistice Day in 1918, was chosen, the same wagon-lit from that historic occasion set in place. An eyewitness wrote a description in his diary of the perfect June day, the dappled sunlight on the stately trees, and the look on Hitler’s face. His eyes brimmed with revenge, burned with anger and triumph, and his expression revealed scornful inner joy and deep hatred. The moment before he entered the railcar Hitler snapped his hands on to his hips, arched his shoulders and placed his feet wide apart in an arrogant posture of absolute victory.
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The terms laid down by the Germans were a
diktat
-twenty-four ‘hard and merciless’ clauses - to be accepted without negotiation. Germany would occupy the majority of France and the entire Atlantic coast, while a Free Zone (Zone Libre) was created consisting of two-fifths of the poorest part of the country lying to the south and south-east. Hitler considered total occupation a liability and an administrative drain on German manpower. The existence of a Free Zone also dissuaded the French government from fleeing to London or north Africa to continue the war. The armistice acknowledged Pétain’s government as the government of Metropolitan France, although in the Occupied Zone it was nothing but a puppet organisation. France was forced to disband and demobilise most of her armed forces, and was only allowed to retain an army of one hundred thousand men - with fewer than four thousand officers. She was allowed to keep her fleet and empire. The country was also required to bear the cost of its own occupation: from now on sixty per cent of the national income would go to the Reich.

One of the armistice’s clauses directly concerned anti-Nazi refugees from Germany, described as warmongers who had betrayed their own people. As a result of this clause, the German occupation authorities issued numerous orders to the French Ministry of Interior and the secret police to track down refugees and hand them over. And in the Free Zone, although German agents were forbidden under the terms of the armistice, in reality they were provided with false papers by Vichy and aided by the police. The million and a half French prisoners of war were abandoned ‘until the conclusion of peace’.
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Among the majority of the populace there seemed to be no sense of national shame, merely relief that France was out of the war. People actually wept in the streets in gratitude. The government had been reduced to asking Winston Churchill if Britain would be willing to release France from her treaty obligations, while public opinion turned against her former ally. People felt that with the French Army defeated, Britain herself would soon negotiate with the Reich for terms. The commanding general of the French Army said that the British neck would be ‘wrung like a chicken’. (Later, after victory in the Battle of Britain, Churchill retorted, ‘Some chicken! Some neck!’)

In London, de Gaulle, then largely unknown, spoke for Michel and the minority like him. ‘What shame, what revolt rises in the hearts of decent Frenchmen... France and the French have been delivered hand and foot to the enemy... This armistice is dishonourable. Two thirds of our territory occupied by the enemy - and what an enemy! Our entire army demobilised, our officers and men prisoners. Our fleet, our planes, our tanks, our arms handed over intact so that the enemy may use them against our allies. The government, you yourself [Pétain] reduced to servitude. Ah! To obtain and accept such an enslavement, we did not need the Conqueror of Verdun. Anyone else would have sufficed.’

At each day’s dismal news, Michel tried to fight off his depression with defiance. It was lonely work among people who openly expressed their relief that the war was over and the certainty that Britain would soon fall. Anglophobia became rampant, especially after the government failed to respond to a British ultimatum demanding that the French fleet sail to British ports. The Royal Navy sank the fleet at Mers el Kebir, in north Africa, in a twenty-five-minute action that left twelve hundred French sailors dead. The reaction in France was understandably bitter. A stranger in the south of France at this time would have thought that the British were the enemy, not the Germans. ‘There are many reasons behind the official hostility towards England,’ Albert Camus wrote in his notebook. ‘But nothing is said of one of the worst motives... fury and the base desire to see the downfall of someone who dares to resist the force that has crushed you.’
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The French government ended up in the provincial spa town of Vichy, met in the casino and promptly dissolved itself by voting overwhelmingly to give full powers to Marshal Pétain, who assumed a new office: Head of the French State. The parliamentary democracy of the Third Republic, which had existed since 1870, was now replaced by an unregulated authoritarian regime dedicated to working hand in glove with the Nazis.

Michel knew that France could fight its way out of military, political and material ruin, but feared she would never recover from the moral ruin she was now entering. ‘It is not shameful to lose a battle, but it can be very shameful not to fight. France did not fight. France collapsed like a pack of cards and darkness came. I wanted to light a candle in that darkness. It was a desperate situation but I didn’t want to despair. I believed in the power of the individual to shape events. And I believed in the power of the fist - my own two bare fists if it came down to it.’ Michel began to search for like-minded people, drawing strength from a line by the German poet, Schiller: I feel an army in my fist. ‘I felt that if I wanted to fight there must be others who felt the same way. I had to find them.’

Michel was among the few
Résistants de la Première Heure
- Resisters of the First Hour. After the war the myth was promulgated that the French were a people united against the Nazis, a brave nation of
résistants
. Nothing could be further from the truth. While Résistance did grow as time passed, the genuine Resisters of the First Hour were a minuscule number of individuals with no structure and no support, whose numbers actually diminished during the first year of Vichy rule.
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The Socialists reverted to traditional pacifism, while the Communists executed an about-face after the Nazi-Soviet pact, and dismissed the war against Hitler as imperial fratricide whose victor, be it the City of London or the Nazis, was of no concern to workers.

The shape the new France was to take was announced by the little men of Vichy. Officially neutral, but in reality fully in compliance with Germany’s will, the new government called for a return to the cult and the practice of God, Country and Family, and saw defeat as an opportunity for a national revolution which was authoritarian, traditionalist and neutral. Pétain pronounced that defeat had been born of pleasure-seeking, atheism and national slackness. He proclaimed, ‘A New Order begins...’

The nature of Vichy’s New Order with regard to refugees and Jews was revealed almost immediately. Twelve days after Pétain became head of state, a commission was set up to review citizens naturalised since 1927 and to strip ‘undesirables’ of their nationality. A series of laws soon followed restricting access to public service and the medical and legal professions to those born with foreign fathers. These laws were not specifically aimed at Jews, but as half of the three hundred and fifty thousand Jews in France were foreign-born they were particularly vulnerable.

The first openly anti-Semitic legislation was the repeal of the Marchendeau Law which had previously outlawed attack in the press on any race or religion intended to arouse hatred. A blizzard of vitriolic newspaper articles denigrating Jews, freemasons and foreigners followed. The Statut des Juifs (Statute on the Jews) was passed towards the end of 1940. This defined who was Jewish in the eyes of the law, and then excluded them from top positions in public service, the officer corps and professions that influenced public opinion. This effectively excluded Jews from the press, radio, film and theatre, and even from teaching. A quota system was introduced to limit Jews in the liberal professions. Further legislation authorised prefects to intern foreign Jews in special camps, or obliged them to live under police surveillance in remote villages
(résidence forcée)
. Algerian Jews, who had enjoyed French citizenship for seventy-five years, lost their rights overnight.

Vichy openly and enthusiastically codified xenophobia and anti-Semitism into the law as national policy, which it would continue to pursue in various forms over the next four years of its life. The persecution of the Jews was not something reluctantly adopted because of German orders imposed on a defeated enemy, or even as a result of German pressure. It was instigated and eagerly enacted independently by Vichy itself. In the first year following defeat the German occupation authorities in the north were not overly concerned with the fate of the Jews in the Free Zone, preferring to leave Vichy to its own devices. There were no German plans in 1940 to extend their racial laws, or the seizure of property, into the Free Zone. Vichy’s home-grown programmes not only rivalled those of the Germans in the Occupied Zone, but in some respects went beyond them. Michel said, ‘A neutral, unoccupied country, with embassies from all over the world in the town of Vichy, was the only one in Europe that passed these laws. The deportation and death that resulted were crimes against humanity. Something that has never been officially recognised.’

The German occupation authorities and Vichy developed competing systems of anti-Semitism that led to friction between them. When three thousand Jews expelled from Alsace were dumped in the Free Zone, Vichy protested. The Germans had plans to deport as many as two hundred and seventy thousand Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, as well as from the Occupied Zone itself, into the Free Zone. Vichy desperately wanted to prevent this, and once again protested vehemently. The objection was logistical rather than humanitarian. When fourteen hundred Jews were sent across the Demarcation Line from Bordeaux, with assurances of freedom, Vichy promptly locked them up in a camp. The government complained to the Germans of a breach of the armistice when six thousand five hundred Jews were sent in sealed cattle cars to Lyon. Two thousand were over sixty years old - the oldest was one hundred and four - and many were children. They were shunted back and forth from zone to zone as the authorities argued over their fate. Finally submitting to the conqueror’s will, Vichy sent them to an internment camp at Gurs, in the Pyrenees.
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Life in Vichy France was precarious for an alien Jew, but Michel typically chose the time to assert his identity by changing his name on all his documents. Instead of the Polish name Moniek - shortened to Mony by Suzanne and his friends - he adopted Mosche, the Hebrew word for Moses. It was the first of many acts of provocative defiance during this period.

Vichy chose to round up foreign Jews straight away and intern them in camps. Families who had lived in France for years suddenly received
Refus de Séjour
- Residence Refusal. The authorities had created an absurd law that was impossible to obey. A family would be given forty-eight hours by the police to leave a
département
, but would need written authorisation from another to move. This was rarely given. ‘So you had to leave, but you couldn’t go anywhere. Most people didn’t know what to do and just did what they were told. It was all so arbitrary that in the early days I was able to intervene in many cases to help people take steps to prevent them from being sent away. I was also able in some cases to help people get out of camps after they were sent away.’

Michel became known among the Jewish and foreign community as someone with influence and connections, a man who could keep you out of jail and the refugee camps. He helped families write the correct letters in French to the authorities and guided their petitions through the bureaucratic maze. And for those who were beyond legal help, he arranged for them to hook up with passeurs to cross the Pyrenées into Spain, or over the Alps into Switzerland. His success through the year was such that he attracted the attention of the authorities in Nice, who considered him a thorn in their side. He was arrested, together with Suzanne, in October 1940 and charged with influence peddling - the inference being that he had charged for his services.
[51]

The couple were put in jail and held for four months without a hearing. They were not mistreated, merely left entirely alone. Michel was separated from Suzanne, who was imprisoned elsewhere, and heard no personal word from her and was given no news of her welfare. He was locked in solitary confinement in his cell twenty-four hours a day except for a twenty-minute exercise period when he was allowed into the yard. He walked in circles behind the prisoner from the adjoining cell, a man charged with murder. ‘A murderer, but a living being - human contact.’ It was the first time in his life he had been incarcerated and, despite his strong physical and psychological state, he was profoundly shaken by the experience. ‘It was terrible.
Terrible.’

The food was swill that he found inedible at first, until he became so hungry he adapted to it. ‘Except for the bread, which was impossible to eat. But it was interesting, made from some quite extraordinary ersatz material. I mixed it with water and made sculptures. If you dropped these on the stone floor they didn’t break. The bread really came in very useful, and I made a serviceable pipe out of it by wrapping it around a pencil to form a hollow stem, and then made a bowl.’ On his arrest he had had a packet of cigarettes on him. Worried that they might be confiscated, he had emptied the tobacco from each of the cigarettes into his jacket pocket. ‘I smoked my loose tobacco in that pipe, which I kept for a long time.’