The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (13 page)

Months of undernourishment wore the prisoners down until they took on the appearance of walking skeletons.
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Michel developed peristaltic movement which made him involuntarily regurgitate whatever little he ate. ‘The food came back into my mouth. It meant I could eat again, chew the food again. It was something that remained with me for many, many years. It became natural.’ Many inmates were too weak for the work details, and some simply gave up, lying motionless on their beds of straw, awaiting death.

The authorities chose to believe that these starved and weakened creatures were dangerous enemies of the state who needed constant surveillance. A ministerial document confirming Michel’s internment stated that he was a man of bad reputation and dubious morality.
[65]
He had disobeyed the order imposed on him denying residence, and a close watch was recommended. Despite his acquittal by a Vichy court, the report chose to repeat the charge of influence peddling.

And in a way, of course, the prisoners of Le Vernet were dangerous. Many were men of courage and conscience who had been chased from country to country in an endless cycle of harassment and imprisonment. They were witnesses to cowardice and barbarity in a country that had previously considered itself, with justification, one of the most civilised and democratic in the world. Now France had chosen to break these wretched refugees from Nazism on the wheel of inhumane internment.

The strongest individuals found symbolic ways to keep their hope and spirits alive. On Yom Klppur, the day of atonement, Michel Thomas observed the holiest holiday in the Jewish calendar by fasting. ‘I did not take a piece of bread or a drop of water. The act connected me in my mind to a world community of Jews who were doing the same. That connection took me out of my isolation and loneliness. It gave me the strength not to give up.’

Inmates needed spiritual strength to combat the perpetual physical strain. ‘I woke one night racked by uncontrollable vomiting. I felt that my insides were coming out. I vomited without stopping, but there was nothing there. On and on, heaving a yellow fluid on to my blanket. I felt I was vomiting my guts. I shook with a high fever.’ He was moved into the hut that passed for the camp hospital where he was surrounded by men dying of typhus. ‘It was just a place to die. People on either side of me were carried out dead. No one cared. I don’t know how long I lay there in a delirium, but eventually I recovered enough to drag myself back to the barracks. The muscles of my stomach were severely weakened, causing my belly to drop.’

Starvation was the terror of the camp and inmates inspected their bodies daily for tell-tale signs. This usually first manifested itself in swollen ankles, the swelling slowly spreading up the legs and into the torso until it reached the head. A starving man could press his finger into his cheek and the indentation would remain until it slowly filled. Once the bloating reached the face, death soon followed. ‘Every morning I woke up on my thin straw pallet and inspected my ankles to see if it had started. Then one day I saw that my ankles were swollen. Finally, my own slow and creeping disintegration had started. We all learned that starvation is a long process if there is water to drink, but it is inexorable -and it had begun. At first I reacted by fighting it, raging against it. This was followed by a strange sensation, a temptation to let myself drift peacefully into the arms of death. I had to struggle for it not to overcome me.’

Throughout the months in Le Vernet Michel received mail from Suzanne. His ankles swollen, and his belly distended from starvation, he stretched out on his straw pallet and read love letters. ‘In fact, because of them, I had something close to a human exchange with a young man my age who censored the mail.’

Suzanne had moved to Lyon, together with her mother, in order to be closer to the various foreign embassies that had been set up in the city of Vichy. She reported to Michel that she was tireless in her efforts to petition one country after another. This was a bureaucratic obstacle course that involved an endless round of frustrating visits, not only to embassies, but also to the relevant French government offices and ministries. Anyone with a letter promising a visa would be sent to a transit camp where a new set of problems had to be overcome. Emigrants were usually obliged to embark from neutral Lisbon, in Portugal, which meant they needed Spanish and Portuguese transit visas as well as a French exit visa. French visas were granted by the
préfecture
of a given
département
, who in turn demanded a certificate of good behaviour issued by the local police. And as all these documents were only valid for short periods of time it often happened that one crucial paper would expire before all the others were granted. The whole process then had to begin again. Moreover, the application for any document could be held up at any stage by the most lowly functionary, allowing anti-Semites and petty tyrants to wield the weapon of bureaucratic obstruction at whim. The odds were heavily loaded against Michel, a stateless Jew the authorities considered of doubtful morality and reputation.
[66]

Undeterred, Suzanne followed up on every lead suggested by the refugee rumour mill, as first one embassy and then another was touted as a possibility. But it always came to nothing. Michel read between the lines of her letters and deduced fading hope and growing desperation. However, just when things seemed most dire he was handed a letter from the camp’s censor. Suzanne had written in excited, almost ecstatic prose: at last a country - Venezuela - was considering issuing a visa.

Suzanne had saved his life. After eight months in a concentration camp, slowly slipping towards death, a piece of paper gave Michel renewed hope of freedom. On 12 December 1941, he trudged to the railway halt carrying a small bag that he dropped repeatedly because he was too weak to maintain a grip on the handle. He was transported by train back across France, guarded by two gendarmes, to the transit camp of Les Milles, a disused brick and tile factory six miles south-west of Aix en Provence.
[67]

A high wall and a barbed-wire fence had been constructed around the dilapidated buildings, instantly converting them into a prison compound. The camp had been created as a detention camp for German and Austrian refugees suspected of being a fifth column for the Reich, an irony that cut deep into the Jews and opponents of Hitler who formed most of the inmate population. When Michel arrived the walls were still covered with the murals of the painter Max Ernst.) It had since become a holding centre for those with an ‘imminent chance’ of emigration.
[68]
In comparison with the other camps the conditions were bearable. ‘The people there were, after all, expected to get out and the authorities knew they would talk about it.’

Simone, a friend from the days at Bordeaux University, and her husband, Charles, visited him in the camp. ‘Simone was a French girl, a lovely person, who had married a good friend of mine, Eric Meier, a Jew from Mannheim, Germany. After the collapse of France the police went to look for her husband. Simone explained he had joined up with the British and she thought he had gone over to England during the evacuation of the army from Dunkirk. So they stopped looking for him. She soon got involved with a Frenchman called Charles Lemoine, whom she married. Which was all right, because Charles Lemoine was Eric Meier.’ Charles had obtained false papers and the couple made a living from a food stand at Marseille station.

Michel had left the bulk of his belongings behind at the apartment in Nice when first arrested, and Suzanne’s mother had gone there and packed them. Now that they thought he was about to emigrate they brought the most important belongings to Les Milles in three large suitcases. They were immediately taken by the guards. The initial enthusiasm over the hope of emigration was soon dampened. Suzanne learned, and subsequently made clear in her correspondence through oblique references and coded asides, that although the letter from the Venezuelan Embassy was genuine, in reality it did not mean that a visa would ever be granted. But even though the letter would not provide sanctuary in Venezuela, it did present the possibility of escape.

The letter from Venezuelan officials in Vichy entitled him to a one-day pass, valid from three a.m. to six p.m. - enabling him to visit the consulate in Marseille to obtain a visa. He confided to an old friend he had run into at the camp, a Czech refugee named Turner, that he did not intend to return. The man grabbed his arm and squeezed it, wishing him luck. Michel left the camp at dawn, and caught an early bus for Marseille. He waited for hours at the Venezuelan consulate, only to be informed that his letter was of no official value and that a visa was impossible. He went to the American consulate and was similarly rebuffed.

The disappointments were expected, and he now reverted to his secondary plan and took a train to Lyon to join Suzanne. It was an emotional reunion, although Michel could see that Suzanne was deeply affected by his appearance. He was gaunt, his eyes were black and sunken, and his distended belly hung over the belt of his trousers. But for a few hours all that mattered was that he was alive and the lovers were together.

They discussed the visa. Suzanne was uncharacteristically vague in her account of how the embassy letter had been obtained, suggesting it was unimportant and merely a tiresome detail of the past. She was now impatient to obtain the actual visa itself, and suggested that this is what they should concentrate upon. But Michel was relentless in his questioning and became more and more dogged as Suzanne grew increasingly evasive. ‘She tried not to tell me, but I wanted to know the truth. We knew each other so well, including one another’s thoughts, it was impossible to lie.’

The truth exactly replicated the circumstances the young lovers had discussed in bed in Nice before Michel’s internment. During the months when Michel was in Le Vernet Suzanne had despaired when efforts to save him began to seem hopeless. Camp stories of starvation, disease and death haunted her. In her perpetual round of the embassies, a young, aristocratic attaché who worked in the Cuban Embassy in Vichy had befriended her. He was sympathetic and patient and offered to help. Refugees had grown wary of Cuban visas since the liner Saint Louis, carrying almost a thousand Jews, had been turned away from Havana, and its occupants returned to Europe after being subsequently denied entry into the United States.
[69]
The Cuban diplomat said he had a friend in the Venezuelan Embassy, and he was able to ask him for a letter promising a visa, even though the country demanded proof of Roman Catholic baptism for admission. But at least it had allowed Michel to leave Le Vernet.

Michel insisted on knowing how Suzanne had obtained such a favour. She replied that she had begged the diplomat to save the life of her lover, and that he had been moved by the appeal and agreed to help.

‘No,’ Michel said coldly. ‘You gave in! We know each other so well. We know each other’s thoughts, we never lie to each other. And now I see that you are lying and know what you did.’ He said firmly that they had discussed just such a possibility, and that Suzanne surely remembered what had been said. They had argued about it. He had been adamant that the course she had chosen to take would be absolutely unacceptable to him in any circumstances. Even if it were a matter of life and death. ‘It is not just a question of physical survival - it’s essential now to live without compromise. I know you feel terrible about this - but you know me! I told you that I would never be able to owe my life to such an act. I told you in Nice two years ago that all you would achieve by this would be to break up our life together. And that I would be obliged to go back to the camp. You understand me well enough to know that I have to do what I said I would.’ He stood. ‘I’m leaving. It’s finished.’

He turned to go. Suzanne tried to hold him back, tearfully entreating him to stay. He pulled himself away and left the apartment and walked out into the streets of Lyon.

‘It was a young man’s decision. Of course I have had second thoughts about it over the years... and third thoughts and fourth thoughts. I have agonised over it. I can honestly say that jealousy was not a part of it. It was the breach of trust. I genuinely felt that any compromise in those dangerous times might be the end of all of us. And looking back I realise this has been a leitmotif in my life. I have always asked myself in every situation and over every action how I would live with it. Egotistical, perhaps, but that has always been very important. And I could not live with that - I couldn’t! I did not want. . . did not dare to owe my freedom and life to such an act of love that was also betrayal.’

And so he buried his love alive. He knew that to return now to Les Milles guaranteed internment and punishment. He had originally intended to escape under a new identity, and somehow improvise a life as an outlaw, but now his own severe standards and personal code obliged him to return. He decided to travel back the following day and present himself to the camp authorities. ‘The only papers I had on me was the pass, which already made me illegal. All hotels handed in guests’ registration cards to the police every morning so I knew I would have to leave early. I wanted to return voluntarily, not in chains.’

He made his way to a small hotel and took a cheap room. On each floor there was a single, shared lavatory, and Michel visited it in the middle of the night. As he entered, he turned on the light and was met by the sight of a bulging wallet lying on the floor. ‘I picked it up and it was packed with money. A gift from heaven! I was very low on cash and this was a lot of money. But as I looked through the wallet I found there was also an ID card.’