The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (14 page)

The carte d’identité was a man’s most precious possession, the single legitimising document that opened the door to a normal life: ration cards, rail and bus tickets, a residence permit. Anyone in France at this time without one - especially an escapee - would find everyday life impossible. One of the reasons there were so few escape attempts from the camps was that the lack of ID was as powerful a deterrent as the bayonets of the guards at the gate.
[70]

‘A gift from heaven - and I could be free! I cursed the ID card because that gave the money a proprietor.’ Michel took the money from the wallet and fingered it, a wad thick enough to allow him to live frugally for months. He scrutinised the ID to see how it could be adapted to carry his own photograph. And then he caught sight of himself in the mirror poring over the wallet. It was the image of a pickpocket. ‘I had refused to accept freedom because of Suzanne’s act, and now I was contemplating being a thief. Stealing money. I weighed leaving the wallet with the ID, and taking only the money. But how could I live with that? I would have committed an act I would consider despicable in another human being.’

The bulging wallet began to seem less a gift from the gods than a temptation designed to weaken his resolve and make him abandon his standards. He took it down to the hotel reception and asked for the owner by name. The desk clerk was reluctant to wake a guest in the middle of the night, but in the face of Michel’s insistence agreed to accompany him to the room. The clerk knocked gently on the door without result, until Michel stepped forward and hammered on it to wake the sleeping man.

He appeared at the door, dishevelled and bleary-eyed, furious at being disturbed. ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘Have you by any chance lost your wallet?’ Michel asked.

The man blinked, stupid with sleep, and then turned in panic to check the top of a chest of drawers. ‘My God! It’s gone! Where is it?’

Michel handed over the wallet. He explained that he had found it lying on the floor of the lavatory, and assured the man he would find both money and ID card intact. The guest scarcely thanked him, but mumbled about leaving a reward at the desk in the morning. Michel went back to bed. He left at dawn before either his fellow guest or the police could reach him, and made his way back to Les Milles.

Turner, the Czech refugee who had wished Michel luck in his escape attempt, was mystified and enraged at his return. He listened to the stories of the visa and the wallet in incredulous silence, then exploded: ‘You’re crazy!
Crazy!
’ Principles and high ideals, Turner suggested, were fine things in peacetime but survival and freedom took precedence in war. He grew heated as he spoke. How could anyone be so
stupid
? Turner raved at Michel as he tried to defend his action, shouting that he was talking nonsense, and dangerous, suicidal nonsense at that. Michel resigned himself to being misunderstood. He realised his friend had invested so much hope in the escape attempt that he took its abandonment as a personal betrayal.

A few days later Michel was in the latrines, which comprised holes cut in rough planks placed over open trenches. Men spent as little time as possible in the latrines, but on his brief visit he spotted a ring jammed between the earth and the edge of one of the planks. It was a beauty - a thick band of gold with a large diamond at its centre. Another
cloaca
, another gift from heaven. It was as if the gods were mocking him.

The next time he ran into Turner he told him of the incredible find. The man turned white. ‘My God, that’s my ring!’

‘Come on!’

‘No, it’s my ring, I promise you.’

It had been Turner’s great secret, smuggled into Les Milles when he first arrived. All the wealth the refugee owned in the world was in that ring and it represented his last chance of freedom, and then he had lost it. He described his panicked, clandestine search for the missing ring when he had crawled on his hands and knees over every inch of the courtyard, and gone through the barracks with a fine-tooth comb. The loss had plunged him into a deep depression and partly accounted for his fury at Michel’s inexplicable rejection of a golden opportunity.

‘Describe it,’ Michel said sceptically. Turner described in detail a gold band with a square-cut diamond set in the middle. Michel dug into his pocket and held the ring out to Turner in the palm of his hand. ‘Here it is. Do you want it back? According to you, I should never have told you. I should keep it.’

He handed the ring to Turner, who took the ring with tears in his eyes. ‘A miracle!’ he exclaimed. ‘The ring’s my one chance.’

Michel nodded, saying nothing. ‘I wanted him to understand my actions. The loss of the ring had brought him so low, almost destroyed him because he felt he had lost his last chance at freedom. It was the same with the man and the wallet. And with Suzanne there had been a betrayal of trust. And that endangered both our lives. In those days I believed trust was more important than love.’ He was aware of the harshness of his decision concerning Suzanne, but was also clear about the ruthlessness and absolute evil of the enemy. To indulge any weakness, even on the side of the angels, was to court disaster. He did not regret his stand, but would be obliged to suffer for it.

On his return to Les Milles Michel had been put down for punishment. He feared a return to Le Vernet, but there was a worse fate in store for him. The administration ordered him to be transferred to a Foreign Labour Battalion at Gardanne, a punishment camp that serviced a coal mine.

The mine had been closed, he was told, since the First World War, but slave labour had allowed it to re-open with minimal expense and little regard for the safety of the workers.

‘I was forced to rise before sunrise at five a.m. to go down the mine. We were let down in an elevator cage for what seemed an age, then transferred to another, smaller cage and lowered further until we arrived at a depot for a small-gauge railway. We climbed on to the coal cars and had to keep our heads down for the long ride through murky, dust-filled, suffocating tunnels until we jumped off at our work zone.’

He had now entered a twilight world of half-naked men covered in sweat and coal dust, straining to push trucks loaded with coal. The hot half-light, the swirling mist of coal dust and the silent slaves presented an image of hell. At the first sight of this diabolical tableau Michel saw in his mind’s eye the words of Dante’s
Inferno
hanging over them in a fiery arc:
Lasciate ogni speranza
,
voi ch’entrate
- All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

‘Once off the train I had to crawl on my hands and knees through a maze of narrow tunnels, in and out of passageways, sometimes pushing through inky water and sludge, until I reached my work station at the face, more than an hour after I had entered the mine.’ He was one of a team of eight slave-workers run by three professional Polish miners who acted as guards as well as foremen. ‘We slaves were so totally controlled and intimidated by this brutal system that the French never had to send any guards into the mine. The miners were not humans but brutes. No animal has the brutality of these men.’

The foreman-miners were well fed and well paid, receiving a bonus for each car filled. The slaves, of course, received nothing. The food was marginally more sustaining than at Le Vernet, but hopelessly inadequate for hard labour. ‘On the first day I was given a pick without a moment’s rest from the rigours of my underground journey and immediately had to begin prying coal loose from a seam. I dared not stop. I worked for a long time until my body demanded a few moments of rest. I set the handle of the pick upon the ground and bent over it for a moment, just to catch my breath.’ He was instantly grabbed by one of the Poles, who snarled, ‘You’d better not stop if you want to live through the day and get out of this mine!’

The hours of work seemed interminable. ‘My hands were covered with blisters that brought constant sharp pains with each blow of the pick. My empty stomach ached with hunger.’ By lunchtime he was exhausted. There was a momentary rest when he only drank water, having eaten his daily ration of bread at breakfast, and watched the miners wolf large, meat-filled sandwiches. The men then returned to work without a break through the afternoon and into the evening. ‘Around me, every so often, a slave would be injured or killed by some accident or cave-in. Or would collapse from exertion. No one cared. Victims were simply thrown on to the coal car and hauled off like trash.’

At the end of the day, long after darkness had fallen, Michel made the long journey back to the surface. He showered in icy water and returned to the barracks. The routine never changed, six days a week. ‘I never saw the sun. Every day was an eternity.’
[71]

The routine ground on. Michel entered a dark, timeless psychological zone in which he could not accurately tell if he had been working at the face for weeks or months or years. The days down in the bowels of the pit merged into a perpetual cycle of hunger, exhaustion and brutality.

On Sundays, the one day of rest, the slaves lay on their thin straw mats too exhausted to move. Some received visitors and even food parcels. An occasional visitor was an old Jewish tailor from Marseille who came to mend the prisoners’ rags. He was almost as poor as they were and received a pittance for his services. Michel liked to talk to him in Yiddish as he worked. One day the old man mentioned that he had originally lived in Le Havre.

‘I had a girlfriend there once,’ Michel said. ‘I used to visit her.’

‘Jewish?’ the old tailor asked.

Michel nodded. ‘The family were from Lodz originally, my home town. Lebowitz.’

The tailor lowered his needle and thread. He threw back his head and roared, slapping his thigh with his hand. ‘I know them...
I know them!
’

‘I don’t suppose there are many Lebowitzes in Le Havre,’ Michel said.

The tailor continued to slap his hand on his thigh and grew increasingly excited. ‘Incredible... yes, incredible! They’re here in Marseille! The daughter is married and has a baby boy.’

‘Lucienne’s in
Marseille?
’

The tailor nodded. ‘Lucienne, yes that’s her name. I’ll give her a message if you like.’

Lucienne arrived at the camp the following Sunday, and from then on became a regular visitor. She was indeed married and living in Marseille, an uncertain existence even for naturalised French Jews. On every visit she chatted in a friendly manner with one of the guards at the gate. She explained to Michel that she believed the young commander who came on duty at night was a decent man, uncomfortable in his role as slave master.

Together they devised an escape plan. When Lucienne went to leave, Michel would hide in the bushes by the gate. As the commander opened the gate, and chatted to Lucienne, Michel would slip out and be met by a friend with a truck. The following Sunday they carried out the plan. He walked to the bushes and hid, while Lucienne made for the gate. The guard opened it, lit a cigarette and stood talking. Michel took his opportunity and scuttled through.

He was taken to the outskirts of Marseille where he met Lucienne’s husband and child and stayed overnight. The couple risked their lives by having him in the house. Early the next morning he made his way to the station and had Lucienne buy him a ticket to Lyon, where friends from Nice had connections with the Résistance.

Control on the Marseille-Lyon train had been tightened during the four months he had spent in Gardanne. The regime was growing increasingly efficient in its repression. Despite moving from one compartment to another, and using all his survivor’s wiles to avoid detention, he was eventually confronted by gendarmes who demanded his papers. He explained that they had been stolen, together with his bags, at the station in Marseille.

He was arrested, returned to Les Milles and transferred after a few days to a punishment camp in what was then known as the Basses Alpes. Les Mees was an isolated logging camp in the mountains, near Forcalquier, and its inmates were almost entirely Jewish. Security was relatively relaxed in the camp itself as roads in and out of the mountain region were tightly controlled. And once again, any escapee without papers would be unlikely to get far.

‘Had I not experienced the hell of Gardanne I might have bridled at the regime, but at least this work was in the clean open air. We had to fell large trees using only axes. Then we stripped the branches and assembled the large trunks into a sort of sled that we dragged down the mountainside through a dry river bed. As hard as it was, it was a relief by comparison to work in the mine.’

Among the sixty or so inmates, Michel found a core of like-minded individuals who expressed enthusiasm to escape and join the Résistance. They were a romantic bunch much given to elaborate stratagems and extravagant pledges. ‘We banded together in the joint desire to strike out against the evils of the Vichy government and its godfather, Adolf Hitler. We made plans. We saw ourselves as two strong fists, and if ever we could free ourselves from this bondage we would remain together always, strong and courageous.’

The camp came under the control of the Vichy military commander for the region. One day Michel, together with four other inmates, was sent to build a fence around the garden of the man’s private residence. The commander was not present in person, but his attractive nineteen-year-old daughter, Nicole, issued instructions to the men. Michel was aware that she seemed to pay particular attention to him and found several occasions to make light conversation. In the five days it took to build the fence an unlikely friendship developed.