The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (30 page)

‘Old and young pass by, some dressed, some only in their underwear, hauled out of their beds and driven out. People after major operations and people with chronic diseases... a blind old man, well known to the inhabitants of the ghetto; he is about seventy years, wears dark goggles over his blind eyes, which he lost in the battles on the Italian front in 1915 fighting side by side with the Germans. He wears a yellow armband with three black circles on his left arm to signify blindness. His head high, he walks erect, guided by his son on one side, by his wife on the other...

‘Immediately after him, another elderly person appears, a cripple with one leg, on crutches. The Germans close in on them. Slowly, in dance step, one of them runs toward the blind man and yells with all his power:
‘Schnell!’
- Hurry! This encourages the other Germans to start a peculiar game.

‘Two of the SS men approach the old man without the leg and shout the order for him to run. Another one comes from behind and with the butt of his rifle hits the crutch. The old man falls down. The German screams savagely, threatens to shoot. All this takes place right in the back of the blind man who is unable to see, but hears the beastly voices of the Germans, interspersed with cascades of their laughter. A German soldier approaches the cripple who is lying on the ground and helps him to rise.

‘For a moment we think that perhaps there will be at least one human being among them unable to stand torturing people one hour before their death. Alas, there was no such person in the annals of the Cracow ghetto. No sooner were they saturated with torturing the cripple than they decided to try the same with the blind war invalid. They chased away his son and wife, tripped him, and rejoiced at his falling to the ground. This time they did not even pretend to help him and he had to rise by himself, rushed on by horrifying screaming of the SS men hovering over him. They repeated this same game several times, a truly shattering experience of cruelty. One could not tell from what they derived more pleasure, the physical pain of the fallen invalid or the despair of his wife and son standing aside watching helplessly... The shots are echoing all over the ghetto.’
[128]

Such was the nature of events in which the SS officer who stood before Michel was involved. He slipped the
Soldbuch
with its citation into his pocket with a shaking hand. ‘This was my first encounter, eyeball to eyeball, with a man who was a war criminal. A man who had committed crimes against humanity that he was proud of and for which he was honoured. My whole being was transformed. I felt I had been there in Cracow. I lost all control.’

Despite the man’s size, Michel grabbed him and hit him hard in the face. He ordered him to squat and do knee bends with hands outstretched - up and down, over and over, again and again. Michel ordered him to bark,
‘Ich danke meinem Fuhrer, Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil’
- I thank my Fuhrer for this. The SS man eventually collapsed, but Michel was still not satisfied and took the whip he had confiscated and set about him. In the midst of the beating, three American officers walked by and one moved forward to remonstrate. He was restrained by his colleagues. ‘Leave him alone,’ one said. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

Finally, Michel stopped. Emotionally drained, he called the Military Police to take the SS officer away. The man was trembling as if he had the shakes and the MPs gave him a blanket, thinking he was cold. ‘That was the only time my rage and hatred erupted physically. When I was spent, I realised that it was a mistake to allow myself to lose control. It was the one and only time it happened, the only time I physically assaulted a prisoner. I am not proud of this. I wasn’t myself. I felt I was being driven, pushed - an instrument for all those who were massacred in Cracow.’

In September 1944, in the vicinity of Aubry, one of the regiment’s battalions was holding a bridge across a river when it found itself in an exposed position and threatened by counter-attack. Michel made contact with a Résistance agent in a nearby town held by the enemy and obtained vital information on their military strength. He also connected with other Résistance agents in villages in the area and received daily bulletins on enemy movements and reinforcements. When two patrols sent out to reconnoitre failed to return, he volunteered to go into the area alone.

He came across a German soldier using an abandoned house as an observation post and could have shot him but chose to make him a prisoner. Michel forced him out of the house and moved back towards the American line. At one point on the journey, the man stopped and stubbornly refused to go any further. ‘I got mad and told him he would be shot if he didn’t move, but he stayed firmly where he was.’ It was only then that the prisoner explained they were about to enter a freshly laid minefield. They made a wide detour.

The detailed intelligence Michel provided on enemy gun emplacements allowed accurate artillery fire to be directed on to them, and the threat to the force holding the bridge was lifted. Michel’s work at this time so impressed the commanding officer of the 1st battalion of the 180th that he wrote him up for a Silver Star, one of the American military’s highest decorations.
[129]

Michel felt secure in the army, as if he had found a family and a home. ‘It was very strange for me to be in the front with the US Army. It was so different from fighting with the Résistance, where if you heard a dog bark you knew there was a stranger about and you would be up and out of your bed on alert. In the army you slept in a foxhole and were shelled, but it didn’t bother me because if you heard them the danger was over. You were connected, part of an army with guards posted, and had a sense of security. I slept soundly.’

In contrast to the furtive hit-and-run tactics of the Résistance, the new experience of front-line combat revealed two things to Michel about his own nature: a disregard for personal safety and a reluctance to kill. ‘A personal killing would have been very, very difficult for me. I was prepared to kill in combat, used a rifle, and certainly caused loss of life by directing artillery, but I never personally shot anybody.’

He saw the fearlessness accredited to him by fellow soldiers as nothing more than the psychological pay-off that came with continued survival. Beating the odds in combat affected people in different ways: it could either make a man overcautious or reckless. ‘I felt like a gambler at the roulette table who has amassed a mountain of chips on a long winning streak. You are only cautious with the original stake and can afford to lose when you are playing with winnings. It isn’t real money. That is how I felt with my life. I had a powerful wish to fight the enemy and in situations of danger I felt my life had been won. It was a part of my winnings from the camps and the Résistance.’

The Thunderbirds ran into increasingly bitter fighting as they pushed north and the Germans battled to hold up their progress. But even at the front and on the move there were moments of romance. At one French town Michel decided his men would be more effective on patrol if they had bicycles. ‘So we had to organise a dozen bicycles quickly. There was this young teacher from Paris, a girl of nineteen or twenty, who arranged everything. We jumped on the bikes and went on patrol.’

They came back at nightfall and returned the bicycles. The group broke up but Michel stayed behind to talk to the pretty Parisian school teacher. They went for a long walk in the beautiful hills surrounding the town. The girl explained that she had been evacuated from Paris to the country because of the Occupation, but now the war seemed to have caught up with her. ‘She was very lovely and it was a beautiful night and we found ourselves in an isolated spot. It was very romantic. It all led to intimate embraces, and as day was about to break we made love. And as we were making love I found out she was a virgin - at the same time that an American artillery position opened fire right above us in the hills. The ground moved.’

The following day Michel returned to his unit, and the teacher to her classroom. The Thunderbirds moved on in heavy rain, a condition that was to plague them for days. ‘We moved with the war and I never saw her again. Later, somewhere in the front, several soldiers told me that a girl had followed the troops on a bicycle and gone from unit to unit in the rain trying to find me. That time with her remains an unforgettable experience, beautiful and painful. It made me so sad to think of her in the rain.’

As the division pushed forward, and Michel continued to reconnoitre and patrol, it was not his nerve that failed him but his sense of direction. It was a peculiar and entirely unexpected phenomenon that began to trouble him, and he had to work hard to counteract it. He would be out on patrol and lose any sense of how he arrived at the place he was in, or how to get back. The spells varied in length and severity, and at first he dismissed them as a curious form of combat fatigue, but they were alarming - and potentially life-threatening.

The division was confronted with murderous opposition in the foothills of the Vosges mountains where the terrain favoured defensive action and the Germans had dug in.

There was heavy fighting around Epinal and Michel, together with an American Indian who was an excellent scout, set up an observation post in a small house. The Germans spotted them and opened up with artillery. The scout squeezed himself into a corner, hoping to protect himself, while Michel thought the house would be blown to bits. A conflict developed between them on the course of action to take next.

‘We have to get out!’ Michel urged.

‘No! I’m staying here!’

‘The shelling isn’t going to stop until they’ve blown up the house! I’m off!’

As he moved to go a shell exploded in the garden, and the near miss served to change the scout’s mind. Together, they threw themselves through the door and crawled on their bellies into a flooded ditch. As they rose to their feet and ran back towards the line, two direct hits on the house blew it to pieces.

Two days later, after non-stop fighting, a large unit of the 180th was completely surrounded. ‘I didn’t like it at all and there was a real fear we might be captured. I had decided that I would never allow myself to be taken alive by the Germans - I knew something about it! So I decided to do everything not to be captured and to find a way out alive. I struck out on my own and somehow made it through enemy lines, but in the tension of the moment did not bother to register any visual landmarks.’

It had been blind luck, but once reunited with American troops he was expected to lead a force back in to relieve the surrounded unit. ‘They wanted me to go back the way I had come out.’ Michel now found himself in an impossible position. ‘I hadn’t told anybody about my loss of a sense of direction. I didn’t want anybody to know. It would have taken me out of the war. And now I was being asked to go back to a dangerous place in a combat zone and had no idea how to do it. What to do? If I said that I didn’t know how I got out and couldn’t lead them back, it would look like I was a coward and not prepared to do anything to help liberate an army unit. If I agreed and failed, it would be disaster. Possibly death. I had never found myself in such a dilemma.’

He protested that he had merely followed his nose and taken a chance, but the claim was dismissed as false modesty. Unable to refuse, he hoped to make it back in the same mysterious way that he had found his way out. Ten men followed him, including a major and two officers with radios. The plan was to call in more troops once they were in position. ‘I already had quite a reputation, so they all followed me confidently, sure that I knew what I was doing. But I had no idea. I was lost. I was so happy to have got out, now it was all-important to get back in. It was a horrendous dilemma. I really don’t know how I found my way back, but I did. It could have gone horribly wrong and I would have been guilty of misleading them.’

It had taken the regiment two days to crawl to the western edge of the city defended by trenches and minefields. Heavy mortar and artillery fire pinned them down, until, supported by tanks, they took the town house by house. Epinal was cleared on 24 September, and for most of the following month the Thunderbirds employed tactics using close tank and artillery support to capture and push the Germans out of one French town after another.

The division then crossed the Moselle and established a toehold among the enemy’s positions in the Vosges mountains. Michel, meanwhile, put forward a plan to Allied intelligence. He felt the most effective he could now be in his personal war was as a member of the Special Forces of the French Army. His plan was to be parachuted behind enemy lines into the German Alps to organise deserters, forced labourers and opponents of the regime into Résistance groups. This involved training in Besancon, so Michel organised his travel plans to take him through Lyon. He was concerned to find out how Suzanne and her mother had weathered the liberation.
[130]

No one answered the bell at the apartment, so he made his way to a Latin American restaurant that had been popular during the Occupation and which he knew Suzanne had frequented. The fashionable clientele at the time included black-marketeers, police spies, German officers and Résistance agents. A young woman who ran the restaurant, who knew Suzanne well, told Michel she had been arrested in Nice on suspicion of collaboration and that her mother had gone to try to obtain her release.

Michel left for the south after a minor hiccup in Grenoble: the American Army jeep in which he had driven down was stolen. Infuriated, he made such a scene that a French general loaned him his staff car and driver. On arrival in Nice, he found Suzanne’s mother through mutual friends, and she told him the whole sorry story of the arrest. He went directly to the jail where, despite his American uniform or possibly because of it, he was given the run-around. Exasperated, he insisted upon an appointment with the investigating judge handling the case, and was eventually granted one. The judge listened without expression and said that as the case was in process there was nothing he could do - the law must take its course. Justice would surely be done. He stood and offered his hand to signal that the interview was over and there was nothing more to be said.