The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (6 page)

The friends agreed to split up and explore various cities throughout France. Afterwards they would reunite, pool their experiences and impressions, and decide where to go. When the friends met again Michel made a strong case for Bordeaux. It was an attractive, sophisticated city with a symphony orchestra and an opera, but more importantly it was on the ocean and close to the Pyrenees. This meant the friends could enjoy the beach in the summer and ski in the mountains in winter. Karl was persuaded, and the university accepted them both in September.

Bordeaux was also full of refugees, and Michel shared a small apartment with Kai in a house used by ladies of the night, good-natured, amiable girls who bustled clients up and down the stairs at all hours. Once again he had to make money to eat and pay for lodgings. A family restaurant was pleased to make an arrangement for free food for both of them if he was able to fill the restaurant. As president of the Jewish student body he persuaded many of them to take their meals in the restaurant, and it was soon packed.

Later, he persuaded the Bordeaux council to lend him a rundown building owned by the city on the Rue Margaux for the refugee community in exchange for an undertaking to renovate it. ‘We turned it into a beautiful place, equipped it with a big kitchen, and served meals in a garden courtyard in the summer.’ A busy laundry service run out of the house also became a profitable concern.

To make money Michel used his Leica camera to take pictures of children at play in the city’s parks. He then went to their mothers and offered them the option of buying the photos. ‘And of course they loved them - I was rarely turned down.’ He worked late into the night developing and printing. He also began to paint on glass, describing his style as ‘assembly line’. He worked on ten paintings at a time lined up in a row and moved from canvas to canvas adding colour. ‘I knocked them out.’ The first fifty were framed and taken by a dealer to a large department store. Sales were slow. Michel sent student friends to stand in front of the paintings and talk about them with excitement. Sales remained slow. He sent them back with money to buy. ‘So they bought the paintings and brought them to me. Sales became quite good. The store gave me a big order and the paintings I had bought went back to the store.’

Michel had applied for a place in the chemistry department at the university, and although he passed the exams he found that he was unable to afford the course. So he switched his studies to philology, philosophy, archaeology and the history of art. He was also interested in psychology, particularly the Viennese psychoanalysts Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud. He became particularly intrigued by the work of the nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist Friedrich Nietzsche.

Another profound admirer of Nietzsche, of course, was Adolf Hitler. Never could two individuals - Michel Thomas and Adolf Hitler - have interpreted a philosophy in such contradictory terms. One man read to challenge himself intellectually, while the other sought texts to confirm his preconceptions.

Nietzsche maintained that all human behaviour is motivated by the will to power. He argued that traditional Christian values had lost their potency in the lives of people - ‘God is dead’ - and that these had been replaced by a slave mentality created by weak and resentful individuals, who encouraged such concepts as ‘gentleness’ and ‘kindness’ only because they served their interests. New values were needed to replace the traditional ones to help form a superman who was secure, independent and highly individualistic. The superman would have strong feelings but would always control his passion. He would be concerned with the realities of the human world rather than the heavenly promises of religion, and would affirm life with all its suffering and pain. The superman would evolve his own ‘master morality’, made up only of those values he deemed valid.

The student Michel saw the positive in Nietzsche, interpreting the will to power as control over self and responsible power over others. He saw the emphasis on independence and individuality as a path to individual moral responsibility. Hitler took a different view and interpreted the philosopher’s ideas to suit his own totalitarian instincts and justify a master-slave society. Nietzsche seemed to support Hitler’s lack of belief in either God or conscience, which the Fiihrer dismissed as ‘a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcision’. The concept that a nation was nothing more than nature’s way of providing a few important men also suited Hitler, who felt chosen for a mission by providence and therefore exempt from ordinary human moral restraint. And while Michel might subscribe to the Nietzschean phrase ‘Praised be that which toughens’, Hitler would have it posted in every SS barracks.
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Michel attended a summer philosophy course at the Sorbonne, in Paris, where a chance remark made by one of the professors made an enormous impact: Nobody knows anything about the learning process of the human mind. The statement had a profound influence on his later life.

Despite a growing undercurrent of resentment towards immigrants and Jews, the French electorate in 1936 put into power the anti-fascist Popular Front, led by Léon Blum, a socialist and Jew. But as the economy grew worse, and the government proved inept, enemies of the Third Republic complained that a Jewish premier proved that the country had fallen into the hands of the Jews, and ruin would follow. Most of all, they feared that it would lead them into war with Hitler. (In fact, the diplomatic thrust of Blum’s government was to appease Hitler - with catastrophic results.)

An important influence at this time on Michel’s political thinking was Michael Nelken, a young German writer who wrote under the name Michael Ren.
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The men had met at Bordeaux University and became good friends until Nelken returned home to Germany to visit his mother and seemed to disappear. There was no word from him for almost two years, but in one of the many fateful coincidences in Michel’s life the friends bumped into each other only minutes after Nelken’s return to Paris.

He was a changed man. In Germany, his writing had attracted the attention and displeasure of the Nazi government and he had been arrested. He was sent to Dachau, near Munich - the Nazis’ first concentration camp opened in March 1935 to incarcerate critics and enemies of the regime.
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Nelken was released only after the intervention of Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but not before the writer had contracted a bad case of tuberculosis.
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On his return to France, doctors recommended that he live in a warm climate in the south.

Michel could see that his friend was deathly ill and offered to accompany him as companion and nurse. The men arranged to rent a house in Grasse, in Provence, but this created a crisis in Michel’s relationship with Lucienne. He had suggested that she accompany him and that they live together, a scandalous arrangement for the times. Lucienne certainly thought so, and issued an ultimatum: marriage or nothing! Michel left for the south without her.

Nelken grew stronger over time, and the friends often visited a famous neighbour, H.G. Wells, for long afternoons of conversation. Nelken began writing a book on his experiences in Dachau, a place mostly unheard of by the world, and it made grim reading. The manuscript confirmed Michel’s worst fears and both men were convinced that the book’s publication would cause international outrage. But it was rejected across the board by French publishers as hysterical and improbable propaganda. Worse, when a condensed account was finally published in a German refugee paper, it was bitterly attacked as fantasy. Some Jewish critics even described the book as the product of a sick imagination.

The reaction depressed Nelken deeply, but Michel was unaware of the depths of his friend’s despair when he went away for several weeks. He returned to receive the terrible news from Nelken’s fiancee that he had committed suicide. The writer Michael Ren had survived the brutalities of Dachau and the ravages of TB but was devastated by the rejection of his own people. The dismissal of his experiences as fantasy, and his warnings as alarmist, was more than he could bear. ‘You will survive the ninety-nine blows of the whip; it will be painful and very bad, but you will survive. But you will not survive the one hundredth lash. For Michael the one hundredth blow was to tell his story as a warning and not to be believed.’

It was a time of false hope, and no one wanted to believe what Michel now saw as inevitable: there would be war. He felt compelled to visit his family and travelled to Breslau to see his aunt and uncle, and then on to Lodz to see his mother and father. The German economy had improved radically under Hitler, although it did not benefit Jews for whom life had become circumscribed, dangerous and unpleasant. In Breslau his aunt and uncle lived in hope of change, but also began to speak half-heartedly of emigration, possibly to America. In Lodz, Michel found his mother oblivious to danger and so removed from reality that she expressed the hope that he might return to live in Poland.

An intimate family dinner was organised to persuade him, held in the palatial home of great-uncle Oscar (Usher) Kohn, a man of fantastic wealth who travelled in his own private train. As the owner of a large textile factory, Widzewska Manufaktura, and the builder of the town of Widzew on the outskirts of Lodz, he took a broad, general view of things.

Usher waved his cigar and delivered an avuncular lecture. ‘It’s nice to travel and see other countries, but it’s important to have a base. You can sail out, but you must have a home port!’

Michel understood his uncle to mean that his home was with the family in Lodz, and the great manufacturing business his future. Cocooned by his immense wealth, Usher Kohn believed he could weather any political storm and return to the safety of his home port. But Michel had plans to study psychology at the University of Vienna, birthplace of psychoanalysis and city of Sigmund Freud.

‘I hate Poland!’ Michel exclaimed, unable to contain himself.

Uncle Usher and Freida exchanged a glance, but the young man did not stop.

‘What kind of future do you have here? A manufacturer? It’s just a matter of time. Maybe in a few years the Germans will be here and it will be the end of your business. Or the Russians will be here and that will be the end of your business.’
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Uncle Usher shrugged, drew on his cigar and changed the subject. He did not even seem angry. He was used to spirited, outspoken hotheads in the family, which is what he had been at the same age.

In many ways Oscar Kohn was the living history of Lodz, and had been largely instrumental in the city’s growth from an empty village in a sandy waste to a world-renowned centre of industry. The four dozen Jews originally allowed to live in the city had been tailors from Germany and Moravia, who had fled the poverty of towns and villages razed in the Napoleonic wars. A mighty textile manufacturing empire had grown from these modest beginnings.

Uncle Usher had witnessed war, pogroms, Cossacks and revolution and had always managed to turn a profit. There had been bad times, but he had endured. Nobody who made it in Lodz did it the easy way, and he could be cynically witty about the city’s inhabitants and mores. Lodz, he would tell Michel - or anyone who cared to listen - admired nothing more than wealth, and the rabbis needed to know more about promissory notes than about the Torah, more about bankruptcy than God’s law. Lodz knew that with money you could buy anything, although unlike wool or cotton, justice was not a commodity the city was concerned about. Lodz was a city of sharpies, Uncle Usher said, a town without secrets that knew what was cooking in everyone’s pot. ‘He’s moving up’ was a glowing term said of a man on the make, and the city’s compliments were sharp and geared to ruthless success. A man was deemed ‘smart as salt in a wound’, or someone who could ‘turn snow into cheese’, and the greatest compliment old Lodz could bestow on a citizen was to say that he had the guts of a pickpocket.

And while Uncle Usher accepted that Hitler was a threat, he did not believe the deranged lance-corporal truly represented most Germans. It was an unfortunate political phase, an aberration. Balance and moderation would eventually be restored to the most cultured and educated country in Europe. German anti-Semitism was manufactured for political reasons and not an intrinsic part of German society at all. Not like Russia, where anti-Semitism ran deep, or Poland, where the strain was the most virulent of all.

Anti-Semitism was a fact of life, a condition Jews had to endure and overcome. Even the Jewish population in Lodz struggled endlessly among themselves for supremacy. German Jews considered themselves the cream of the crop, followed by the Poles. Both groups resented and looked down on those expelled from Russia, while Lithuanians - known as Litvaks - were considered even worse, existing only on bread and herring and dismissed as ‘onionheads’: ‘All they brought with them to Poland were their teapots and their razors with which to shave once a week.’
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It was in this worldly and sophisticated manner that Uncle Usher dismissed Michel’s warnings as youthful exaggerations, and no doubt Freida was greatly comforted. But as Michel left the country and made his way by train to Vienna, he was full of foreboding. His return had been a bittersweet experience that left him emotionally upset and inexplicably angry. The happiness and tears of the people he loved most in the world had moved him deeply, but he worried about the danger his aunt and uncle faced in Germany, and the uncertain future of his parents in Poland. He had savoured every moment of their company, recalled every gesture and word, committing them to memory. It was the last time he saw any of them alive.
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