The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (9 page)

After driving for some time along a dark, empty road, they suddenly pulled over. The Gestapo officer in the passenger seat turned to face them. ‘We have decided to let you escape.’

Michel was certain they were about to be shot, victims of the classic ruse:
Auf der Flucht erschossen
- shot while trying to escape.

‘Yes, we are going to let you go,’ the Gestapo officer continued, ‘but you’ll have to keep your eyes and ears open because when we return to HQ we will announce your escape.’

This made no sense, and Michel prepared himself. The Gestapo officer in the passenger seat got out of the car, while his companion remained behind the steering wheel. The back door was unlocked and the couple climbed out. The Gestapo officer led them to the edge of the woods where there was a path. He gestured to Michel to follow it.

‘No,’ Michel said firmly, expecting to be shot in the back. ‘After you.’

The Gestapo officer understood and went ahead without comment, and after walking a short distance they reached a clearing. He pointed out three lights in the far distance and explained that the two closest to them were on German territory, while the furthest was in France. He told them that if they walked straight they would come to a railway line, and once they had crossed it they would lose sight of the lights. But if they remembered the position of the third light and made towards it they would be able to cross the border unchallenged. It was a lonely part of the frontier, he continued, and it was unlikely they would run into any patrols or checkpoints. But if the French picked them up they would certainly be handed back to the Germans. And then, incongruously wishing them good luck, the Gestapo officer turned and walked back along the path.

They stood for a moment, braced for shots to ring out from the black woods. But there was nothing - only the silence of the night. Michel suspected they were trapped in a cruel game and could only guess at the pay-off. On the other hand, there was a possibility that the Gestapo had decided to throw the political small fry back into the sea. They began to walk towards the lights.

They crossed a railway line and the lights disappeared exactly as described. Michel wondered if they were being sent directly into the line of fire of some frontier post as they continued to walk. They emerged on to a road. There was no checkpoint, no armed guards or border patrol, no sudden burst of gunfire from out of the dark. A knot of people were walking along unconcernedly. And they were speaking French. Grateful, and somewhat bemused to be alive, Michel and Suzanne entered France.

It was the Eve of All Saints - Hallowe’en - 1938 when Michel and Suzanne entered a French village in Lorraine, in the area of Metz. People were still out and about celebrating the festival, lights burned in the local cafés, and they attracted little attention. Michel enquired in the village if anyone operated a taxi service, explaining they had come to see friends and stayed on too late. He was directed to a house on the outskirts of town. It was in darkness and the owner was asleep, but Michel knocked loudly on the door, rousing the man from his bed. He explained they needed to be driven to Paris immediately on urgent family business. He knew it was late, and there was a long journey ahead, but he was prepared to pay. The man dressed and took the car out of the garage, and by three in the morning they were on their way. On the long journey across France, Michel and Suzanne discussed the strange action taken by their Gestapo captors. Nothing they came up with proved a completely satisfactory explanation, but there seemed to be a number of possibilities. The men might simply have had Hallowe’en plans and the arrest was an unwelcome interruption: a tedious night-time drive across Germany with unimportant refugees was both a low priority and a thankless chore. They might even have been persuaded by Michel’s argument and felt that by letting them go the Reich had to deal with two fewer Jews. And it was just possible that these young Gestapo officers retained a streak of human decency and sympathised with the plight of two young lovers caught up in forces beyond their control.

Later in the war, when Michel interrogated numerous captured SS and Gestapo men, he often wondered what he would do if his captors came under his control. He decided that he would investigate the men’s subsequent war records and, despite an Allied policy of automatic arrest and imprisonment of all such officials, he would return the favour and let them go if they had no blood on their hands.

On arrival in Paris Michel and Suzanne made straight for the house of a cousin, Dianne Dudel, on Boulevard Simon Bolivar.
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The family not only had the unexpected pleasure of their company, but Dianne’s father was also obliged to pay the enormous taxi fare. In the days that followed Michel traipsed from one government office to another in order to reinstate his residence permit and establish Suzanne’s legal status. And finally, safe and saved in Paris, Michel and Suzanne became lovers.

The couple had arrived in Paris at a pivotal moment in history. A seventeen-year-old Polish Jew from Germany, Herschel Grynszpan, was living illegally in the city, supporting himself by doing odd jobs. His parents lived in Hanover. In reaction to the Polish government’s decrees cancelling the passports of Poles living abroad, the Germans now ordered all male Polish Jews to be forcibly deported. (Michel did not know it, but his uncle was among them.) The Polish border guards turned them back with the result that the deportees became trapped in a no-man’s land. Most ended up in a concentration camp in Poland.

Grynszpan heard of the deportations in a letter from his sister. He wrote a note to an uncle in Paris: ‘My heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy. I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest.’ He took a pistol and walked to the German Embassy and asked to see an official.

He was shown to the office of the First Secretary, Ernst von Rath, took out the gun and shot the diplomat dead.

The protest was seized upon by the Nazi government to initiate a ‘spontaneous’ pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria. The streets of the Reich’s cities became carpeted in the broken glass from synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. As a result, the pogrom became known as
Kristallnacht
. Hundreds of synagogues were set alight, Jewish cemeteries were destroyed, and businesses and homes belonging to Jews were vandalised. More than a hundred Jews were murdered and many more committed suicide. It was an explosion of the vilest hatred involving Germans from all levels of society. Michel’s oft-repeated prophecy had become chilling reality.

Michel and Suzanne stayed for a number of weeks in Paris, but as soon as their papers were in order they moved south to Nice, on the Côte d’Azur. The lovers were inseparable in their new life together. ‘If ever anybody saw one of us they knew the other was not far away. We were one mind and one body. I knew her mind and she knew mine - we read each other’s thoughts.’ Although they were unable to marry, because of the lack of proper documentation, Michel always introduced Suzanne as his wife.

They found an apartment together and he began to make a good living putting on shows in the various hotels, clubs and resorts along the coast. Michel sold tickets and hosted musical soirees of classical and light music for well-to-do émigrés where one of the foolproof attractions was a bowl of his ex-Nazi friend’s powerful egg-nog. The evenings served as auditions for the featured artists, and he became well-known in the town. He also returned to painting. ‘The trashy paintings sold, but when I put my soul into a painting it did not sell.’

One of the serious painters Michel met in Nice was the wife of the former Polish consul, Madame de Stachiewicz, ‘a Polish Jew who did not display much Judaism’. She ran an elegant salon at her home and Henri Matisse was a regular visitor. He asked Suzanne to sit for him, and she agreed. ‘I went regularly to pick her up from his place at Cimiez. He refused to show me the work in progress, which I respected. Then when it was finished he showed me. She was semi-nude. I was absolutely scandalised. I blew up! How dare he paint my wife like that! How dare she let herself be painted like that for everybody to see!’ The couple had their first lovers’ tiff.

Michel became active among the various émigré groups in the south working under a life-and-death deadline to help Jews leave Germany and Austria. He engineered a series of complicated arrangements to help Suzanne’s mother and uncle escape from Vienna. The senior conductor on the Orient Express was an Italian and he was bribed with a considerable amount of money to help. As the express approached the Austrian-Italian border the conductor ushered the two escapees into his tiny cabin and locked the door. Customs controls were rigorous in both countries, but the conductor was never checked. The émigrés got off the train in Venice and then crossed Italy to Ventimiglia on the border with France. They were initially refused entry and had to remain in Italy for an anxious week, while Michel pulled various legal strings and paid essential bribes to obtain entry visas. Mother and uncle then joyously entered what was to prove a treacherous haven.

Meanwhile, Michel watched helplessly as Hitler took greater and greater political risks in Europe, first seizing the Sudetenland and then taking over the whole of Czechoslovakia six months later. The world protested but did nothing, a feeble response that Hitler trumped with the signing of a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. Then, on 1 September 1939, he invaded Poland and pushed towards the free city of Danzig, an act that even the weak governments of France and Great Britain found intolerable. Michel knew there would be war and immediately volunteered for duty in the French Army. Two days later France and Great Britain declared war on Germany.

The Wehrmacht smashed its way through Poland and gave its hated enemy no quarter. It was the world’s first experience of a new and terrible kind of warfare:
Blitzkrieg
- lightning war. The biggest armoured force in the world - ten superbly trained and equipped Panzer tank divisions backed up by the coordinated and deadly support of modern aeroplanes - tore across the flat countryside. Whole divisions of tanks covered thirty to forty miles a day, firing

their heavy guns as they moved. Squadrons of fighter planes and bombers flew ahead of them, reconnoitring and pounding the defence. The unearthly scream of Stuka dive-bombers filled the air as they dropped out of the sky on to their targets. And behind the Panzers marched an army of a million and a half men. The earth had never seen the like of this armoured juggernaut for speed and destructive power.

The outdated Polish Army was hopelessly outclassed and looked to its Allies to attack Germany through France. But no help came. The antiquated Polish Air Force was destroyed in the first forty-eight hours of the invasion, most of it on the ground. The old-world unreality of the defenders was most graphically demonstrated by a heroic but doomed skirmish. As the tanks of the German Third Army ploughed across open land at forty miles an hour, they were confronted by the Pomorska cavalry brigade. The mounted cavalrymen charged the Panzers with lances couched, pennants carrying the Polish colours fluttering bravely from their tips. The brigade was obliterated.

Michel was impatient to be sent to fight, but was told that because of his nationality he could not join the military. However, it was felt that he might be useful to French intelligence so he returned home to await a summons. He heard nothing, and was dismayed to find that there was no stomach for war. The mood everywhere was uneasy but passive. The national reaction to Hitler’s invasion of Poland was summed up by the ironic phrase
‘Mourir pour Danzig?’
- Why die for Danzig?

One morning on the street in Nice, a couple of months after the declaration of war, Michel bumped into a writer-friend from Vienna, Ernst Ehrenfeld. Ernst announced that he was on his way to the army recruitment office.

‘I’ll take you there,’ Michel said. ‘I’ve already volunteered.’ On the way to the office Ernst explained the difficult journey he had made to France. A large group of Jewish students - around fifty or so - had been drawn together in their desire to reach France and volunteer to fight. They had left cities all over Europe, travelled south and gathered on the French-Italian border at Ventimiglia. The Italians were prepared to let them out of Italy, despite the country’s fascist government, but the French border police challenged them.

And although the students explained they had come to volunteer to fight for France, they were refused entry.

Thoroughly demoralised, they remained in Italy where they bribed the crews of several fishing boats to smuggle them into France at night. The captain did not want to risk an illegal landing on French soil, so while the students were still some distance out to sea they were obliged to lower themselves into the water and swim for the beach at Nice. Dripping wet, cold and disillusioned, the group collected on the shore. They split up and agreed to rendezvous outside the army recruitment office the following day.

Michel accompanied his friend and found the crowd of young men gathered on the pavement. The mood among them now was buoyant. Inside it was explained that as foreigners they could not join the army, but the Foreign Legion would be more than happy to have them. Life in the Legion was austere in the extreme, and its regiments consistently faced the sharp end of combat, but they readily agreed. They were given a medical examination, signed up for the ‘duration’ of the war, and were told to wait.

And then the police arrived. The students were arrested for illegal entry into the country. It did not matter to the authorities that the students had joined the Legion and volunteered to fight for France, they had no entry permits stamped in their passports. ‘They were marched as prisoners through the streets of Nice to the court house. I was so angry I marched with them.’ The students were kept waiting again at the Palais de Justice until late afternoon, when they were herded before a judge and sentenced to three months in prison. ‘They couldn’t wait to fight against a common enemy. But they had to serve a prison sentence before they were allowed to fight in the Legion.’
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