By the age of four Michel had developed an advanced case of rickets, news of which had been kept from his mother who had been taken into hospital with typhus. He was cared for by his grandmother and aunt - his second mother. By the time Freida returned home after an extended stay in hospital the child’s legs were so bowed he could hardly walk. ‘I still see my mother as she came into the living room and her reaction as she saw me - my horribly curved legs.’
Rickets was common at this time and often left children permanently crippled, and his mother’s initial joy at seeing her son turned to anguish. ‘Oh my God,’ she blurted, ‘he cannot walk!’
‘Yes I can,’ Michel cried out, delighted to see his mother at home again and eager to please her. In a display of superhuman will and effort, he dragged himself around the dining-room table. He held on to the backs of the chairs and hauled himself from one to another. ‘See, I can walk!’
Freida wrote to all the experts in the field, and consulted family friends in the medical profession in a desperate search for a cure. She developed a remedy that was an early form of health cure and radical for the time. Michel was put on a diet of fresh vegetables, fruit juices and hot honey drinks with egg yolk - and less palatable doses of cod liver oil. He was soon walking again and eventually recovered to the point that he began to excel at sport.
‘When I went out with my mother, her friends would always talk down to me. Idiotic baby talk in a strained voice - endless stupid questions that were meaningless. It irritated me. So I gave them strange, unexpected answers. They would become confused and embarrassed, and always they would say, “How precocious!”’ It puzzled him that adults talked to children in such a manner. ‘I wondered why they talked like that. I came to the conclusion that although they had all been children they had somehow forgotten their childhood.’ It was an alarming insight. ‘A little while later I thought, If they have forgotten their childhood, when I grow up /will forget mine. And that horrified me! It was a terrible shock. To forget everything! To forget me as I am now! Every day was filled with growth and change and events - and it would all be forgotten! And I would be forgotten - cease to exist, wiped from the world! I could not let that happen.’
He carefully began to develop a system to help him remember childhood. Unable to read or write, he adopted a mental process in which he forced himself to think as far back as he could and reclaim feelings and reactions. He flagged these with a child’s mental markers of colour, smell, touch and taste. In this way he could recapture and fix a moment in his memory, logging the significant events of his life into his system. It was a large task for a six-year-old but he conscientiously stuck to his method until, at the age of twelve, he spent weeks painstakingly writing the history of his childhood into a lined notebook, the Memory Book - a document sadly lost to posterity. ‘I owe a lot to that child. He made a vow not to forget. He influenced my development as a man and laid out the pattern of a lifetime.’[11]
It was also at the age of six that he experienced an incident so powerful and disturbing that it forever changed his life. The family lived in a spacious apartment that had a balcony filled with oleander plants overlooking a large courtyard. In one corner was a well used as an emergency water supply on the occasions when the city’s mains failed. One sunny spring afternoon his mother went out on to the balcony looking down into the quadrant where the children played. Suddenly, she became rigid. A boy and his teenage sister ran to the well, leaned over its side and began calling down into it. The urgency of the children’s voices echoed through the courtyard: ‘Moniek, Moniek - come back up, your mother is calling. Moniek, come up!’
Freida was filled with dread that her mischievous son had fallen into the shaft. Fearing the worst, she ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard. She peered into the well and began to call for her son. There was no reply. The surface of the water was black and still with no sign of life. She became hysterical and began to wail, ripping at her garments and hair. A large crowd gathered to watch the display of grief in silence, as if at a theatre performance.
Just then Michel ran into the courtyard. The sight of his distraught and inconsolable mother shook him to his soul. He had been climbing trees in an adjoining garden to the apartment building and had not been near the well. An adult had called him down from a tree and led him back to the courtyard that had filled with people.
Michel was led through the crowd to his mother and she fell on him in relief, hugging and kissing him. The drowning had been a cruel, brutish joke hatched by a child and fed by adults. ‘These men and women who were our neighbours, non-Jewish Poles, enjoyed the spectacle of the despair of a Jewish mother. No one said anything, or tried to explain it was a joke gone too far, or that they did not mean it. Nothing! They were enjoying it.
‘This viciousness and hatefulness traumatised me. My belief system as a child was totally shaken. It changed me. Changed the child. After that I was no longer wild but clung to my mother’s side. I became a mother’s boy. It took a physical toll on me and I became a sleepwalker. I would pick up a pillow from my bed, put it under my arm, and try to walk out of the house. My mother actually put a bell around my neck. I suffered nightmares - terrible nightmares! Not of the incident itself, but of horrible monsters coming through the window to get me. I was scared of the dark and the things I imagined it held. I developed chronic asthma. That trauma was so deep, so strong, I quite literally could not breathe Polish air.’
His mother grew alarmed at the severity of his condition and took him from one specialist to another without success. ‘I just couldn’t live in Poland, I felt the atmosphere that strongly. It was such a betrayal. At the age of six I had been made aware of the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew. I wanted out - to get away from Lodz.’
In later life, Michel analysed the virulent nature of Polish anti-Semitism. ‘It was worse even than Ukrainian or Russian anti-Semitism - far worse than in Germany. It was a direct result of the teaching of contempt for Jews by the Catholic Church to a largely ignorant and illiterate peasant population. These people emerged from their churches after a Sunday sermon hating the Jews whom they had been told had murdered Christ their God.’
Freida, who was a shrewd businesswoman and held an important position in the family company, travelled all over Poland and now began to take Michel along with her. Since the trauma he had become a difficult and demanding child, and his physical and psychological states were alarming. He was touchy and sensitive and resented doing what was expected of him even when it was agreeable. He grew increasingly stubborn and disobedient. ‘I had my own ways and got away with it.’
As they visited the towns of Poznan and Danzig, and other areas that had been part of the German partition of Poland, Freida noticed her son’s spirits lift. ‘Travelling on a train I can remember looking out at the countryside and everything seemed so beautiful... the cows, the horses, the landscape. Still I can see it - I can feel it, I can smell it. Through my childish eyes it was a different country because I was out of the Polish-speaking region.’
On one of these journeys, just before Michel’s seventh birthday when he was at his most difficult, his mother engaged him in a long and serious conversation. They walked through the streets of Poznan together and she explained the trouble he was causing, and the problems this posed for her. ‘Can you imagine if you had a son, a boy like you are? How would you handle him?’
Michel pondered the question. After some thought he recommended a regime of strict rules and harsh discipline, accompanied by draconian punishment for the least infringement. He elaborated on the rules, which were ruthless in their severity, and on the punishments that were equally extreme.
‘Very interesting,’ his mother said. ‘I have learned a lot. You have taught me how to handle you.’
‘Oh no!’ The child’s response was immediate. ‘For me it’s too late!’
The system was never introduced, and Michel kept his true feelings over the incident to himself, but he felt tricked
. He had been betrayed by his own mother and was deeply hurt. ‘The only time I was ever hurt by my mother. I still feel it now.’
It was evident to the child as they travelled together that his mother was both well-known and respected. Michel also came to understand that his upbringing was somehow privileged and more comfortable than many of the children around him. Freida took great trouble to imbue him with her own philosophy, explaining that privilege and riches could be stripped from anyone at any time, and that the only true wealth was knowledge. The mind, she insisted, was something that a human being carried with him, a treasure trove that could be endlessly enriched and never taken away. ‘What you are and who you are and what you know - these are the only things that count. That has to be strong. Everything else can be destroyed.’ Freida was imparting a life lesson that would pay a high dividend in the future.
Michel’s condition remained extreme, but his relief when outside the Polish-speaking region was so evident that Freida decided her son’s health depended upon him leaving the country. Aunt Idessa had married and gone to live in Breslau, just across the border in Germany, where her husband owned a highly successful wholesale wine and spirits business, complete with its own vineyards. Some six months after the trauma it was decided that Michel should go to live with his adored aunt, something he accepted happily. ‘I was not homesick, or in tears -I was happy to be going. I knew I was not being sent away but that I was going to my aunt, who seemed like a part of my mother. I did not feel I was losing my mother - I knew she would always be with me. She was in my heart.’
But travel had been forbidden to Jews under the previous Russian regime, as had college education, and passports in the new Poland were still difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. The child would have to be smuggled out of the country. A German friend from Breslau arrived one sunny afternoon in an open convertible. Michel was excited at the prospect of the journey, which he saw as a grand adventure despite the welter of rules that seemed to govern it. Advice and instructions were piled upon him. Most important of all, he was told that during the journey he was not to speak at all in the presence of other people or attract attention in any way.
His mother pretended to be happy and excited about the journey as she saw him off. But as the car sped away and he turned to wave goodbye, he saw Freida collapse to the ground. Michel squirmed in his seat and wanted to turn back, but was assured with a comforting, adult nod from the driver that everything was as it should be.[12]
It was a long journey that took all day. The driver spoke no Polish, and Michel no German, but they drove along comfortably enough in silence. The hood of the car was down and it was a sunny day. The man occasionally turned to the child beside him and smiled kindly. Somewhere near the border he pulled the car over to the side of the road and bought punnets of the first cherries of the season. He handed one to Michel, who ate the delicious fresh fruit greedily.
They crossed the border without incident. The man seemed familiar with the German frontier guards who waved them through after only a perfunctory inspection. The young charge was delivered to his aunt in the old part of the city of Breslau. He was delighted to see Idessa, who could not have been happier to have him. Michel had shed his first identity as a Polish child, and was about to enter his life as a German youth.
And suddenly he could breathe.
As a child, Michel adored Germany. The journey from Poland had been a passage from darkness into light, his arrival rebirth and liberation. True, the financial circumstances of the Weimar Republic were disastrous in the wake of the First World War (in 1914 the mark exchanged at four to the dollar; by November 1923 it was 130 million to one) but this hardly concerned a young boy who felt he had been delivered from hell. The family seemed to have everything and lived comfortably. His health improved dramatically -although he still had to be watched at night - and while he was a rather serious child for his years, he was adventurous and enjoyed life to the full. Slowly, the trauma began to fade. His mother visited him as often as she was able. Sometimes she would travel on a business passport that strictly limited the number of days the bearer was allowed to stay out of the country. On other occasions she would take great risks to enter Germany illegally. Even if his mother arrived in the dead of night Michel could sense her in the house, and her silent presence at the end of the bed was enough to wake him. ‘I would feel just a touch on my foot when I was sleeping and know it was my mother.’
The adults led him to believe that he was living in the most civilised country in the world, and his experience confirmed it. Breslau was the biggest and most important city in eastern Germany, with more than six hundred thousand inhabitants, and was a mixture of two cultures: old-world bourgeois-merchant and modern-industrial. A bishopric for a thousand years, the city had a sombre, no-nonsense burghers’ beauty and stolid charm. It had once been a fortress but Napoleon had ordered the destruction of the castle keep and walls, and only the moat remained. The city had a university, theatres, several newspapers and a number of attractive parks. It also had its monumental modern structures, such as the concert hall built in 1913 boasting the biggest cupola and organ in the world. The blocks of flats close to the factories in the working-class area were a uniform gloomy grey, but the young Michel felt he was living in paradise.[13] He had begun to learn German immediately on his arrival, fell in love with the language and made rapid progress. ‘I didn’t want to hear the Polish language, and didn’t speak it. As quickly as I learned German, so I erased Polish. It was total rejection.’ He was also taught to ski in the mountains of Silesia, and from the age of seven grew up on skis. ‘A winter without skis was unthinkable. I was not always the best, but the most daring.’ His aunt taught him to dance, something that became a lifelong love. He was taken to the opera and the concert hall, and classical music became important at an early age - primarily Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin. ‘I couldn’t imagine life without music. I wouldn’t go to sleep without listening to classical music’ He was also obliged to take piano lessons, a ten-year sentence that produced little result. ‘It was not handled well. I loved music but hated to practise. I resented the imposition of those daily sessions.’ It was an early example of how not to teach. ‘When I finally gave the piano up I played the trumpet to join the school orchestra, and because it was my own choice I loved it. I was very loud but not particularly good.’
At the age of seven Michel met a German girl his age who initiated him into the mysteries of sex. ‘She was a sweet little girl and we used to play together. She wanted to play a doctor and nurse game that was new to me and we went to the basement of her building. So we had fun, naked. But we were surprised by an old man who saw us en passant and walked away. It was terrible for me to be discovered like that. Terrible! I felt so guilty and ashamed!’ Michel was so bothered by the experience that he confessed everything to his aunt. ‘Idessa sat down with me and talked very simply about growing up and sex and love. She told me there was no reason to feel shame. She said that sex should be connected to love to make it meaningful and beautiful. “But not now! Wait until you grow up.”’
Other interests were encouraged, perhaps to steer the youngster away from precocious sex, and an early love of animals developed. ‘I grew up identifying with all life, and this extended to animal life. I developed a love and an understanding for animals, and ended up with dogs, cats and eighteen birds.’ He was given a canary named Mouki. ‘A wonderful singer! We were friends, and I always left the door to his cage open. In the morning when I had breakfast I would call him and he would come and perch on the table.’
A mate was found to keep Mouki company, and other birds followed. The family apartment in Breslau had a large balcony overlooking a garden and Michel and his birds colonised it. Half of the balcony was turned into a gigantic birdcage, modelled on one seen on a visit to the zoo, complete with grass, elaborate perches and a live tree. The outside cage was connected directly to Michel’s bedroom through a window. ‘I developed good personal
relationships with all the birds, and they would fly around my room. I called to them individually and they would perch on my finger.’
The childish interest developed into a passion, and eventually led to a life-changing insight. At the age of eleven Michel was taken on a summer holiday in the mountains. His room had a terrace, and he discovered a bird’s nest with eggs under the eaves. At first the birds flew off at his approach, but slowly they grew accustomed to his presence. ‘I was very curious so every day I sat at a respectable distance until they finally accepted me. I watched the chicks hatch and saw how the parents taught them. They taught them. In bird language. The chicks learned to react to certain sounds - there were sounds for danger, so that they would keep quiet, and others for food when they were about to be fed. This was language, communication. And I learned with the little birds and found it fascinating.
‘They had to learn how to fly, and to be daring. Some of the chicks were timid, some courageous. The very timid ones had to be pushed out of the nest. I observed definite individual behaviour in each chick almost as soon as it hatched.’ These observations led to the conclusion that most animal behaviour was learned, not instinctive. It was an insight that changed the way he thought - that one of the powerful innate drives in all living beings is the urge to learn.
The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Page 2