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

by Christopher Robbins

  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.[39] 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 go
vernment, 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.’[40]

  War had been declared on Germany but little effort was made by either France or Britain to wage it. Belgium and Holland had taken the soft political option of strict neutrality, a decision that would cost them dear. A strong Allied assault at this time might well have scotched Hitler’s dreams of world conquest. The German High Command certainly thought so, and worried throughout the Polish campaign that such an attack to their rear would bring collapse, knowing that any assault by the French would encounter a military screen instead of a real defence.

  But the Allies did not even have an offensive plan. France had specifically guaranteed Poland that in case of attack she would launch an offensive counter-attack against Germany with the bulk of her forces. Later, the French government was told by its military leaders that it was impossible to launch such an assault in less than two years, and only then with the help of British troops and American equipment. The British commitment to Poland was general and undefined. The ill-equipped Expeditionary Force of four hundred and fifty thousand men was moved across the Channel to France, while the French Army made a half-hearted, tentative probe towards Saarbriicken (where German defences were strongest).

  Even the Maginot Line - the Star Wars system of the day -was only reinforced with reservists. The modernity and scale of the Maginot Line created a false and fatal sense of security among the civilian population, and masked the ossified and almost entirely defensive military thinking that permeated the French Army. While the Poles were cut to shreds, one hundred and twelve divisions of the French Army did nothing. A British general raged, ‘Facing no more than twenty-six German divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!’[41]

  Another war on the scale of the First World War was beyond the imagination of the nation and was deemed impossible. Mobilisation was lethargic and the French Army - the strongest in the world - sat tight, together with its powerful air force. France felt secure behind its great concrete and steel-turreted Maginot Line guarding the two major historical invasion routes. It formed an impregnable defence of ‘fortified regions’ twelve miles deep and stretching ninety miles inland from the Swiss border. It had been in construction since 1930, had cost in excess of five billion francs, and was the greatest system of permanent fortification built since the Great Wall of China.

  The Maginot Line included one hundred kilometres of tunnels, four hundred and fifty kilometres of roads and railways, twelve million cubic metres of earthworks, one and a half million cubic metres of concrete, and one hundred and fifty thousand tons of steel. The defences consisted of hundreds of miles of anti-tank obstructions and barbed wire, behind which advance posts of reinforced barracks and pill boxes were placed. Deep anti-tank ditches came next, protecting hundreds of small subterranean casemates that were almost invisible above ground except for the two observation cupolas surmounting them. Every three to five miles there were massive forts, masterpieces of military engineering known as ‘earthscrapers’ because most of their construction was below ground. These fantastic science fiction creations bristled with numerous gun stations that included machine guns, anti-tank guns, heavy mortars and giant howitzers mounted in retractable turrets. Each fort held up to fifteen hundred soldiers, transported from their subterranean concrete barracks to combat stations by electric trains. As the men lived almost entirely underground, the forts were equipped with movie theatres, gymnasiums and recreation areas - even sun-ray treatment rooms. Apart from the vast amount of money needed to construct the Maginot Line, it was enormously costly to maintain. As a result, the remainder of the French Army remained antiquated.[42]

  Jean-Paul Sartre, who was posted to the Maginot Line at the outbreak of the war, and who spent most of his time sending up balloons and watching them through binoculars, wrote: ‘There will be no fighting... it will be a modern war, without massacres as modern painting is without subject, music without melody, physics without matter.’[43]

  In France, this uneasy limbo period of war without battle became known as the Drôle de Guerre - the strange war; to the Germans it became Sitzkrieg - the sitting war; and to the British, the phoney war. In general, the population of France was greatly relieved at the lack of combat activity, but Michel was depressed to hear the oft-repeated line, ‘What do we care as long as we have our steak and wine?’

  Hitler used the lull to prepare for his attack on the west, although wavered when his generals counselled against it. It was a high-risk enterprise with an uncertain outcome. Allied inaction had allowed the Wehrmacht to take Poland cheaply, but France was an entirely different proposition. Hitler, however, was prepared to take the gamble.

  On 10 May 1940, the mechanised juggernaut of the German war machine launched Blitzkrieg on the west. Eighty-three divisions - with a further forty-seven in reserve - invaded the Low Countries, spearheaded as in Poland by ten Panzer divisions made up of three thousand armoured vehicles, a thousand of which were heavy tanks. Small forces of highly trained airborne troops were dropped by parachute and landed in gliders to capture vital bridges before they could be destroyed, and the defence systems of Belgium and Holland were quickly overrun.

  Three days later Panzer tanks crossed the Meuse where it meandered through the heavily wooded Ardennes, which had been pronounced ‘impenetrable’. The armoured column for this thrust was made up of forty-four divisions and was over a hundred miles long, stretching back fifty miles the other side of the Rhine. It advanced so fast and easily that both Hitler and the German High Command became alarmed that they were vulnerable to a French counterattack from the south.

  As for the Maginot Line, the German Army simply bypassed it. The bulk of the Allied forces was now exposed to attack from the rear, and there was no option for the British Expeditionary Force except retreat. An army of three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men - including one hundred and twenty thousand French troops - was lifted off the beaches at Dunkirk, much of it by small craft capable of taking only a handful of soldiers. This was made possible by the brave rearguard action of the First French Army who fought until they were surrounded, having been abandoned by their commanding generals who had been ordered to evacuate to England. The retreat had been inevitable, and its execution heroic, but to
Frenchmen it seemed that their British ally only showed military verve when it came to scuttling back to their island.

  The British, for their part, increasingly viewed the French with contempt. Panic gripped the nation. As the Germans pushed towards Paris, and the government left for Bordeaux, it is estimated that as many as ten million of France’s citizens took to the road. Entire cities became ghost towns as old men, women and children in cars, carts and wheelbarrows choked every highway and byway in the push south.

  In the meantime, the French Army was left in total chaos, often falling back to find their new positions already occupied by the Germans. French soldiers surrendered in such great numbers they became the greatest problem the German Army faced in its advance. Soldiers threw away their weapons and even stripped off their uniforms. There were instances of the murder of officers who ordered their men to stand and fight, and the inhabitants of one village lynched a tank officer who attempted to defend them. One and a half million prisoners were taken and sent back to Germany.

  A French colonel who had long espoused mobile armoured warfare found himself in command of a tank division that did not exist. Scraping together a few tanks, he assembled three battalions and set out to reconnoitre the military situation. ‘Along the roads from the north flowed lamentable convoys of refugees. I noticed among them many soldiers without arms. At this spectacle of a lost people and a military rout, and from the reports of the scornful insolence of the Germans, I was filled with a terrible fury. It was too awful! The war was starting unbelievably badly. But we would have to continue it. If I lived I would fight on wherever I could as long as necessary until the enemy was defeated and the stain wiped out.’[44] The defiant colonel survived to become General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French.