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

by Christopher Robbins

  ‘I had a girlfriend there once,’ Michel said. ‘I used to visit her.’

  ‘Jewish?’ the old tailor asked.

  Michel nodded. ‘The family were from Lodz originally, my home town. Lebowitz.’

  The tailor lowered his needle and thread. He threw back his head and roared, slapping his thigh with his hand. ‘I know them... I know them!’

  ‘I don’t suppose there are many Lebowitzes in Le Havre,’ Michel said.

  The tailor continued to slap his hand on his thigh and grew increasingly excited. ‘Incredible... yes, incredible! They’re here in Marseille! The daughter is married and has a baby boy.’

  ‘Lucienne’s in Marseille?’

  The tailor nodded. ‘Lucienne, yes that’s her name. I’ll give her a message if you like.’

  Lucienne arrived at the camp the following Sunday, and from then on became a regular visitor. She was indeed married and living in Marseille, an uncertain existence even for naturalised French Jews. On every visit she chatted in a friendly manner with one of the guards at the gate. She explained to Michel that she believed the young commander who came on duty at night was a decent man, uncomfortable in his role as slave master.

  Together they devised an escape plan. When Lucienne went to leave, Michel would hide in the bushes by the gate. As the commander opened the gate, and chatted to Lucienne, Michel would slip out and be met by a friend with a truck. The following Sunday they carried out the plan. He walked to the bushes and hid, while Lucienne made for the gate. The guard opened it, lit a cigarette and stood talking. Michel took his opportunity and scuttled through.

  He was taken to the outskirts of Marseille where he met Lucienne’s husband and child and stayed overnight. The couple risked their lives by having him in the house. Early the next morning he made his way to the station and had Lucienne buy him a ticket to Lyon, where friends from Nice had connections with the Résistance.

  Control on the Marseille-Lyon train had been tightened during the four months he had spent in Gardanne. The regime was growing increasingly efficient in its repression. Despite moving from one compartment to another, and using all his survivor’s wiles to avoid detention, he was eventually confronted by gendarmes who demanded his papers. He explained that they had been stolen, together with his bags, at the station in Marseille.

  He was arrested, returned to Les Milles and transferred after a few days to a punishment camp in what was then known as the Basses Alpes. Les Mees was an isolated logging camp in the mountains, near Forcalquier, and its inmates were almost entirely Jewish. Security was relatively relaxed in the camp itself as roads in and out of the mountain region were tightly controlled. And once again, any escapee without papers would be unlikely to get far.

  ‘Had I not experienced the hell of Gardanne I might have bridled at the regime, but at least this work was in the clean open air. We had to fell large trees using only axes. Then we stripped the branches and assembled the large trunks into a sort of sled that we dragged down the mountainside through a dry river bed. As hard as it was, it was a relief by comparison to work in the mine.’

  Among the sixty or so inmates, Michel found a core of like-minded individuals who expressed enthusiasm to escape and join the Résistance. They were a romantic bunch much given to elaborate stratagems and extravagant pledges. ‘We banded together in the joint desire to strike out against the evils of the Vichy government and its godfather, Adolf Hitler. We made plans. We saw ourselves as two strong fists, and if ever we could free ourselves from this bondage we would remain together always, strong and courageous.’

  The camp came under the control of the Vichy military commander for the region. One day Michel, together with four other inmates, was sent to build a fence around the garden of the man’s private residence. The commander was not present in person, but his attractive nineteen-year-old daughter, Nicole, issued instructions to the men. Michel was aware that she seemed to pay particular attention to him and found several occasions to make light conversation. In the five days it took to build the fence an unlikely friendship developed.

  On his return to the camp, Nicole began to visit him on Sundays. She became a regular and took responsibility for him to go outside of the camp. ‘It was the beginning of a strange relationship. She was the daughter of a Vichy commander whom I despised passionately. And I was a slave. She came every Sunday and would bring food that I shared with my friends, and then take me out of the camp for a few hours of relief. It was a little Sunday fairy tale.’ They would go for walks, picnic in mountain meadows and take bicycle trips. The couple flirted, held hands and kissed in country lanes, but Michel was careful not to take the physical relationship too far. He had tender feelings for the girl but was inhibited by the peculiarity of the situation. Something held him back. ‘She was attractive, happy, affectionate, and maybe in love. She was also very spoilt by her father who gave her everything she wanted. He even tolerated her visits to me, which he knew about. She never mentioned her mother, who seemed to be absent.’

  One day towards the end of July 1942, Michel received another female visitor. He was told that a young woman was waiting for him at the gate with official authorisation to take him into the village. The woman introduced herself as Yvonne, and as they walked the short distance into Les Mees she explained that the authorisation was forged and that she had been sent by the Résistance in Corrèze. An inmate of the camp who had recently been released had joined the Maquis and told them about Michel. In the village, Yvonne suggested that the safest place to talk was in the auberge, where she had taken a room. She told Michel of the first large round-up of French Jews in Paris, and that there were plans for the deportation of all foreign Jews.[72] The Résistance was certain that this was a death sentence. ‘She was very clear. She had come to get me out.’

  She had been sent to warn him that mass deportations were scheduled to begin any day. The first deportation had already been made from Drancy, a large, unfinished apartment complex in the north-east of Paris which had been hastily converted into a camp. (Yvonne could not know at this time that it served as the French antechamber to Auschwitz.) Deportees were taken by rail, accompanied by French police, to the eastern border where they were handed over to German soldiers. It took a further three days to reach the notorious Polish concentration camp. Most of the deportees were gassed on arrival.[73]

  Yvonne added that there was a place for Michel in the Résistance - he had been vouchsafed and they wanted to arrange his escape.

  ‘When?’ Michel asked.

  ‘Now. That’s why I’m here.’

  Michel hesitated, then declined. He explained about the two ‘fists’ of inmates who had banded together in the camp and pledged fealty to one another. He suggested that the Résistance help them all escape so they could join the struggle. It was now the turn of the woman to hesitate. His proposal was both unexpected and a tall order. The woman left unsaid the Résistance’s suspicion of large groups - that there was always the risk of a weak human link and the chance of betrayal. However, she promised to take the matter up with her superiors, but stressed the urgency of the situation.

  We spent the whole day in the hotel room. She was very impressive and had come to save my life. To take me with her. It was an emotionally charged atmosphere. I could not go, but we embraced - which led to passionate kisses and lovemaking.’

  Yvonne accompanied Michel back to the camp and left him with a handshake at the gate. Once inside he immediately told his companions about the deportations and discussed the urgent need for escape, something that had been mulled over endlessly on many occasions. It had always been rejected previously because of the physical difficulties of leaving the closely guarded, remote mountain region. Now it was a matter of life and death. A vote was taken and a unanimous decision made to break out in two days. The plan was to escape at night before daybreak, climb into the mountains and hide during the day. They would then make their way towards Correze, travelling by night, and join the Résistance t
here.

  On the night of the planned escape Michel was again called from the barracks. Nicole was at the gate at eleven o’clock, a highly unusual time for a visit, even for someone with her connections. She was nervous and charged with energy that seemed to be a mixture of fear and excitement.

  ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said.

  They walked together for a short distance.

  ‘You have to get out. I want you to come with me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want you to leave with me right now.’

  ‘To go where?’

  ‘To the safest place possible for you to live.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Home with me. You must come to my house.’

  ‘You mean, your father’s house?’

  ‘Yes. I have talked to him. He has agreed to let you live with us. Under my father’s roof you can be sure to be protected and safe.’

  Michel was genuinely bewildered. ‘Why should your father protect me?’

  Nicole grew passionate. Why wouldn’t he protect his only daughter’s true love?

  ‘That’s very nice,’ Michel replied coldly, ‘but I cannot accept the protection of the man who has enslaved me. I’ll make my own escape, thank you. The war will not last for ever and if I survive I’ll come back to see you - but under different circumstances.’

  Nicole’s face had grown hard during this short speech. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ she said, instantly cold and remote. She shrugged, a gesture that conveyed sudden rejection and dismissal. ‘Le monde est petit.’ It’s a small world.

  Michel tried to reach out and embrace her, but she turned her back and walked away. He returned to the barracks where his group was quietly making preparations for the escape. The visit had unsettled him, but as the atmosphere among his companions was already edgy and tense, he said nothing.

  At one in the morning there was a commotion at the gate. Trucks carrying Vichy troops drove into the camp, and the entire contingent of guards turned out to meet them. The door to the barracks was flung open and everyone was ordered to dress, gather their belongings and assemble outside. ‘We were put in chains and herded into the trucks at gunpoint.’

  As they drove down the mountain, Nicole’s impetuous behaviour of the previous night became clear. ‘The troops were sent by her father the commander. Nicole had known exactly what they were planning to do. She came to save me, but only under her conditions. When I rejected those conditions she decided to let me go to hell with the phrase, “it’s a small world”. Small chance you will live to see me again, she was saying. That betrayal was a tremendous hurt.’

  Le monde est petit? On the long, uncomfortable journey south the trite phrase repeated itself over and over in Michel’s mind. ‘It was true that I had no strong feelings for the girl, but I was shocked at this clue to the depths to which the human heart is capable of sinking. I had turned her down - she had condemned me to death.’ As the trucks bumped along the road from Aix en Provence, and once again he saw before him the forbidding brick blocks of Les Milles, he was forced to recognise the truth in Nicole’s words: his world had shrunk to the dimensions of a prison yard.

  That summer marked a turning point in the fate of all Jews in France. The war was not going well for the Germans, who were bogged down in Russia. The occupied countries soon felt the effects as enormous new demands were made on manpower and goods. A request for two hundred and fifty thousand French volunteer workers from the Occupied Zone had already been made, and eventually a total of seven hundred and fifty thousand would be sent to Germany. But there was a second demand. Adolf Eichmann, head of the Judenamt (Jewish Office) of the central German security service, visited Paris in person in June to pass on a Berlin directive. It was the French blueprint of the Final Solution.

  From now on the Jews of France were to be deported, regardless of citizenship. The Nazis estimated that there were one hundred and sixty-five thousand living in the Occupied Zone with a further seven hundred thousand in the Unoccupied Zone - actually an exaggerated, unrealistic figure. A census was proposed, a timetable set, and Poland and other countries to the east were ordered to prepare for the deportees’ arrival. Occupation officials intended that all these measures would eventually extend to the Unoccupied Zone.

  The Germans did not anticipate difficulties with this order, and they were right. Although there were reservations among certain Vichy cabinet members about the fate of French Jews, little of this was conveyed to the Germans who were, in effect, given the green light. Vichy had always resented the dumping of German Jews on their soil, and had lodged a formal complaint about it to the Armistice Commission. Now Vichy actually lobbied the Germans to include foreign Jews from the Unoccupied Zone in the deportations. Deputy Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich said, reasonably, that it depended on the availability of trains.

  The German ambassador reported back to Berlin that the French government would not object to the deportations on political grounds as long as foreign Jews were taken first. Prime Minister Laval stated that foreign Jews had always been a problem in France and that the French government was glad about the opportunity to get rid of them. The Wehrmacht were persuaded to provide trains to allow between ten and twenty thousand deportees to be taken east in the coming months.

  The number of Jews demanded by Germany from both zones jumped to forty thousand, and then one hundred thousand. Vichy was asked to deliver fifty thousand from the Unoccupied Zone and was expected to bear the cost: seven hundred marks per Jew, plus food for a fifteen-day period during deportation. In this they were overcharged: most deportees did not live longer than five days after they left France.

  To facilitate the planning of the deportations from the Unoccupied Zone, a young SS officer was dispatched across the Demarcation Line on an inspection of the camps, accompanied by the head of the police for Jewish affairs. He was disappointed to find fewer Jewish internees than expected, although he was encouraged that officials were enthusiastic about the policy. Police in Nice, for instance, told him that they longed to be rid of some eight thousand Jews in the town, and other police chiefs expressed the belief that deportation would solve the refugee problem.

  More and more Jews had been interned following fatal attacks on German occupation troops the previous year. The Germans had reacted to the attacks by taking French hostages with the intention of shooting them in the wake of further assassinations. They also demanded that Vichy execute six Communists in their custody in reprisal for the murder of a naval cadet. The government complied beyond the terms of the request, assuring the occupation authorities that the death sentence would be decapitation by guillotine in a public square. The logic behind this was to demonstrate that home-grown French repression was the most effective, and that police matters, and law and order, could be left in their hands. But even public beheadings were not enough to assuage German anger, and the wholesale shooting of hostages was instituted under a decree known as the code d’hôtage: for every German killed between fifty and a hundred Frenchmen would die. Executions became so numerous that German officials in France asked for extra beer and cigarette rations ‘to calm the nerves of the executioners’ and for ‘persons of colour’ to bury the dead.[74]

  The Vichy government condemned this new Nazi brutality, but also promised to root out those responsible for ‘outrages’. The state was in no doubt about the identity of the culprits. The Minister of Defence listed them as ‘Foreigners (parachutists, bomb throwers, hoodlums of the Spanish Reds), Jews and Communists’. The Vichy ambassador (actually married to a Jewess) sent a telegram to Goering blaming the trouble on ‘Communists incited daily by radio broadcasts of Jewish émigrés in the pay of the British government and the Bolshevik plutocrats’.[75] He added that the entire French population deplored their criminal acts. The press thundered that ‘Jews, Communists and foreign agitators constitute a national danger’.[76]

  The number of Jews among the hostages - a mix of Communists, anarchists and fo
reigners - became disproportionately high. Repression against them was expanded further when Vichy announced that all foreign Jews who had entered France since 1 June 1936, even those who had since acquired French citizenship, would either serve in labour battalions or be interned.

  Since June, Jews over the age of six in the Occupied Zone had been ordered to wear a Star of David the size of the palm of a hand on the left side of an outer garment, with the word JUIF (masculine) or JUIVE (feminine) written in black. They had to apply for the stars from the local police, pay for them and even have their textile ration cards marked. However, some ten thousand foreign nationals, and a handful of upper-class society women who were Jewish and embarrassingly married to senior officials, were excluded from the order.

  Jews in the Unoccupied Zone were not obliged to wear the star. Vichy felt that a law that branded French Jews, but exempted foreigners, was contrary to the nationalistic spirit of the regime. There was also public opinion to think about. A German decree had made certain Frenchmen strangers in their own land, and this struck a chord among the population in the Occupied Zone - especially as veterans from the First World War made a point of wearing their decorations beside the Jewish star. The move seemed to question Vichy’s authority as a government, so it preferred instead to adopt a more oblique approach. Instead of forcing Jews to wear the segregationist star, it required that all their personal documents - ID card, work permit, ration card - be stamped JUIF or JUIVE. In this way, the stigma need not unsettle the man in the street, but could be clearly seen and acted upon by those in authority.

  The inclusion of all the Jews in France in Nazi plans for the Final Solution called for ever greater co-operation between Germany and Vichy. The German occupation authorities in Paris would have found it difficult to carry out its anti-Jewish programme without the active help of the French administration or the police; in Vichy, of course, it would have been impossible. And as the war in Russia continued to go badly for the Germans, manpower and resources grew ever more stretched. They came to rely increasingly on French enforcement of their anti-Semitic policies, which were growing more violent and extreme by the day.