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

by Christopher Robbins

  Suzanne also made the journey to Le Havre to see Michel off at the dockside, an emotional moment for both of them. The couple had met on several occasions after the war on a friendly basis. Suzanne sought rapprochement, while Michel denied the love, which remained buried. ‘The truth is that I did not realise how much in love with her I was. I had a conflict within myself over how I felt, which I tried to remedy. But it was impossible.’ They would remain close for the rest of their lives, in a friendship that was held in a state of love suspended, and Michel visited Suzanne whenever he travelled to France. Suzanne married the Cuban diplomat who became consul in Nice. ‘But people do not remain the same and our characters went in different directions. Even if the world had collapsed, I remained positive and optimistic. Suzanne became bitter. She had everything - money, houses, diplomatic cars - but became a habitue of casinos.’ On the quay in Le Havre, Suzanne gave Michel a photograph of herself. On it was written, ‘Avec tout mon coeur - je reste toujours, ta Suzanne’ - With all my heart - I remain for ever, your Suzanne.

  There were only a dozen or so passengers on board ship and, apart from Michel, they were all French war brides sailing to the States to join the American soldiers they had married in Europe. Despite the demanded proscription on Barry’s movements, he soon took up position under the captain’s table, where he was fed illicit titbits. The young brides were a happy, lively group, excited about the future, and Michel enjoyed listening to them talk about their lives. One of the women spoke of an anti-Nazi German officer she had met in Paris who had impressed her. ‘I asked her to tell me about him. It was very curious. She said he was from Breslau, and called von Waldenburg, and I realised as I listened that he was the son of my aunt’s closest friend, Mia.’

  Later, in the United States, Michel’s shipboard companion sent him Mia’s address in Hamburg. He began a circumspect correspondence under an assumed name, both hoping and dreading to receive news of his aunt. ‘She wrote me letters about her close friend, my aunt, and mentioned the nephew who went off to France. That was me.’ But as the letters began to describe the fate of German Jews unable to escape Hitler, Michel stopped writing. ‘I never revealed my true identity. I realised I did not want to know what she knew.’

  Michel landed in the United States at Galveston, Texas, and was met at the dock by his friend, Colonel Wilson Gibson, the tank commander from the Thunderbirds who had given him a Silver Dollar as a token of friendship. Wilson received him like a brother, installed him in his house and introduced him to his wife and three small children, the youngest of whom had been named after Michel. He stayed for a number of weeks and Wilson persuaded him to settle in New Orleans, study law and join the legal practice he had set up. Michel was convinced by his friend’s arguments and promised to return once he had made a duty visit to family living in Los Angeles. The men parted the best of friends and shook hands as potential partners.

  Michel’s uncle, Abraham - his mother’s brother - had left Poland for New York before the First World War, and had finally settled in Los Angeles where he built up a successful wholesale cutlery and silverware business. His five children were Michel’s first cousins, and he was warmly received.

  An unspoken agreement came into being between uncle and nephew not to discuss the fate of the family in Europe. The subject was too painful for both of them. Abraham handed him a bundle of the last letters received from Germany and Poland. Michel took them without a word. His inability to accept the murder of his family, particularly his mother and aunt, was absolute. He knew deep within himself that they were dead, wiped from the earth, but he could not bear to face the awful truth. He was unable to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning that is one of the most ancient and solemn in Judaism. Traditionally, the prayer is believed to help the souls of the dead find lasting peace, and is recited over the grave of the deceased for eleven months, and on the anniversary of the death ever after. ‘I could not say Kaddish. Could not! Knowing is one thing, accepting is another. I did not feel guilty for not saying these prayers - I would have felt guilty if I had said them. I would have felt a party to their deaths.

  ‘The world’s Jewish community regards the six million men, women and children who died in the Shoah as martyrs. I say No! My parents - my whole family - were not martyrs for their religion. They were slaughtered because of their race. There was no choice - that is not martyrdom.’

  As Michel was preparing to return to New Orleans he received terrible news. Wilson Gibson had been taken ill with acute appendicitis and had died suddenly before he could be operated upon. It seemed unbelievable that this soldier who had landed in Africa, then battled across Sicily and up through Italy, France and Germany, could die in such a way after returning home safely to American soil. Michel’s sense of himself in the New World, fragile at best during this period, was shaken.

  He decided to remain in southern California and rented a house in Beverly Hills. Barry seemed to find it as difficult to adapt to peacetime life as his master, but eventually became familiar all over town. ‘He learned to cross streets - I think he looked at the lights. He drove with me everywhere in the car and if he felt I had stayed too long somewhere he would put his great paw on the horn.’ Man and dog had always been close, and now they became inseparable. ‘He was a strong and wonderful companion to me in those years of feeling like Gulliver. I learned so much from Barry about communication with non-human animals. If I worked late in the evening he would lie down and wait for me. And he always seemed to know when I was finished and jump up in anticipation. I wondered how he did this. I thought perhaps I made some slight move or gesture that signalled my intention. I decided to test him. I made no move and did absolutely nothing except have the thought, “I’m ready to leave”. And he jumped up.’ There was only one thing that could make Barry revert to his previous incarnation as a dog of war, and that was the sight of someone in a uniform. He would bark and snarl in his old SS manner at the police and mailmen of Beverly Hills, who learned to give him a wide berth.

  The option of working for the UN faded as it became clear that it would take years to become a US citizen. Although Michel was a legal immigrant, there seemed no shortcut, despite the fact that California Congressman Clyde Doyle and Senator Helen Gehagen Douglas introduced private bills before Congress to obtain citizenship based on his war record.

  In the meantime, he concentrated increasingly on education, particularly languages. ‘In a way I saw education as a continuation of the war. Democratic countries had fought not just to defeat the Nazis but to preserve free societies. I felt one of the factors that contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party was an educational system in Germany, which I had experienced as a student, that concentrated on creating a small elite to govern a vast ignorant mass. I remember professors proclaiming that graduation from high school needed to be difficult: “We want an elite - we don’t want an educated proletariat!”’ Michel believed the opposite to be true, and that a free society needed an effective educational system for all to produce informed and concerned individuals. He had been impressed by a statement made by Thomas Jefferson: ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.’

  As he thought more about the necessity of an educated citizenry and the importance of learning, his thinking was given added direction by a remark made by the professor at the Sorbonne when Michel had been a student in France: ‘Nobody knows anything about the learning process of the human mind.’ ‘I wanted to explore and probe that learning process. I needed to find out how humans learn so I could discover how to teach. And I felt that the most alien thing for somebody to learn was a foreign language. Not the most difficult, but the most alien - simply because you know nothing when you begin. And I took as my cornerstone the idea imparted from my maths teacher, that there was nothing so complicated that it could not be made simple. So I chose to teach foreign languages because it would allow me to probe the learning process from zero to high lev
els of achievement.’

  The Polyglot Institute on 400 North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (occupied today by Chanel) opened in September 1947. The building was a small, one-storey Californian bungalow converted into an office. A large painted sign of a parrot was placed outside. Directly across the street was Sugie’s Tropics, a fashionable meeting place at the time where people enjoyed exotic and powerful cocktails such as Missionary’s Downfall. The Polyglot Institute did not prosper at first, but lurched from one financial crisis to another. Michel was joined at the institute almost immediately by Dorris Halsey, who helped translate documents, type letters, boil eggs for sandwiches, and bath Barry. In reality, she managed and ran the school. More importantly, Dorris was a fellow alien. ‘We understood each other very well. I had been stateless, like Michel, and worked with the Résistance and French intelligence and been imprisoned by the Germans. You walk around with those experiences for the rest of your life. Half of my friends who had been active in the war had been killed. So Michel was not closed down with me because I knew of what he spoke. He didn’t have to explain, or dot the i’s or cross the t’s. We communicated in half-words. He was an alien and so was I.’

  Dorris was actually a Hungarian Catholic from Budapest who had moved to Paris with her family at the age of eight. She was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in the south-west of France when the Germans moved into the unoccupied zone. ‘They came to the school to find out if anyone spoke German, and like an idiot I put my hand up.’ She was ordered to work as an interpreter at the local German command post after school. As Frenchman betrayed Frenchman, Dorris’s main activity was mistranslating, losing or delaying as many of the numerous letters of denunciation as she was able. She also reported to the Résistance. The locals, however, treated her as a collaborator and refused to fill her ration allotment of eggs and butter. ‘I was told by the Résistance that being thought of as a collabo was a good cover - but it was not easy to bear.’

  The Germans eventually discovered her activities and she was sent to prison in Toulouse. ‘Luckily, it was then 1944 and they were retreating all over the place so I was not sent to a camp.’ St Michel’s prison in Toulouse dates from 1275 and Dorris was placed in a small cell with thirty-nine other women for a total of ninety-six days. ‘There was a mixture of political prisoners and prostitutes and God-knows-what, all sleeping on straw mattresses. I became the cell’s champion flea and louse killer and would tell the others fairy tales from Hungary and Germany to send them to sleep at night and avoid my turn to empty the slop bucket.’

  After the Liberation, Dorris returned to her village to find a photograph draped with ribbon in a local shop window identifying her as a collaborator. She moved to Paris and began to work for the Deuxième Bureau - the French intelligence service. Her mission was to deliver thousands of francs in cash to hotel porters and concierges employed as paid informers.

  American troops on the Champs Elysées threw cigarettes at French girls to see if they would stoop to pick them up. Dorris ground them under her heel and was accused by the GIs of being less friendly than the German girls. But one American officer was more gracious when he asked for directions in appalling French. ‘What on earth are you trying to say to me, captain?’ Dorris replied in English. They went for a drink together and the American turned out to be a major in the Quartermaster Corps. ‘He had access to instant coffee, cigarettes and nylons, and I was seventeen.’ The couple married and Dorris moved with her husband to California, where she later met Michel. ‘He was very easy to work with. He became my friend, my confidant and eventually godfather to my second marriage. Many of the friends I still have today I met through Michel. And later my second husband and I were witnesses at the ceremony for Michel’s citizenship.’

  One of Dorris’s early tasks at the Polyglot Institute was to translate divorce papers for the actor George Marshall, whose wife was the well-known French actress Michelle Morgan. (He later married Ginger Rogers.) ‘I also taught the occasional mad Hungarian if he came through the door. I became a sort of mascot and was known as Miss Polyglot.’

  Another of Dorris’s many roles in the office was to play romantic traffic cop in Michel’s love life. ‘Michel was the greatest Casanova I have ever known. Women found him a romantic Casablanca figure, and he had mystery and allure for people whose only hardship in the war was a shortage of gasoline coupons. There was this guilt among those who had not been in the war but remained safe and cosy in America.’ The womanising had a driven quality. ‘I watched all the goings-on with great amusement. Someone would be coming in as someone was going out, and I was in the front office going crazy. Everyone believed they were the one and only one, and I thought there might be a disaster sometime.’

  Michel developed a reputation in Hollywood as a ladies’ man. ‘I love women and they know it and feel it. My relationships were very good friendships and I was open and honest and didn’t make promises or cause unrealistic expectations. I always said very early on that marriage was out of the question. It’s true there were a lot of ladies, and I did not tell one about the other, but everybody knew where they stood.’ Dorris accused Michel of abusing his charm. He defended himself by comparing his weakness to Dorris’s partiality for cake. ‘You are offered a beautiful cake - chocolate, lemon, sponge or whatever - could you resist? Wouldn’t you be tempted to take a slice?’ From then on, when women called, Dorris would hold up a drawing of a slice of cake.

  Michel disliked Dorris’s first husband intensely and felt she was wasting herself on him. ‘After I learned English I realised we didn’t have much in common,’ Dorris said, ‘especially when he told me that the only thing he read was the labels on beer cans.’ Michel introduced her to Reece Halsey, head of the literary department at the William Morris Agency.[196] The two hit it off, divorced their respective spouses and married. ‘They had a long and good marriage. Reece Halsey quit William Morris to start his own agency and Dorris left the school to work with him.’ Michel lost a colleague but gained a lifelong friend and met the extraordinary collection of writers the new agency represented, including Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley. ‘I have fond memories of Henry Miller. We played a lot of ping-pong together.’[197] He met many writers at Miller’s home, and quarrelled with Lawrence Durrell, irritated by his indifference and easy-going attitude towards the collaboration of Vichy.

  Michel was very much on the scene, and he received endless social invitations to a wide variety of Hollywood parties and enjoyed the company of the successful and the famous. ‘He learned the necessity of being a chameleon,’ Dorris said. ‘He could be bright and intelligent and cultured or play the simpleton. He could change.’

  But even in Hollywood, the war was never very far away.

  In the period directly after the war, when Michel worked for US Army Counter Intelligence in Germany, he had been largely ignorant of American politics and public opinion back in the States. He rarely read American newspapers or magazines, with the exception of the Stars & Stripes, although he knew that the Malmédy Massacre had outraged Americans and had resulted in a commitment to hold war crimes trials. The subsequent court case should have been a straightforward prosecution of SS criminals, but suddenly the tables were turned and the US Army would stand accused.

  All seventy-three SS defendants had been found guilty in the trial. However, by the standards of American peacetime courts the army’s legal procedures were open to criticism. The defendants had been tried en masse with only numbered white cards draped around their necks to identify them. The verdicts were hastily delivered when each of the accused received an average of only two minutes’ deliberation before sentence. Punishment seemed arbitrary and illogical. Gustav Knittel, for instance, who confessed to giving the order to shoot eight unarmed American prisoners, received a life sentence while his commander, Joachim Peiper, who personally issued no such order, was given a death sentence. In Germany the verdicts were seen as victors’ justice.

  The lawyer assigned to defend Peiper, and s
everal others of the accused, was Colonel Willis Everett, a Georgia attorney who was demobilised from the army directly after the trial. He returned to America feeling that justice had not been done and began to orchestrate a public attack on the army in an attempt to have the sentences overturned.

  Two weeks before the trial began, Everett had objected that some of the defendants’ statements had been made under duress. In addition, the prosecution admitted that in some instances interrogators had used elaborate ‘mock’ trials to obtain confessions. Black hoods were placed over prisoners’ heads, and they were then led into a room where inquisitors sat behind a table with burning candles and a crucifix. The prisoners believed they were at an actual trial, and were told their lives were ruined and that they would never be released.

  The first of thirteen investigations made by the army into the treatment of Malmédy prisoners was launched. Thirty of the SS men Everett had named as having made serious charges against the army were interviewed. Only four claimed mistreatment, ranging from blows to the head or body to being pushed down stairs. However, a review of the verdicts criticised both the conduct of the trial and questioned the admissibility of some of the sworn statements, given the nature by which they had been obtained. Temporary stays of execution were granted and the convicted men were allowed the opportunity to appeal.

  Ex-SS officers used the official criticism of the army to elaborate upon the accounts of American brutality to feed a rumour mill. Wild stories went around of prisoners being starved, having their testicles crushed, their teeth knocked out, and being subjected to freezing temperatures and intense heat. Human flesh and hair was said to have been found on the walls of the men’s cells together with a black hood with dry blood upon it. The rumours circulated among the American military in Germany and then spread to the States.