Michel’s approach overcomes the most stubborn cases, and he insists there is no such thing as someone being unable to learn. He emphatically rejects the idea that a person has to have a gift, or ‘ear’, to be able to learn a language. ‘Have you ever met anyone, however stupid, who cannot speak their own language? Everyone is gifted.
Anyone who can speak his native tongue has already proved his gift for language and can learn another.’
In a letter to a friend about his experience with Michel, Truffaut wrote, ‘He has never criticised me. His manner is a little like that of a psychoanalyst and he has the patience of an angel... Anyway, he told me that he would make it his job to teach me and that I wouldn’t leave here without being able to write, read, speak and even understand.’[223] Michel was as good as his word, and after sixty hours of lessons Truffaut was able to read his first book in English (Selznick’s Memo[224]), watch and understand the Nixon Watergate hearings on TV, and write the following inscription on a photograph for his teacher: ‘At first I learn from you the word “impeachment” and four weeks later I was able to have a meeting in English at Warner Bros headquarters. Thanks, Michel, warmest regards.’[225] Truffaut presented him with a beautiful set of Proust - in French.
A further success with both teachers and children in a Los Angeles primary school was also ignored by the educational establishment. In the early 1970s Michel was approached by Andréa Kasza, principal of Norwood Elementary School in the heart of South Central Los Angeles. The principal had a serious and fundamental problem with her five hundred pupils. The school had originally been split between sixty per cent black and forty per cent Hispanic students, but was moving rapidly towards a Spanish-speaking majority. None of the new arrivals spoke English, and there was not a single Hispanic teacher on the staff. ‘There were only two who knew any Spanish at all - one of whom was Jewish, and the other Japanese.’ There were no government programmes at the time to help, and while Kasza attempted to hire Spanish-speaking teachers, she sought desperately for something to fill the gap. ‘I wanted the staff to learn enough Spanish quickly to be able to communicate with the students. I had heard about Michel’s Foundation and contacted him. We set up a class for twenty teachers who had no Spanish at all, and they took one of his crash courses.’ It was an unqualified success. ‘The teachers were very happy with the programme and many of them went on to become fluent in the language.’ During the course, Michel decided he also wanted to work with the young children, which he had not done before, to help them speak English. ‘I didn’t have the money to hire him for a year, and he did it pro bono,’ Rasza said. ‘It would never have happened otherwise.’ Michel was given carte blanche for a year to teach not just languages but every subject. ‘I had thirty kids in the class and divided them into two groups. One used a teacher and one used tapes, and I rotated them. It worked like a charm.’ A six-week block was set aside when the primary school children who spoke only sub-standard barrio Spanish were taught nothing but English as a foreign language. ‘A child in America must speak English or become a permanent second-class citizen. So they learned English and also had their level of Spanish raised. They learned how to speak and write in both languages in these six weeks.’ The second six-week block course was in mathematics, again using a rotating combination of teachers and tapes.
Rasza watched Michel at work and devised a curriculum over time to enable ordinary schools to adopt the method without disruption. The programme started with kindergarten and spread to involve all grades and the entire staff. The Spanish community approved because the programme maintained the use of both languages. The school became recognised as having the best transition programme in the country, and people came from all over the world to study it. ‘We developed an outstanding programme,’ Rasza said. ‘The teachers loved it, the children loved it, the parents loved it and we had great press.’
The courses were given the official endorsement of the California Teachers’ Association and the National Education Association. Michel was greatly excited and waited for the various state and federal educational bodies to express interest. ‘I waited for the phone to ring. I expected the Education Department to hammer on my door. Instead, there was silence. Nothing.’
‘I don’t know why people don’t support things,’ Rasza said. ‘It’s so difficult to create change. Certainly don’t look for it in the language departments of the universities. They’re the most resistant to change of any educational group I know. They ignore the practitioners. A new approach means asking a whole department to change its attitude, and that’s the problem. In the academic world people get comfortable with what they’re doing. What would happen to all those Spanish professors with tenure? They’d have to change their ways. If the man who invented the paperclip needed the approval of a university department we would never have had the paperclip. They would say people had never used paperclips before, so who needs them?’
One of the young teachers at Norwood Elementary School, Alice Burns, approached Michel one day with two tickets for a concert. I had been on the course and after just one day I was in awe,’ Alice said. ‘I had just never seen anybody synthesise the things that we learned as theoretically sound. I had been sent on a university course at USC and there was no comparison. The course I took there was the same sort of fragmented language instruction that we’re all familiar with.’
The couple began to go out regularly together. One evening, after dinner, Michel suggested that they drive to the airport and get on the first plane to wherever it happened to be going.
‘That would be great,’ Alice said calmly. ‘Let’s do it.’
Michel looked closely at his date. ‘I realised that it would be wonderful to travel with this woman. To me, to travel with somebody is even more of a test than living with them. And I decided this was somebody I could travel with - possibly settle down with. So we looked at each other, bypassed the airport and drove to a hotel in Newport Beach and spent the weekend together. It was the beginning of a very special relationship. It started me thinking in a different way. Over the years I always had a strong desire for a family and children, especially during the war when I thought I might be killed. I had the need for someone to survive me. But I had hidden the desire, and convinced everyone in Hollywood I was not the marrying kind, not a family man. Alice brought this out of me as my feelings for her deepened.’
They were married within a year.[226]
Alice was born and brought up a Catholic, but had converted to Judaism in her teens. Her father, a history professor in Oklahoma, was part Osage Indian. ‘I was a spiritually orientated person, but I was constantly in conflict with Catholicism. I seemed always to be breaking some rule and nobody gave me an explanation why. I never had that conflict with Judaism.’[227]
The couple wanted children quickly, and a son was born in the first year of their marriage. He was named Gurion, the Hebrew word for lion. When Michel saw the baby, tears of emotion welled in his eyes - the first he had shed since long before the war.[228]
After the birth of a second child - a daughter, Micheline - the couple decided to move to the east coast where they set up house in Larchmont, New York, half an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Michel opened a school. ‘I brought the children up with a reverence for life - for people, for animals and even plants. When the kids picked wild flowers and threw them down, I tried to make them feel responsible by putting the flowers in water and taking care of them.’ Micheline took the lesson to heart and grew attached to a cockroach. She travelled into Manhattan on the train with her unlikely pet in a jam jar and showed it to fellow travellers for them to admire.
Michel often worked late in his study on the ground floor of the house. One night, as he sat at his desk, six-year-old Guri came down the stairs from his bedroom. The child entered the study and immediately made for a half-open drawer where he spotted an SS dagger from Michel’s wartime collection. ‘I brought up both of my children not to have military toys - no guns, no shooti
ng - and here he had stumbled on all this Nazi stuff. It was a contradiction. I felt caught.’
To the small boy, the dagger seemed like a sword, and he was thrilled by it. ‘Why do you have this sword?’ he asked. ‘How did you get it?’ Michel felt uncomfortable, and was wondering how to respond to the six-year-old when Guri answered his own question. ‘You took it from a bad guy.’ Michel nodded as the child came up with another question. ‘Who are the bad guys, Daddy?’ Again the child answered his own question with information picked up at Bible study. ‘It must be the Assyrians.’
Michel thought, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want this. The Assyrians will become the Syrians, and then it will be the Arabs. I don’t want him to go down this road.’ It was a critical moment. He could either burden his son with a legacy of hate - albeit the legitimate hatred of Nazi evil - or introduce him to a more complicated world of personal responsibility. ‘One is not born with hatred, one learns hatred. Children are injected with it and then they grow up with it. As adults they have to find reasons to justify their hatred, and they find these reasons. Hatred is dangerous because it can last for ever, be handed down from one generation to the next. There are antidotes to most poisons, but none for the poison of hatred. Especially if it is inculcated in children.’
He told Guri that he had taken the sword from a Nazi bad guy.
A few days later Guri had a new question. ‘If God created all life, did he create bad guys and Nazis?’
Michel told his son to fetch his latest favourite toy, a space figure with a revolving head that revealed different expressions ranging from benign to downright evil. Michel rotated the head, moving from one expression to another, and asked Guri to tell him whether the face was a bad guy or a good guy. The child became engrossed in the game, emphatically differentiating between the two.
‘We are all created by God but we are not puppets of God,’ Michel explained. ‘We are not being played or manipulated by God. Good or bad is within all of us and it is what we do with our lives, and with ourselves, that brings it out. Those who do not suppress the bad side of themselves, but allow it to dominate, will be bad guys. There are people in whom sometimes the bad will triumph and sometimes the good, and nobody can trust them because they can’t trust themselves. They are people with many faces. It is important to know what we have in us, to work towards one strong, good face.’
Later, he explained to his son that nations too had many faces, and what they made of their history shaped their nature. ‘I taught my children not to follow the crowd, and elevated a couple of lines from the Bible to the level of commandments: Thou shalt not follow the multitude to do evil, and Thou shalt not stand idly by. I’m not a religious man. But let me say that my life has led me to believe in God. A more precise explanation would be that I believe in the divine spirit of God, a universal God. I am happily Jewish because it is a religion without dogma - there is nothing that cannot be questioned. I accept the differences between human beings. I see a brotherhood of mankind regardless of colour, creed or race, and believe in what is God-given in all of us. But what Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler were capable of doing is something we all carry. We have the same seeds in us, the same potential for evil in certain conditions and in certain circumstances. It is up to us what we become.’
The encounter between Michel Thomas and Klaus Barbie at St Joseph’s prison in Lyon more than forty years after they had last met was a calm and dignified affair without emotion or histrionics. In a gloomy room set aside for judicial investigations, Michel sat at a table flanked by a judge and a lawyer. Across from him, beside an interpreter and a court reporter, but so close the men could almost touch, was wartime Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon.[229]
The meeting was part of the preliminary hearings in the course of collecting evidence for the trial against Barbie. Michel had already given testimony in Paris to the police, in the presence of prosecuting attorney Serge Klarsfeld, and now he had been called as a witness to establish the identity of the man who had interrogated him forty years earlier. Barbie argued in German that when he was in ‘police’ training a professor of criminology had stated that it was impossible to recognise anyone after such a long time. Especially if that person, on his own admission, had only been in the other’s presence for two hours. ‘I did not expect ever to agree with the defendant, but in this case I do,’ Michel said. ‘If I had passed the man sitting there in the street I would not have recognised him. But facing him and staring at him here close-up, I know. His voice, his demeanour. It is clear. That is Klaus Barbie.’
Michel drew attention to a distinguishing mark he had noticed all those years earlier: a right ear lobe lower than the left. ‘And that effeminate gesture, the flicking of his hand with his little finger bent inwards. The mocking, sarcastic smile. And nobody could forget those eyes, those rat’s eyes with no mercy in them.’[230]
After the war, Klaus Barbie had disappeared for thirty-three years. Although wanted by the Americans, British and French, he managed to keep one step ahead of them all through a mixture of his own low cunning and the gross incompetence of his pursuers.
Ever since he left Lyon, he had been on the move. As a member of the Gestapo he came under the automatic-arrest category, so he took an assumed name one month after Germany’s surrender, and worked on farms to survive. He was soon back in touch with clandestine Nazi and SS organisations, however, and learned to make a living forging identity papers. In the winter of 1945, he was arrested by the Americans at Darmstadt, for reasons that remain unknown. He received a fourteen-day prison sentence but his true identity was not discovered and he was released.
He became a common criminal, posing as a policeman on one occasion to rob a baroness of her jewellery in Rassel, and moved from one town to another, selling forged identity papers and black-market goods. As his circle of underground SS contacts grew, one proved to be a double agent working for the British. Barbie was subsequently arrested and told, ‘Well, my friend, we are not the Americans. You are not going to run away from us!’ A bold statement that was to prove entirely incorrect. The British moved him to a safe house in Hamburg and locked him in a room, but Barbie found a crowbar, levered the padlock from the door and fled. He would later claim that the British had roughed him up. ‘I lost all interest in the British and all faith in their promises.’ He acquired new forged ID papers and returned to Marburg and a life of petty crime.
The Americans and the British had launched a crackdown at this time on Nazi Résistance groups. Operation Selection Board targeted numerous suspects, and in February 1947 agents simultaneously raided dozens of addresses all over Germany. Barbie was thought to head an underground Nazi group, made up of seventy members, that was involved in smuggling fugitives out of the country. He later claimed to have escaped through a bathroom window as CIC agents burst through his front door.
Soon after this narrow escape he decided that his only long-term chance of remaining at liberty was to switch sides and work for Allied intelligence. He sought out Kurt Merk, a former wartime colleague and Abwehr (German military intelligence) officer who had been recruited by CIC to run a spy network. The men met in the small town of Memmingen, just a short drive south of Ulm, and Merk agreed to introduce his former colleague to his American masters.
Barbie’s name was immediately recognised by CIC as one of the principal Selection Board targets still at large, but the regional commander saw him as a valuable informant and neglected to inform HQ. And so it came about that one section of CIC secretly protected the Gestapo officer, while another searched for him. The American agent who recruited Barbie found him to be ‘an honest man, both intellectually and personally, absolutely without nerves or fear... a Nazi idealist’.[231]
‘The new CIC officers were totally and completely incompetent, with no idea of how to run an intelligence operation,’ Michel explains. ‘They looked for help from “professionals” - Nazis who had worked in intelligence. Most of these men just sold them newspaper reports t
hey had read in the Czech press, or the like. They got zilch from Barbie.’
Barbie’s past was no secret to his masters. He had been on the CROWCASS directives since 1945, accused of the murder and torture of civilians, and CIC had further identified him as head of the Gestapo in Lyon. A brief profile on him was also among the multitude written by Michel while in Munich. Barbie did not deny his position - which, after all, was his sole claim to expertise in intelligence work - but insisted he had not been involved in torture and murder. However, Merk later reported to CIC that Barbie had tortured Résistance members and had boasted of hanging them from their thumbs until they were dead. ‘If the French ever found out how many mass graves Barbie was responsible for, even Eisenhower would not be able to protect him,’ he said.[232]
A report was now sent to HQ and an internal squabble broke out within CIC between Barbie’s protectors and those who arrested him. After being a paid informant for nine months, he was finally arrested and taken to Oberursel for investigation. Barbie was scared and angry when he was locked lip, alarmed that he might be handed over to the French and shot. In a hollow attempt at defiance, he told his captors, ‘You are not going to get anything out of me!’ It took only a week of solitary confinement for him to change his mind. He began to write lengthy, heavily edited accounts of his activities in Lyon and admitted being a member of the SD, but claimed he was attached to foreign espionage rather than the Gestapo. A CIC officer reported, ‘It is not believed that he had wilfully withheld information.’
It became clear to Barbie that the Americans were only interested in his post-war activities, and his captors seemed satisfied with his account. They prepared to release him to return to work with CIC in Memmingen. The French, however, took a different view when their investigations revealed that US intelligence knew of Barbie’s whereabouts. As early as 1948 there were newspaper reports in France, and then official notes between the countries, demanding his extradition from Germany. CIC was faced with a situation that was diplomatically embarrassing and potentially explosive.
The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Page 39