Ten days before the first students were supposed to begin, it was abruptly cancelled. ‘The reason for this action is that the support of the UCLA’s French Department was withdrawn, and University policy requires that all summer classes be approved by the academic department responsible for the area covered,’ the director of the Summer Sessions wrote in dismay. ‘There was considerable interest in this program among our students.’[251]
Clearly, if a ten-day course was on offer that was both cheaper than the university’s own intensive course and also succeeded in meeting a standard usually acquired after a year, the department would look ridiculous. ‘So the experiment never went through. And yet only I could have lost! If I failed I would have been wiped out, my reputation would have been in tatters. And they could have gone on teaching in the same old way getting the same level of results. And if the experiment succeeded all they had to do was think about it.’
Today, the educational establishment remains as impregnable as ever, but individuals, corporations, diplomats and film stars still beat a path to Michel’s door.[252] (The French, to their credit, have recognised Michel’s talents, and the Societe d’Encouragement Au Progres, which comes under the guidance of the Academie Francaise, have awarded him their gold medal.)[253] The waiting list for personal tuition grows ever longer. Among the stars Michel has taught are Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Tony Curtis, Bob Dylan, Princess Grace of Monaco, Melanie Griffith, Yves Montand, Diana Boss, Peter Sellers, Barbra Streisand, Baquel Welch, Natalie Wood... the list goes on and on and includes ambassadors, politicians, cardinals and industrialists. Woody Allen described learning with Michel as ‘effortless... a psychological breakthrough, some sort of miracle’. The most recent star to be taught by Michel is Emma Thompson, who learned Spanish. You follow these threads he creates with you as he slowly weaves it into your brain. He knits the structure of the language into your head. It’s magical.’[254]
And yet, despite all the plaudits heaped upon both man and method by those who have spent a small fortune to take the course, there are still those who remain convinced he must be a fraud. Perhaps it is all the talk of magic and miracles that puts people on their guard. When producer Nigel Levy approached the Science Department at the BBC to make the first film of the method, he experienced the disbelief and suspicion that has dogged Michel all his life. ‘They rejected it out of hand. On the grounds that they did not believe it was possible. They were quite dismissive.’ Eventually, a commissioning editor in the Education Department of the BBC agreed the method sounded fascinating, and it was arranged that Nigel Levy should take a language course and then be tested by independent adjudicators. ‘I didn’t speak a word of Spanish, so I chose that. I learned more in four days than I would have in years at any school or institute. Because the way he teaches is just so fundamental.’ Michel’s parting words were, ‘It’s important not to open any grammar textbooks - it will only confuse you. It’s very important to leave it alone. Do not try to remember.’ Nigel Levy found the advice impossible to take. ‘It was all I could think about. I desperately wanted the technique to work for the sake of the film I wanted to make. I tried to revise my grammar and got thoroughly confused.’
A week later he prepared to take the various tests the BBC had organised. He was examined by the Cervantes Institute, which was given no indication of his level of knowledge of Spanish. He felt that by attempting to revise the grammar he had muddied the pool and feared he had made a thorough mess of the exam, but his Spanish was judged to be commensurate with a student who had spent a year at college and done homework. A second test was held later at the BBC with the commissioning editor and a teacher from a college of higher education. ‘This time I was relaxed. And I sat and chatted to the teacher for half an hour or so and could express myself easily. He couldn’t believe it when I told him how long I had been learning Spanish. He assumed I was intermediate level, which meant two years. It had been four days!’ The BBC went ahead and commissioned the programme.
Michel was challenged in the documentary, the first time he had allowed even a part of his method to be filmed, to demonstrate his technique by teaching half a dozen students French in a single week of term. At first sight the volunteer guinea pigs from Islington Sixth Form Centre in north London - described as ‘academically very average’ - did not instil confidence. All had failed whatever language GCSEs they had previously taken and were studying for vocational qualifications because they did not like exams. One had been written off as a hopeless case with regard to learning any language, told to give up trying and advised to take up woodwork. It almost seemed that the language master had been set up. Unfazed, Michel guaranteed without reservation to have them all speaking French in five days.
The standard, institutional classroom was changed into a cosy den. Desks and blackboards were replaced with armchairs, carpets and potted plants. Bright lights were dimmed and curtains drawn. After three days of lessons the pupils appeared as transformed as their surroundings. Animated and full of excitement, they interrupted one another to enthuse over the joys of long hours in the classroom. They spoke of Michel as a magician, insisting he could anticipate questions, banish inhibitions, create confidence - even read minds. Their imaginations had been captured and, perhaps for the first time, they found themselves in the grip of intellectual excitement. They had discovered they were not language duds after all. The surprise and thrill of this unexpected revelation made once dead eyes shine. And, sure enough, after five days they were able to speak French to one another in long, complicated sentences.
The head of French at the school, Margaret Thompson, was shown at the beginning of the documentary to be thoroughly sceptical. ‘I think there are different aptitudes for language. I think it requires things like attention to detail and hard graft that kids find boring and don’t want to be bothered with.’ At the end of the week, after witnessing the progress of the class, she was converted. ‘Impressive,’ she conceded graciously. ‘Very impressive. As the students say, they have done in a week what normally takes five years. I think the real lesson is that the sheer interest in learning is enough for the students. Knowledge keeps them interested. He’s really on to something here, something very important.’[255]
Michel has spent the whole of his life since the war teaching languages, and more than ten thousand students have passed through his schools. But he regrets that his influence has been minimal, a pebble cast in an ocean. ‘I feel that I have not made a dent in improving the educational system. All we are doing at best is rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic. It leaves me greatly frustrated that I have never managed to get the model school going as an educational showcase, and failed to set up the international university - although I’m not giving up. I have done and tried everything - and I mean everything - but have been defeated by an educational establishment that believes it is enlightened but is really autocratic and dictatorial.
‘My idea in essence has been to create excitement. To succeed with youngsters where others failed. With those who are wild, even with delinquents locked up for major crimes. I attempted to expose them to the experience of learning, which becomes the excitement of learning, which becomes the excitement of living. All you have to do is turn the key to unlock what is already there in every individual.
‘The desire to learn never really dies. It cannot be killed, it just becomes dormant. At all ages and in all conditions of life it can be awakened and can flourish. Every human being - I should say every living being - has a natural, inherent drive to learn. And this desire doesn’t have to be created or force-fed. It craves satisfaction.’
Michel Thomas never really wanted to teach languages, or anything else - it just turned out that way. Teaching became a way of carrying on the various battles he has waged throughout his life. ‘I fought, and continue to fight, an entrenched educational system to try to make it more open. I wanted to show what could be achieved with learning by removing the heavy lid and opening the mind. I wan
ted to demonstrate that anybody can learn. I didn’t devise my system to teach languages quickly. I did it to change the world.’
X - Never-ending war
For Michel Thomas, the war can never be over. The memories from those years remain as real and emotionally powerful as events in the present. Whenever he travels, he carries with him a suitcase stuffed with photos, letters and documents from the past. He has never been anywhere for more than a few days without this small parcel of history. Once, when he thought he had lost everything, he experienced an afternoon of uncharacteristic panic and despair.
The suitcase contains the haphazard archive of a long and eventful life and provides both anchor and backdrop in the various rented apartments, houses and hotel rooms he temporarily inhabits around the world. After a few days in any location its contents slowly spread, covering tables and shelves, until Michel is surrounded by his past. He sifts endlessly through the familiar disorder of his papers, often pausing over a faded document or creased photograph as if in a trance. Each item is a reminder of some significant event or person which the emotional memory developed as a child brings to life.
An old love letter from Suzanne, sent from Lyon, reminiscing about their days together in Paris, jostles with faded newspaper cuttings and pictures of his children. Horrific private pictures of corpses at Dachau lie on a glossy magazine containing an article on the language course. Pictures of past girlfriends are mixed in with ID cards from the Résistance, old CIC reports and correspondence. Photographs of Michel’s mother and aunt are scattered over the handwritten, pencilled confession of hangman Emil Mahl. The assortment is a jarring combination of great love and absolute evil.
The war goes on, and the enemy remains the same. The adversary was never really the Vichy government, or SS Storm Troopers, or even the Nazi war criminals that Michel tracked down after the war. The true enemy, and the one that still generates immediate, boiling anger, is the nameless, faceless bureaucrat who condemned Michel’s family to death for lack of a quota number. Forever with us, in peace as in war, he lives on as the symbolic leader of those who do not care.
Michel continues to battle the cohorts of this great grey mass. It includes the officials who have side-stepped his numerous attempts to bring the dark secrets of the Vichy years into the open, and ambitious political opportunists on extreme left and right who have manipulated the experiences of the victims of the Nazis to their own post-war political ends. It also numbers unimaginative educators who resist new methods of learning, and are prepared to sacrifice a child’s future to protect their own interests.
As a boy, Michel instinctively admired and emulated courage. Later, when life became hard and almost unbearable, he came to value it as the first of all virtues, without which no other can exist. In the war he conspired to surround himself with men of courage, from his French comrades in the Résistance to the American GIs of the Thunderbirds. Now, in the soft times of peace and prosperity, when quiet and undramatic acts of real courage are often overlooked, he clings to it more than ever as the moral quality that stands between humanity and ruin.
In Les Milles, when Michel thought he was about to be discovered by guards and transported to his death, he cried out to his universal God to be spared, and he made a covenant. He has never told another living soul the terms of the agreement, but his life suggests it must include promises to keep alive the memory of those slaughtered, and to struggle to prevent it happening again.
His energy remains boundless as he leaves his base in New York to travel around the world, teaching for weeks at a time in London, Los Angeles or Monte Carlo. He remains forever on the move. Plans are under way to present the language courses in condensed form on tapes and CD, and a scholarly book on the method itself is being prepared. His celebrated charisma is really no more than the energy of his belief in himself and those like him. He continues to have faith in the inestimable power of the individual. ‘I believe in the power of one. Never to give in. And that a person should never feel or say that he or she is powerless as an individual.’
The eighteenth-century Italian poet, Alfieri Vittorio, a passionate advocate of liberty, wrote, ‘Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.’ The test has been passed in the life of Michel Thomas, who always chose life in the most dire circumstances when death appealed as the soft option. But some human pain penetrates so deeply into the soul that courage is not enough.
The precious family letters in the battered cardboard folder remain unread.
Afterword
At a time when Michel Thomas should have been celebrating the unprecedented success of his recorded language courses in Great Britain and the United States, a dark shadow was cast across his life. A long article, mocking in tone and hostile in content, appeared in the Los Angeles Times inviting its readers to entertain the idea that he was perhaps something of a fantasist and a fraud.
The piece succeeded in raising questions about Michel’s life without answering them. Readers were left in little doubt that the reporter believed him to be less than a war hero, and possibly something of a con man. In order to protect his good name and reputation, Michel would now be obliged to commit most of his financial resources and summon the mettle of earlier days in a battle that would pit David against Goliath.
The request for an interview by the Los Angeles Times seemed straightforward. The hardback edition of Test of Courage had been favourably reviewed by the paper some months earlier and briefly appeared on its best-seller list.[256] Michel was well known in the city where he had spent thirty years, and was happy to grant an interview. A reporter, Roy Rivenburg, accompanied by a photographer, arrived at Michel’s hotel and immediately demanded to see ‘the packet of letters’. At first, Michel did not understand until the reporter, grinning broadly, explained that he wanted to read the letters mentioned at the beginning of the book. These are the ones described as having such explosive emotional content - the despair of parents trapped in Germany facing deportation and death - that Michel himself has never been able to read them. He ignored the request, but did produce documents and photos, and submitted to a four-hour interview.
Rivenburg reached me in London some time later for a phone interview. Less than five minutes into our conversation I sensed someone on the warpath. The relentless, negative nature of the questioning felt like a police interrogation. ‘You seem very sceptical,’ I said.
‘Well, this story is overwhelming.’
I explained that it was an extraordinary story, but that more than two years of research and interviews had convinced me of its truth. Rivenburg countered by saying that he had spoken to the colonel who had led the first troops into Dachau and that he had never heard of Michel. It was apparent the reporter had no military knowledge, and failed to understand why a regimental infantry commander would not have known of the presence of a divisional CIC agent on the day of liberation. In addition, there were a great number of troops from two separate divisions present in the camp, which was vast and spread over many acres, not to mention chaos, murder and high emotion.
Rivenburg then said that the Pentagon had no records of Michel’s military service. I explained that the Pentagon was not the place to look for military records, which were kept at the National Military Personnel Records Centre in St Louis, where many files had been destroyed by fire in 1973. I repeated the unusual nature of Michel’s induction, and referred to a wealth of other documentary evidence that confirmed his service. I offered to supply copies so the reporter could see for himself that they were genuine, and referred to particular documents lodged in the US National Archives.
‘What is the name of the man you dealt with at the National Archives?’ Rivenburg asked.
This was said in such a manner that I interpreted the question to mean that he was sceptical that such documents existed - the underlying suggestion being that I had invented them. After the interview I immediately called Michel in New York and told him that I was left with a very uncomfortable feeling. ‘It
was very negative. As if he didn’t believe anything.’
‘As you know, I welcome scepticism,’ Michel said. ‘It is to be expected. I am going to talk to him again and answer all his questions.’
Michel submitted to a second long interview, flying down especially from San Francisco for the encounter. He courteously answered every question as well as he could, but the reporter wanted to know details that would confound anyone’s recall after sixty years. Rivenburg asked for a description of the foyer of the Monte Carlo casino in 1941, and the position of the slot machines; he asked about the terrain surrounding Dachau, the position of rivers and bridges, and the layout of the camp; he wanted to know the number of storeys in the building that housed the Jewish refugee association in Lyon during the war, whether it had an elevator, and if the office doors carried identifying plaques; he asked the colour of various Nazi Party membership cards discovered in Munich.
At last, Michel lost his temper. ‘I seem to remember no sign on the door of the office - but if there was one you will say I am lying? And I am supposed to remember the colour of cardboard cards after sixty years?’
The motive behind such an investigation remained mysterious. At first I imagined the newspaper thought it had stumbled on a fraud similar to Binjamin Wilkomirski. This was a man who wrote a powerful Holocaust memoir, Fragments, describing his life as a child separated from his parents during the massacre of Jews in the ghetto of Riga, Latvia. Told in a series of disjointed, harrowing flashbacks, the author chronicles his escape by boat to Poland, the horrors of a child’s experiences in concentration camps, and his earliest memory - the execution of his father.[257]
The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Page 42