The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (2 page)

As the rage passed, Michel was left weak and nauseous. He sat motionless for hours with the letters scattered on the desk before him. Half a lifetime of preparation for this moment found him pitifully ill-equipped to cope. He was forced to admit that even after so many years the time was not yet right to read the letters.

He was a man who thought he knew himself but suddenly he was confronted by a violent stranger. He attempted to make sense of the terrible knowledge he had come upon and the alarming emotions it had uncovered. He tried to understand his murderous rage and the fact that it was directed not against the brutes that had tortured and enslaved him but at a bureaucrat who had worked in the American Embassy in Berlin. A man who had chosen to follow the rulebook, and by declining to wield his rubber stamp had condemned the people Michel loved most in the world to death.

As dawn broke outside the study window, he folded his uncle’s letter and replaced the single sheet in its envelope. He pulled the other letters towards him, slipped them back into their folder, and returned them to the safe unread.

II - The security of love

The memories of Michel Thomas stretch back to the crib: a huge but benign black dog the size of a bear viewed through the wooden bars of a playpen; the sensation of being pushed in a pram in the open air; the texture of a cloth pulled from the drawer of a sewing machine and its oily smell; the glittering silver shapes of the machine’s metal frets used for different stitches, and their pleasing feel and cold metallic taste when placed in the mouth. His first erotic memory, vivid and thrilling, dates from the age of three. Crawling on the floor, he looked up at the towering figure of his young nanny and glimpsed under her skirt. The girl wore no underwear. Stretching heroically, the toddler reached up and touched bare flesh. ‘The naked female behind! I liked it -1 still see it!’

At a very early age he began consciously to recover and hold on to these memories of what he calls his ‘cradlehood’. It was his first act against being overwhelmed by a hostile world.

Michel Thomas was born Moniek Kroskof, in Lodz, Poland, under the shadow of the First World War, into a prosperous Jewish family that owned a large textile manufacturing company.
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He was the only child of the second marriage of his mother, Freida, a strong, independent woman in her late twenties who was highly unusual for her time. Arranged marriages were then the norm among well-to-do Jewish families and at the age of eighteen Freida had married a man considered to be from a suitable family. The relationship was a failure from the start, but instead of suffering within the marriage she rebelled and demanded a divorce. It was a scandalous decision for a young girl to make, but Freida insisted in the teeth of fierce family opposition.

She later met and married Samuel Kroskof, an engineer who had worked in the oilfields of Iran and Azerbaijan. The couple lived together in Lodz where the joy felt over the birth of a baby boy was tempered by fear of war. At the outbreak of hostilities, Poland became a battleground. As the German Army advanced towards Lodz, a part of Russian Poland at that time, the local population panicked. Poland was first partitioned by Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1772, after which the country’s history became an endless cycle of insurrection and reprisal. After a nationalistic uprising in 1863, Russia imposed a harsh policy of Russification within its zone, stripping the country of all autonomy and turning it into little more than a province of the empire. Russian was adopted as the official language in schools, and the use of Polish was restricted. Jewish life became particularly difficult.
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Treatment of the Jews, many of whose families had lived in the city for hundreds of years, became vicious. There were daily executions by hanging of those accused by the Russians of sympathising with the Germans, and the fact that a quarter of a million Jews served in the Russian Army did nothing to mitigate the prejudice against them. Shops and houses were looted, synagogues defiled, and hundreds of thousands of Jews living within the Russian partition were driven from their homes. They took to the road, carrying their possessions on carts and bicycles, struggling with suitcases and bundles, their children in their arms.

Samuel and Freida remained in Lodz with their baby during this terrible time of fear and privation. The city had always been an ugly industrial place of grime, smog and noise. Its factory chimneys belched foul smoke into sooty skies and the sun found it difficult to shine through the polluted air and dingy window panes. The city at war became dismal, its few scattered trees felled for firewood and its unpaved streets churned into liquid mud by troops and horses. Most of the remainder of the already diminished population fled, including the Russian bureaucracy that had been in the city for a century. Lodz became a ghost town.

When Michel was only eight months old, the German Ninth Army surrounded the city. The ensuing battle was waged on a monumental scale, the first great carnage of modern warfare, and for weeks the two armies fought each other to the point of exhaustion until winter paralysed them.

Icy winds brought temperatures to below freezing and at dawn each day both armies removed from the trenches the corpses of those frozen to death in the night.
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The Germans finally took the city in December, but at a high cost: German losses in the campaign were about thirty-five thousand killed and wounded; Russian losses are unknown, but conservatively estimated to be around ninety thousand in all.
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Germany went on to take over the whole country, stripping industry of everything valuable and sending the booty back to the homeland. Copper was collected from factories, church steeples, frying pans and even doorpost amulets. The thick leather transmission belts from the textile mills were sent back to Germany for soldiers’ boots, and roofs were stripped of lead. The country’s raw materials were also plundered, paid for with vouchers redeemable after the war, which the locals said were not worth a plug groschen.
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German sentries stood on every corner to prevent looting and riot. Food was scarce, even for the prosperous, and milk was unobtainable. There were ration cards for the terrible bread, made from a mixture of chestnuts and potato peelings and tasting of clay. Stray dogs and cats were rounded up and rendered down for their flesh, which was sent back to Germany as animal feed. Disease raged in epidemic proportions, the worst of which was typhus. Hospitals overloaded with military casualties were obliged to leave the sick to die, and corpses without shrouds were trundled to cemeteries in wheelbarrows.

As the war ground on, one terrible year after another, the desperate conditions took their toll on the health of mother and child. It also did nothing to help a failing marriage. Freida seemed unprepared, or unwilling, to give up the degree of independence that marriage demanded and broke up with Samuel. One divorce was a scandal, a second social disaster, but Freida seemed unperturbed by the opinions of others. She remained on friendly terms with her ex-husband and later took Michel to see him regularly. The child resented the visits as a duty and an imposition, and during his formative years became emotionally distant from his father.

Michel was brought up in a world of doting women. He lived together with his mother, his aunt Idessa - two years younger than his mother and a beauty - and his grandmother. With the collapse of Tsarist Russia in the revolution of 1917, and the final defeat of Germany the following year, Poland once again became a nation. The factories of the family textile business, which had floundered and closed during the war, gradually picked up production. Michel grew into something of a wild child, independent and wilful, even as a toddler. The women in his life indulged him shamelessly. ‘I felt I had two mothers. I was surrounded by love. It was like air. Love was so much part of my life it was like breathing. The security of love was very strong. I am sure that is where I have drawn my strength over the years - that absolute bedrock of mother love.’

By the age of four Michel had developed an advanced case of rickets, news of which had been kept from his mother who had been taken into hospital with typhus. He was cared for by his grandmother and aunt - his second mother. By the time Freida returned home after an extended stay in hospital the child’s legs were so bowed he could hardly walk. ‘I still see my mother as she came into the living room and her reaction as she saw me - my horribly curved legs.’

Rickets was common at this time and often left children permanently crippled, and his mother’s initial joy at seeing her son turned to anguish. ‘Oh my God,’ she blurted, ‘he cannot walk!’

‘Yes I can,’ Michel cried out, delighted to see his mother at home again and eager to please her. In a display of superhuman will and effort, he dragged himself around the dining-room table. He held on to the backs of the chairs and hauled himself from one to another. ‘See, I can walk!’

Freida wrote to all the experts in the field, and consulted family friends in the medical profession in a desperate search for a cure. She developed a remedy that was an early form of health cure and radical for the time. Michel was put on a diet of fresh vegetables, fruit juices and hot honey drinks with egg yolk - and less palatable doses of cod liver oil. He was soon walking again and eventually recovered to the point that he began to excel at sport.

‘When I went out with my mother, her friends would always talk down to me. Idiotic baby talk in a strained voice - endless stupid questions that were meaningless. It irritated me. So I gave them strange, unexpected answers. They would become confused and embarrassed, and always they would say, “How precocious!”’ It puzzled him that adults talked to children in such a manner. ‘I wondered why they talked like that. I came to the conclusion that although they had all been children they had somehow forgotten their childhood.’ It was an alarming insight. ‘A little while later I thought, If they have forgotten their childhood, when I grow up /will forget mine. And that horrified me! It was a terrible shock. To forget everything! To forget me as I am now! Every day was filled with growth and change and events - and it would all be forgotten! And I would be forgotten - cease to exist, wiped from the world! I could not let that happen.’

He carefully began to develop a system to help him remember childhood. Unable to read or write, he adopted a mental process in which he forced himself to think as far back as he could and reclaim feelings and reactions. He flagged these with a child’s mental markers of colour, smell, touch and taste. In this way he could recapture and fix a moment in his memory, logging the significant events of his life into his system. It was a large task for a six-year-old but he conscientiously stuck to his method until, at the age of twelve, he spent weeks painstakingly writing the history of his childhood into a lined notebook, the Memory Book - a document sadly lost to posterity. ‘I owe a lot to that child. He made a vow not to forget. He influenced my development as a man and laid out the pattern of a lifetime.’
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It was also at the age of six that he experienced an incident so powerful and disturbing that it forever changed his life. The family lived in a spacious apartment that had a balcony filled with oleander plants overlooking a large courtyard. In one corner was a well used as an emergency water supply on the occasions when the city’s mains failed. One sunny spring afternoon his mother went out on to the balcony looking down into the quadrant where the children played. Suddenly, she became rigid. A boy and his teenage sister ran to the well, leaned over its side and began calling down into it. The urgency of the children’s voices echoed through the courtyard: ‘Moniek, Moniek - come back up, your mother is calling. Moniek, come up!’

Freida was filled with dread that her mischievous son had fallen into the shaft. Fearing the worst, she ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard. She peered into the well and began to call for her son. There was no reply. The surface of the water was black and still with no sign of life. She became hysterical and began to wail, ripping at her garments and hair. A large crowd gathered to watch the display of grief in silence, as if at a theatre performance.

Just then Michel ran into the courtyard. The sight of his distraught and inconsolable mother shook him to his soul. He had been climbing trees in an adjoining garden to the apartment building and had not been near the well. An adult had called him down from a tree and led him back to the courtyard that had filled with people.

Michel was led through the crowd to his mother and she fell on him in relief, hugging and kissing him. The drowning had been a cruel, brutish joke hatched by a child and fed by adults. ‘These men and women who were our neighbours, non-Jewish Poles, enjoyed the spectacle of the despair of a Jewish mother. No one said anything, or tried to explain it was a joke gone too far, or that they did not mean it. Nothing! They were enjoying it.

‘This viciousness and hatefulness traumatised me. My belief system as a child was totally shaken. It changed me. Changed the child. After that I was no longer wild but clung to my mother’s side. I became a mother’s boy. It took a physical toll on me and I became a sleepwalker. I would pick up a pillow from my bed, put it under my arm, and try to walk out of the house. My mother actually put a bell around my neck. I suffered nightmares - terrible nightmares! Not of the incident itself, but of horrible monsters coming through the window to get me. I was scared of the dark and the things I imagined it held. I developed chronic asthma. That trauma was so deep, so strong, I quite literally could not breathe Polish air.’