The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (22 page)

The moment the Germans crossed the Demarcation Line, Darnand proudly declared his intention to work with the occupiers, an action that bestowed power on the Milice out of all proportion to its membership. While other French military units were disarmed, the Milice received weapons from the Germans and carte blanche to pursue Jews, as well as the power to denounce those in authority who did not demonstrate their zeal for collaboration. The Milice became intensely unpopular among fellow Frenchmen of all persuasions, who accurately saw its members as thugs in the pay of the Germans.
[102]

The Nazis found the work of the Milice exemplary, and commended them in particular for their single-minded pursuit of Jews. The Germans, after all, were strangers to the area and could be fooled, as Michel had demonstrated, but the miliciens were locals with none of the growing moral doubt or increased reluctance displayed by many of the police. And it was local knowledge that led to Michel’s arrest at the end of March.
[103]

He was sitting in a café in the town with a Résistance colleague when four members of the Milice entered and took them to the local HQ in Grenoble. It became clear during questioning that Michel’s interrogators knew about his role in the Résistance, although he naturally denied everything. Strangely, the Milice seemed disinclined to argue. The questioning stopped and the men sat in silence, regarding him with little more than disinterested curiosity.

The door to the interrogation room opened and a young Résistance member of his group was pushed into the room. He was in bad shape and had obviously been beaten, and Michel knew at once the source of the Milice’s information.

‘Do you know him?’ one of the officers asked Michel, pointing at the young man.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Is this the one?’ they asked the young man, nodding towards Michel.

‘No,’ the
résistant
said firmly. ‘You made a mistake. I don’t know this man.’

The Milice went into action. The man was thrown to the floor where he was punched and kicked. Two men held him down while a third appeared with a short metal rod. He rammed it into a pressure point between the man’s neck and shoulders and he screamed in pain. He began to babble, confirming Michel’s identity as his Résistance cell leader. Then he lay on the floor sobbing before he was carried out.
[104]

The Milice now turned their attention to Michel. His fake papers no longer served as a cover, although he continued to deny he was a member of the Résistance. He insisted that he did not know the young man, who had implicated him merely to save his own skin.

His interrogators did not bother to contest his protestations of innocence. ‘We know you are scheduled to have a meeting,’ one said. ‘Save us time and trouble, and yourself a lot of pain, by telling us when and where.’

At first, Michel denied all knowledge of any meeting, but he had already seen what was in store for him if he continued to keep silent. ‘Their information was correct. The meeting was scheduled for five o’clock that afternoon. We had a rule that if any individual was more than five minutes late for a rendezvous the others must scatter. I needed to gain time - delay the arrival of the Milice until after the deadline.’ He told them he knew nothing of any meeting.

At first the Milice merely intensified their questioning, and then made a series of physical threats, culminating with a beating. ‘Just tell us where the meeting is and when. Save yourself unnecessary pain.’

Michel pretended to give in and began to talk, naming the place and time. He knew that the next step would be torture, and was unsure how he would react. He reasoned that he would gain enough time to ensure that the meeting would be abandoned if he sent them on a false trail. ‘There’s to be a meeting at the station at five,’ he said, slowly. The Milice demanded names. Michel pretended to be reluctant to give these and was encouraged to speak with the threat of another beating. He gave them half a dozen unconnected first names.

‘What are their family names?’

‘We don’t use family names.’

‘Give us a description.’

A fantasy description of every one of the half dozen was forced from him, and he gave a convincing performance. The meeting had genuinely been set for five, but far away from the station.

He was locked in a dark room where he contemplated the return of the Milice from their wild goose chase. He had sent violent and dangerous men on a false trail, and when they discovered the truth they would come for him to vent their anger. He vividly recalled the precision with which one of the miliciens had used the metal rod on the young
résistant
, and the man’s unearthly screaming. ‘All I knew for certain was that I would be tortured soon, and I wondered how I would take it. Would I be able to stand it, how would I react, would I talk, would I break down? I tried to prepare myself. We cannot evaluate or judge ourselves unless we go through certain experiences. I had learned in the Résistance that strong men who looked the embodiment of heroism, who talked big, could fall apart at the first sign of danger. While seventeen-year-old girls, little frail wisps of things, could be so very brave. There were weak-looking men who never cracked under torture, and tough guys who wept and broke in the first moments. There was no pattern, no rule.’

He was brought back to the interrogation chamber to face his persecutors once again. There was a distinct change of atmosphere. The men seemed settled into a calm, deadly anger, and their body language suggested they had resigned themselves to a late night of hard work. Their leader said they had checked Michel’s papers and determined that they were false. They had gone to the place he had told them about and found no one. So they would have to start all over again. They wanted to know everything about him and his Résistance activities. And he could start by telling them his real name.

Michel repeated what he had originally told them. They waited, almost politely, for him to finish and then one of them moved towards him. ‘Come on,’ Michel said quietly. ‘You’re stronger here - show your strength! I promise not to defend myself. I am ready for you. You can do it - go ahead!’

The man stopped, momentarily uncertain of how to proceed. He looked back at his colleagues for support. There was a moment of hesitation before they moved upon him as a single being. They punched and kicked him, shouting obscenities. One pushed a thumb between his neck and collarbone and the pain was so great he thought he would pass out. He cried out and they stopped briefly to question him.

‘Tell us who you are! We want your true identity now!’

He was knocked to the ground and held while his hands and feet were placed in a press. As the screws were slowly tightened they screamed at him to tell them his name. ‘I knew I had to tell them something new. I could not revert to my real name - Michel Kroskof was a condemned Jewish escapee from Les Milles. So I focused all my concentration on inventing a new identity, one that I had to make them think was real and that I wanted to protect.

‘Every time I stopped talking they resumed their torture. So the secret was obviously to keep talking, but the only time I was able to think and concentrate on a new story was under torture. I was concentrating so strongly on making up a believable story that I wasn’t talking. So they were applying more and more torture. And then I noticed something that really alarmed me. I did not feel the pain.’

He not only felt nothing but also showed no pain, so his torturers continued to tighten the screws on the press, slowly crushing the bones in his toes and knuckles. One of the Milice was so frustrated by his victim’s lack of response that he clubbed him a terrific blow on the right shoulder, instantly creating a huge lump he would carry for the rest of his life.

He heard a distant, angry voice:
‘Merde
, he doesn’t show any pain.’

Oh God, Michel thought, I do not show pain! I do not feel pain! He knew that if he did not react they would kill him. ‘So I began to fake the pain, grimacing in agony. I kept repeating to myself over and over, like a broken record: “Show pain, show pain, show pain!”’

The need to be seen to react to the torture interfered with the intense concentration on what to say. It took him hours to make up a story plausible enough to tell them when he judged it was time to feign breakdown. Meanwhile, he was smashed in the left eye, which began to swell and close, and he saw his persecutors take out the same steel rod used on his colleague. The rod was applied to pressure points on both shoulders between the neck and the collarbone. ‘But still I felt nothing. The pain never reached me, although now I acted convincingly as if it did.’

During the six hours of torture and interrogation he supplied his interrogators with his identity and activities. He told them he was a Pole by the name of Kowalski who had been in the army and put in a POW camp in Belgium at the beginning of the war. He had escaped and made it to France where he had been reduced to making a living from the black market selling food stamps. He calculated that by confessing to the lesser crime of black-marketeering, he might escape the consequences of the greater crime of being a Jew. He was very convincing, occasionally breaking into long bursts of distraught Polish. ‘I could not prove it, of course, but I had constructed a completely viable false identity they could not disprove.’

Satisfied that the ‘broken’ man had told everything, the Milice threw him into a large, gloomy room containing a dozen prisoners. ‘I was a mess. The other prisoners couldn’t believe what I was like. They looked at me in horror. They couldn’t believe how I had got into such a terrible state without hearing me scream.’

The next morning he was moved to a jail in Grenoble. Conditions were predictably awful and prisoners had to tolerate bedbugs, lice and fleas, while crabs lodged in their pubic hair. He remained untreated in jail as he slowly regained his strength and health. His spirit had not been broken, but now he did feel pain, a constant hurt that racked his body from his swollen eye and damaged shoulders to his crushed fingers and toes. He tried to understand what resource he had drawn from to mask the pain of torture. ‘I contemplated the untapped reserves of the human mind.

The great hidden depths of the brain. I learned from it.’
[105]

There was a daily turnover of prisoners. No one knew whether those who left were shot or released, and nobody much wanted to find out. A new arrival brought hope in the shape of a message for him from the Résistance: DO NOT DESPAIR - WE ARE WORKING FOR YOU!

One morning the guards came for him. He was ordered out of the cell and marched along the corridor. With every step he feared his fate might be a bullet in the back of the head in some gloomy, echoing courtyard. He was loaded into a prison van and taken to the Grenoble court house where he was formally charged with black-marketeering, being in possession of false papers and illegal entry into France. As he looked about him he felt a surge of hope as he spotted Sammy Lattès among the spectators, one of the leaders of the Grenoble Résistance. Lattès had made an arrangement with the judge, who was a secret Résistance sympathiser. Michel was sentenced to a period on parole, which meant immediate release.

The black-marketeer Rowalski was taken to the home of Rene Gosse, a distinguished professor at the university. Gosse, a mathematician, had been Dean of the Faculty of Science at Grenoble and, as a socialist and vocal anti-fascist throughout the 1930s, had used his position to oppose the armistice. As a result he had been relieved of his administrative post, although he was allowed to remain at the university as a professor. His efforts at sedition had been so successful that he was largely responsible for a report sent to the Prefect of the Ministry of the Interior: ‘Grenoble is the centre of propaganda which is anti-government, Anglophile and Gaullist.’
[106]

The Secret Army now decided that Michel would no longer be safe or effective in Grenoble, and that he should move out of town into the mountains. He was given a set of false documents for his fifth and final identity in the Résistance, the name he has chosen to live under ever since: Michel Thomas. ‘The papers were provided by Sammy Lattès, whom I have always considered my godfather. Sammy was very active in the Grenoble Résistance and it was his family in Lyon who had first helped me. I consider that he saved my life and gave me the papers for my chosen identity. So I owe him my life and my name.’
[107]

Michel was posted to the village of Biviers, situated on an Alpine slope nine miles outside Grenoble, and billeted on a sixty-five-year-old spinster. Mademoiselle Thérèse Mathieu had been a teacher all her life, and had retired as head of the region’s teacher training college, Ecole Normale. A tall, dignified and correct woman, her reserved exterior concealed enormous strength and courage. Thérèse Mathieu had the heart of a lion and restored Michel’s faith in the nation. ‘The French seem to me a people who are capable of the very heights of human achievement and nobility - and also of plunging to the depths of human behaviour. Thérèse Mathieu, and others like her, displayed the noblest, the highest calibre of human strength and dignity. That’s why my own feelings about France are not torn - divided, but I hope not torn. Because I cannot betray my feelings for Thérèse Mathieu. To me, noble people like that - and there were many of them - outweigh the evil committed by hundreds of thousands. I found that type among the French which I admire and love - a deep love. They exemplified the greatness of France.’