The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (12 page)

There was no reading material of any kind, so to keep himself sane during the empty days and nights he elaborated upon the intellectual system he had invented as a teenager. This was something of a challenge without books, but he would pick a subject and then attempt a process of rigorous analysis. He also wrote a dissertation in his head on the relationship between art and glass, and worked on imaginary paintings and sculptures. It kept boredom at bay, and during the process an extraordinary thing happened: ‘I started hearing music. Not the classical music that I already knew, but a different sort of music entirely. Passionate, beautiful music, played by a whole symphony orchestra.’

Finally, he was put on trial. Suzanne was brought into the courtroom separately, the first time he had seen her since his incarceration. ‘She looked beautiful.’ But prison had taken its toll and she was thin and pale. ‘It had been a terrible experience for me, so imagine the effect on a young girl alone. She was so strong.’

A gifted and articulate lawyer named Pasqualini had taken up the case for the defence and dominated the court with his oratory and theatrical manner. Michel became so carried away by the proceedings that he felt more like a privileged spectator than a defendant. ‘This man should never have been brought to trial,’ Pasqualini boomed, jabbing an accusing finger at the prosecutor. He turned to the judge. You should not be sitting in judgement on him, but humble before someone whose only so-called crime is that he helped other human beings. You should be proud of this man.’

The lawyer successfully established that Michel had not taken money and that the help he had extended was entirely within the law. In an extraordinary verdict for a Vichy court, Michel and Suzanne were acquitted and released.
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But Pasqualini warned that they were in danger under new laws of being re-arrested and sent to a camp without trial. (Within a month of the conversation they were denied permission to reside in Nice.)
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He advised them to seek refuge in nearby Monaco, which was technically independent and outside Vichy police jurisdiction. It had also not adopted Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation.

They moved to Monte Carlo immediately, where they were given a residence permit. Michel travelled to Nice most days to continue to help desperate refugees and keep in contact with opponents of the regime. Although he kept the apartment in Nice, he considered it too dangerous to visit but felt reasonably safe in the city as long as he never stayed overnight. For safety, Suzanne remained in Monte Carlo during his numerous excursions.

In Monte Carlo he made a daily visit to the casino, where he gambled with enough success to make money to live. The foyer was lined with primitive one-armed bandits dedicated to boule, a nine-number variation of roulette that paid winnings of ninety francs on a ten-franc stake. T studied the machine and calculated that if I pulled the lever with exactly the same pressure every time I could develop a system. So I tried it out and found that by using this method I could calculate which number would come up more or less consistently. I would cover the two adjoining numbers, in case I got it wrong, and managed to win on a regular basis. I was careful not to clear out the machine and alert the casino, but over the four months I was in Monte Carlo I won a significant amount.’

Michel often put in long hours in Nice and arrived home exhausted. After one particularly gruelling and difficult day he thought he might risk staying overnight at the Nice apartment. He set the alarm clock for four a.m. and planned to be up and out of the building before dawn.

The alarm was ringing when the police hammered on the apartment door. Exhaustion had made him careless, and he had been betrayed by either the concierge or a neighbour. He was arrested, and this time there was no trial or even the semblance of a hearing. The period in solitary confinement was to prove a light apprenticeship for what now became a descent into hell.

IV - The French Dachau

Nothing remains today of the concentration camp of Le Vernet. The camp that once stood beside the ugly brick village of the same name in the barren plain near Pamiers, in the department of Ariege, thirty miles north of the Pyrenean Spanish border, has been erased from the landscape as it has from the national memory. There are few survivors to recall its misery, but Michel Thomas remembers.

The camp had been built on a deserted stretch of empty country beside a small railway. Even in the spring the area is a desolate wasteland of dust and rock. Michel arrived by train and was marched the half-mile from the tiny station, in formation with sixteen other ‘undesirable alien Jews’, towards the nondescript prison camp.
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It rose before him, a bland fortress of despair surrounded by a tangle of barbed wire. The guards patrolling the perimeter were not soldiers but gendarmes from the Gardes Mobiles, a force with the proven reputation of being the most brutal and reactionary in the country.
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Michel had been sent to Le Vernet under close guard on an ordinary train in a third-class compartment. ‘We were stripped and had to surrender jewellery, watches, rings and money - except for the equivalent of about fifteen dollars. I was allowed a small case with a few personal belongings, and everything else had to be left with the guards.’ Nothing was ever returned. The less fortunate travelled in sealed transports made up of cattle cars. One, carrying a hundred refugees from Belgium, took a week to arrive, during which time the prisoners went unfed. To make matters worse, the word PARACHUTISTES had been daubed on the side of the wagons, provoking outbursts of hatred whenever the train stopped. One of the refugees, unable to bear the claustrophobic misery of heat and hunger any longer, went mad. The guards shot him.
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The camp had originally been built during the 1914-18 war to accommodate colonial troops, and was then used for military prisoners of war. Later, during the Spanish Civil War, it was used to house refugees who had fled over the mountains, mostly men who had fought with the International Brigade. A string of such camps had been constructed along the foothills of the Pyrenees, and many of the civil war prisoners were still there at the outbreak of the Second World War.

Now the camps had a new use and would be packed with troublesome refugees from the north. The network of concentration camps - the term used by French officials themselves
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- were of various sizes and severity, but Le Vernet was universally accepted as the worst in the country. It was a punishment camp, dubbed the French Dachau.
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The novelist Gustav Regler described it as ‘a collection of ramshackle huts without beds, without light, without heating... An eerie cemetery where the huts stood like great coffins on the plains.’ Even among the interned undesirables of Vichy, the government considered the inmates of Le Vernet the lowest of the low, a caste of untouchables. Arthur Roestler, who was imprisoned there in 1940, complained that the place was so primitive that its inhabitants were reduced to living like Stone Age men. ‘In Liberal-Centigrade, Vernet was the zero-point of infamy.’
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Food, sanitary conditions and accommodation in the camp at this time were considerably below the level of its Nazi equivalent. In further contrast, German prisoners of war held in France had been comparatively well cared for, with adequate rations and decent sleeping quarters. It was a crushing blow to Michel’s morale to know that the enemies of France had been better treated than men who had volunteered to fight on her behalf. More than a quarter of internees in Le Vernet were sick and unable to work, despite the severe punishments meted out to malingerers, and many died from lack of medical attention.

By the end of September 1940 there were thirty-one camps in the Unoccupied Zone, some, like Gurs and Argeles, with populations of as many as twenty thousand refugees - including children - and others holding only a few prisoners. There was a special camp for women, another for the sick and the old. Ten hospitals and sixteen prisons also held refugees. Seventy per cent of internees in Vichy were Jews.
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Responsibility for the camps lay entirely with Vichy. The inhumanity of the administration, coupled with a lack of resources, appalled American Quakers working in France, who alerted the international press. An inspector-general was appointed as a result of the adverse publicity, which even the authorities acknowledged was justified. The inspector was a man in sympathy with the aims of Vichy, and his standards were austere, but he was deeply shocked by what he saw as he went from one camp to another. His report was so critical that it moved one government minister to declare: ‘The living conditions of the internees puts the honour of France on the line.’
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The inspector concluded that Le Vernet provided ‘highly precarious living conditions’. The camp housed a fluctuating prison population of between two and three thousand men and covered a total of fifty acres. It was divided into three sections: Unit A for common criminals - a loose term used to include anyone who did not fit into the other two categories; Unit B for veterans of the International Brigade that had fought in Spain; and Unit C for Jews. High barbed-wire fences separated each section and contact was forbidden between them. The inspector described Unit C as ‘the most inadequate of all... the Israelites enclosed in Unit C are piled up in wooden shacks in a deplorable state, dark, unclean, where the most elementary conditions of hygiene cannot be observed’.
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Each of the wooden huts that housed the prisoners was thirty yards long and five wide. Inside, an upper and lower shelf of wood two yards wide ran the length of either side of each hut, with a narrow gangway between. Each side was split into ten sections divided by the wooden poles supporting the roof, and every compartment slept five men - fifty to a shelf, two hundred to a hut. This meant that each prisoner was limited to twenty-one inches of space, obliging everyone to sleep on his side. It was impossible for a man to turn without disturbing his neighbour. There was one stove that was never lit as there was no fuel. Waves of influenza passed from hut to hut, section to section, in a permanent epidemic.

There were frequent outbreaks of typhus and tuberculosis, and dysentery was rife. The suffocating stench of the untended sick, combined with wet, rotting straw and human excrement, made every barracks reek like a farmyard.

Each prisoner was provided with a tin can to wash in and eat from, with no utensils, and meals were eaten standing or squatting on the ground as there were no tables or chairs. The food consisted of eleven ounces of bread daily, a cup of ersatz coffee in the morning, and weak soup at midday and in the evening. The rations barely kept a man alive, let alone fit for physical labour, and condemned him to a permanent state of gnawing hunger.

Work consisted of unnecessary road repairs and the maintenance of the camp itself. Guards carrying leather whips escorted gangs of prisoners dressed in rags to and from the camp. Once the shoes a man arrived in wore out he had to make do with thin, prison-issue galoshes to cover his naked feet. The worst work of all was carried out by the
corvée de tinette
, the latrine emptiers’ squad. Twelve men emptied twenty seventy-pound bins brimming with excrement twice a day. The human effluent was dumped in the river half a mile from the camp, and if the wind was in the wrong direction the sewage of Le Vernet could be smelt for miles around.

In between so-called work sessions there were four daily roll calls, lasting up to an hour each, when prisoners were obliged to stand immobile in the open air in all weathers. Guards routinely used their fists and whips on men slow to obey, while serious offences were punished with terms of solitary confinement on bread and water. ‘There was constant repudiation and fighting among friends,’ Regler wrote. ‘Feelings were relieved by sheer baseness; it was a dysentery of the soul.’
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Inmates developed various forms of melancholia and neurosis, while a few went stark mad, or killed themselves.

Michel himself did not suffer physical brutality at the hands of the guards, except for the abuse and humiliation of the daily routine. ‘The guards did not have to be brutal. It was enough to be locked in a camp like that and slowly starved, watched over by well-fed gendarmes.’ Only the possibility of emigration kept his hope alive. ‘The inmates lived, not upon food, but upon rumours - upon hope. At one time a new inmate told us of a bill before the United States Congress proposing to set up some sort of camp in the Virgin Islands, where those with emigration papers could wait in safety for their quota numbers to come up. So anyone with a visa would have been immediately released. I had signed affidavits from family in the US and all the papers except for a quota number. It raised everybody’s hopes.’ Nothing came of it. ‘Imagine the people who would have been saved!’

The heat of high summer was unbearable in the arid region, but it was nothing compared to the misery of winter. Freezing winds from the Pyrenées - those same mountains on which Michel had happily gone skiing as a student -howled through the camp. Half the prison population slept without blankets in twenty degrees of frost. ‘I have a vision of one man forever standing at the barracks’ unlit stove. He stood there hour after hour, hands held out towards the cold metal to receive its imaginary warmth.’