The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (20 page)

This had been a precarious undertaking. A telegram from national police HQ to the police chief of the camp arrived at the factory the evening the departure was being organised. It specifically prohibited adults expelled to the Occupied Zone from leaving their children behind. Glasberg intercepted it and hid it in his cassock, alongside a collection of letters from prisoners for delivery to family and friends. As a result, the police chief never learned of the change in orders.

The children left at dawn on two buses, while a couple over the age limit were hidden in Glasberg’s official-looking black
traction avant
Citroen, the type of government car driven by the local prefect and the Gestapo. Black government cars were saluted, not checked.

Three days later the chief of police in Lyon requested troops from the city’s military commander to keep order when the Jews were loaded on to trains. General Robert de Saint-Vincent replied, ‘I will never lend my troops for this type of operation.’ He was immediately ordered by his superiors to resign his commission. But he did not send the troops.

When the Jews were transported, it was noted that eighty-four children had been taken by priests. Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon, was told over the telephone by the prefect, ‘Tonight, there is a train coming from Les Milles camp with Jews that we are turning over to the Germans. We will add a car so that you can put the children that you have on board. I ask you to bring these children to the station.’

‘Monsieur
le Préfet,’
Gerlier said, ‘their families have entrusted these children to me. You are not going to ask a father to deliver his children to the police, I hope.’ The prefect was adamant, but so was the cardinal. ‘You’re not getting the children,’ he said, and hung up.

Priests took the children and hid them in homes with Catholic families around Lyon. The cardinal wrote an anguished pastoral letter: ‘The new measures of deportation taking place against the Jews are leading to such painful scenes that we have the imperative and painful duty of protesting. We are seeing a cruel dispersion of families where nothing is spared, not age, not weakness, not illness. The heart is wrenched at the thought of the treatment received by thousands of human beings, and even more at the thought of what cannot be foreseen.’

It was a chilling glimpse into the near future.

On the morning of 11 November 1942, the Germans crossed the Demarcation Line and occupied the whole country. There was no official Résistance and no bloodshed. The Germans reported gratefully that the French Armistice Army had remained ‘loyal’ during the operation, and that the French police had been equally helpful. The general population met the occupation with apathy, while the government adopted a bureaucratic policy of maintaining correct relations with the conqueror. The Italians now occupied the Riviera and the French Alps, including Grenoble, and created a zone separated by the Rhône.

The takeover - Operation Attila - was triggered by the unexpected news that an American invasion force was dis-embarking in French colonies in north Africa administered by Vichy. United States president Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the French forces not to resist the Allies, but Marshal Pétain, outraged and shaken by the invasion, ordered them to fight the American and British forces to the bitter end.

Encouraged by reports of French warships defending north Africa, Hitler sent word to the French government asking whether they were now seriously willing to join the Germans in the fight against the British and the Americans. This would entail a complete break in diplomatic relations with the Allies and a declaration of war. ‘If the French government makes an unambiguous declaration like this, then we would be ready to go through thick and thin with the French government.’ Hitler both hoped and expected France to join the Axis cause.

However, France’s military commanders no longer shared their political leaders’ aims. Admiral Darlan, the supreme commander, was already in Algiers and had switched sides to join General de Gaulle and the Free French. Hitler reacted by ordering the disarmament of Pétain’s forces - in particular the hundred-thousand-man Armistice Army that had been so loyal. The French fleet in Toulon - three battleships, an aircraft carrier and more than thirty destroyers - was scuttled. France had now lost everything - her military forces and control of her colonies - and Vichy had lost its credibility.
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Perceptions among a growing section of the population changed, and now German victory seemed less than certain. New graffiti began to appear:

VIVE L’AMÉRIQUE!

In Lyon, German tanks rolled into the Place des Terreaux and once again the swastika replaced the tricolour over the entrance to the city hall. But there was no fuss as the Germans took over prisons, hospitals and military barracks. Eighty SS officers, including Klaus Barbie, arrived in the city. The Gestapo made its headquarters in the Hotel Terminus, beside the Perrache railway station, on the tip of the peninsula formed by the Rhône and Saone rivers. Forty officers remained in Lyon, while thirty were posted to surrounding towns and villages.

Barbie, as head of the Gestapo, had a large staff working under him, and inherited a network of French agents and informers from Vichy. These included prostitutes, criminals, and the barman at Le Perroquet. Informers and collaborators were everywhere. At first the Gestapo went about its business surreptitiously, and the locals were both surprised and relieved to find that life under German occupation was little worse than that under Vichy. Then, at the end of November, two young men on bicycles shot and wounded a German soldier in the Place Bellecour, setting off a series of arrests and reprisals. But still the repression seemed nothing much out of the ordinary, the lull before the storm.

On the surface nothing had changed, and Michel continued his activities with the Résistance. He was now living in Grenoble, a safer place to be because it came under the control of the Italians who now oversaw eight French
departéments
. The Italian Army, Foreign Ministry, diplomatic corps and common soldiers went to extraordinary lengths to protect Jews and confound the Germans and Vichy authorities. Although officially anti-Semitic, the Italians ignored repeated demands to deport Jews living in their zone, conspiring to create frustrating bureaucratic obstructions to thwart both the Germans and Vichy, and disregarding all sorts of official anti-Jewish directives and laws. They resorted to subterfuge, feigned incompetence and outright lies.

Not only did the Italians protect French Jews, they also extended their protection to include foreign refugees. This led to direct confrontation with the Vichy administration when, in December 1942, the arch-collaborationist prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, who was a personal friend of Marshal Pétain, ordered all foreign Jews in his
departément
in the Italian zone to be sent to enforced residence in the German zone, where subsequent deportation was then inevitable. Italian Foreign Ministry officials simply cancelled the order, claiming that non-French Jews came under their care. Prime Minister Laval protested. The Italians ignored him and prevented the introduction of other anti-Jewish measures. They forbade the word ‘Jew’ to be stamped on ID papers and ration books, and refused to allow forced-labour camps in their zone. They went as far as to order the Vichy government to annul the arrest and internment of all Jews in the Italian zone, which meant the immediate release of a hundred people awaiting deportation and death. Italian soldiers actually showed up at the prison in Grenoble to ensure their safe passage. The Germans were enraged, but powerless to do anything.
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Michel, meanwhile, worked to establish a separate Jewish unit within the Secret Army that would fight under its own flag. Headquarters had given its approval to recruit for such a force and agreed to supply it, but the response from Jewish organisations was not enthusiastic. Michel was greatly disappointed to be turned down flat by the secret local Zionist organisation in Grenoble that insisted its priority was to hide Jewish families and keep them together. ‘To me it made no sense. I told them of my escape and that deportation meant death. It was stupidity.’ Rebuffed by the Zionists in Grenoble, Michel spent more time in Lyon where he undertook the lengthy and risky process of recruiting one individual at a time.

Even with a full set of forged documents, Michel had to exercise great care in his daily life. He took to carrying a portfolio of his own paintings, a cover that gave him the added benefit of not having to declare a fixed place of work. At any time whole streets would be cordoned off in sudden raids and anyone in them subjected to a
contrôle
- when the police checked papers. ‘These were nerve-racking. Through experience I had learned not to run away from danger but to confront it and do the unexpected. If caught within a
contrôle
I would walk up to the police and ask for information, like the address of an official building. Often they would answer instead of checking my documents. At other times, I would get indignant and complain that my papers had been checked only minutes before. “Goddamn it, this is the fourth time I’ve been asked!” Sometimes they would wave me on, occasionally even with an apology.’

It was during this period in Lyon that he met a French girl who had her own apartment. ‘It was good to have a relationship with an independent girl who was strong and successful. We became close immediately and both needed each other emotionally and physically. I was so pleased to have found her and to have found a safe place to stay with a non-Jewish girl who had strong feelings about the Résistance. Then on the night we became lovers she started crying bitterly. We were getting along very well, there had been no argument or anything, so I just couldn’t understand.’ At first the girl refused, or was unable, to explain her anguish. Then she blurted out that she knew Michel was a Jew.

‘Circumcision had given me away. It was very rare among non-Jews in those days. And then the girl told me what it meant to her that I was Jewish and why it made her so distraught. She too was Jewish, living an unsafe life with false papers. She had been so happy to meet a Frenchman she cared for who was not Jewish. She had held out so much hope. And there we were - two people pretending not to be Jews discovering that the other was Jewish. She felt it threatened her life, and the only way to survive was to be far removed from it, and to avoid all contact with Jews. I understood. I too had been happy under the illusion she was not Jewish. She needed it and I needed it, and when we found out the truth it was over.’

The following morning he left the apartment early and never saw her again.

One cold winter’s morning, Michel made his way to visit the main Lyon office of the Union General des Israelites de France, an officially recognised Jewish welfare organisation that was a magnet for the numerous German and Austrian refugees in the city. Before the occupation the UGIF had maintained good relations with Vichy, and one of their reports written in June stated: ‘We are finding understanding and even cordiality from most of the authorities. This goes for most of the civil servants and employers.’

After the arrival of the Germans the organisation openly continued to provide services for Jewish refugees, offering money, work and help in communicating with relatives incarcerated within France. It also paid for doctors and lawyers. In secret, it smuggled Jews into Switzerland and provided false papers. The organisation was an obvious target for the Gestapo, but continued to operate under an unrealistic and false sense of security. The reason there had been no extra pressure on foreign Jews since the arrival of the Gestapo was because no trains had been available for deportations since November due to military disasters on the Russian front. In Berlin, Adolf Eichmann was concerned that the French had fallen behind in terms of meeting their quota of Jews, and with the beginning of a new year he looked for improvements. Trains were promised by mid-February and the Gestapo in France was expected to fill them.
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Michel’s destination on 9 February 1943 was the UGIF office at 9 Rue St Catharine where refugees congregated at the beginning of each week. ‘In the past I had been able to supply ration cards to the committee, but on that day I was in search of recruits for a Jewish fighting unit for the Secret Army.’ The office was always crowded on Mondays when money was paid out and a doctor and nurse were on hand. The refugees were made up mostly of individual German or Austrian Jews from dispersed families, people without belongings or a place to stay. The UGIF had attempted to enrol the help of rich Jewish families in the city, but reported, ‘Alas! The results have been so disappointing we don’t even dare quote the number of replies.’
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It was a miserable, grey day as Michel pushed his way through the streets carrying his portfolio of art under his arm. He battled the bitter wind and rehearsed his recruitment pitch, in which he warned of the dangers of deportation by telling stories of his experiences in Les Milles, and extolling life in the Résistance. He arrived at the building and began to climb the stairway to the office.

Halfway up the stairs he paused, overtaken by a profound sense of foreboding. ‘Something told me to stop.’ He looked around him but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. ‘I shook off the feeling and continued on my way. But it persisted, grew stronger and stronger. I stopped again.’ But there was nothing. He told himself that he was merely suffering from the inevitable paranoia that accompanied the clandestine life. It was simply a case of nerves.