The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (21 page)

On arrival at the second floor the feeling became overwhelming. ‘This time I heard an inner voice, clear and frightening: Don’t go! Of course I knew it was in my mind and tried to ignore it, but the voice kept on: Don’t go - the Gestapo is there.’ The Gestapo at this time had not become visible in the daily life of the city and Michel had never concerned himself about them before. ‘Why should the Gestapo be here? Why am I standing listening to voices? Can Le Patriote go back to his headquarters and say, “Yes, I was on my way to the meeting but I heard voices so I turned back”?’

He calmed himself and continued, almost laughing out loud at the absurdity of his fears. He forced himself to walk along the corridor to the door of the office, but was unable to shake off the sense of dread. ‘I approached the door cautiously, listening for anything abnormal. I asked myself what the matter was. What is it? I told myself that I wouldn’t go in. That I was just going to listen, and if I heard anything strange I’d go away.’

He stood outside the door. Again, nothing. He was now thoroughly ashamed of himself. He was just plain scared, he told himself - a coward. The thought shocked him, but unable to shake off the premonition he decided on a compromise. He would push the door open a little, just a crack, and peer inside. If anything was out of the ordinary he would follow his instincts and leave.

As he turned the knob and gently eased the door open, it was yanked violently from inside. A uniformed Gestapo officer grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him forward.
‘Kommen Sie’rein!
he barked in German - come in!
‘Geheime Staatspolizei!’

A group of Gestapo officers stood in the small reception area.

‘I must have made a mistake,’ Michel said in French. ‘I must be in the wrong place.’

‘Oh no, this is the right place,’ one of the agents replied in German. ‘Who are you? Where are your papers?’

Michel, of course, understood every word but decided to play the role of a French artist who had dropped by to sell his paintings. The Gestapo had raided the place to arrest Austrian and German refugees and expected everyone to speak German. The officer continued to rant at him in German when the door opened and more people entered. They too were grabbed and berated by the Germans. ‘I knew two of them from the cafés and my heart jumped. If one gave the slightest sign of recognition my little game was over. But they were either too stunned or too scared to acknowledge my presence.’

He was part-pulled, part-pushed into a large room that served as the main office. Cowed refugees were huddled everywhere, pressed against the walls. The Gestapo had arrived early in the morning and detained everyone who entered the office, and by the day’s end there would be a hundred of them. Michel was steered towards a man in civilian clothes, the only person in the room who was seated. He was behind a table that served as a desk and Michel was ordered to stand a respectful distance in front of it. The man was Klaus Barbie, although Michel did not hear the name at this time and would not have recognised it if he had. The only obviously striking thing about him was how small he was compared to the other Gestapo officers.

One of them now explained to his chief that Michel had arrived on his own and did not seem to be part of any group. ‘This one only seems to speak French.’

Barbie inspected Michel closely, and barked,
‘litre Ausweispapiere!’
- identity papers! Michel knew enough about the deportation policy to know he was doomed if he was suspected of being a German-speaking foreign Jew. Barbie repeated the question.
‘Wo sind lhre Ausweispapiere?’

Michel pretended to be bewildered and protested in French that he did not know what was going on. He insisted that he had made a mistake and had come to the wrong place, and begged somebody to translate for him. ‘It’s a mistake... a mistake! Isn’t there anybody here who speaks French?’

Barbie nodded at one of the Gestapo men standing behind Michel. He heard what sounded like a gun being taken from its holster. The officer spoke calmly in German to his colleague.
‘Na, ich werde den da einfach abschiesser’
- Ach, I’ll just shoot him down. He leaned close and spoke to the back of Michel’s head.
‘Wie soll ich das tun? Einen Schuss ins Genick? Oder eine Kugel in den Kopf? Oder ins Ohr?’
- How shall I do it? Shall I shoot him through the neck? Or a bullet through the head? Or into the ear?

Michel remained deadpan. ‘I could show no reaction. No reaction at all. I knew that I had to remain calm and I could not betray the slightest acknowledgement that I understood. Any reflex on my part suggesting I understood what he was saying would have meant death.’

Barbie watched the performance carefully as the game played itself out, then suddenly seemed to lose interest. He jumped up, held out his hand and snapped,
‘Verdammt noch mal! Haben Sie denn keine Identitätspapiere?’
- Goddamn it, don’t you have any identity papers?

Michel pretended to latch on to the word
identitätspapiere
because of its similarity to the French equivalent
pièces d’identité
. ‘Ah,
vous voulez mes pièces d’identité!’
he said, feigning enormous relief.
‘Mais oui, bien sûr! Voilà!’
He handed over documents that identified him as the Frenchman Michel Sberro from Tunisia.

Barbie sat down, spread the documents across the table and began to question him in reasonable French. He was subjected to a lengthy and detailed interrogation, frequently interrupted as other refugees arrived and were brought into the room. ‘So I told my cover story. That I was a freelance artist. That was why I was carrying my portfolio of paintings. I had met a gentleman with an address in the building who had expressed interest in buying, but evidently I made a mistake and came to the wrong office.’

Barbie listened, but looked sceptical. He opened the portfolio and inspected the contents, looking at each painting. Suddenly, he gathered up the ID papers, returned the paintings to their portfolio and handed them back. ‘You can leave.
Au revoir.
’

Au revoir.
Until we meet again.
[99]

The incident had a profound influence not only on the way Michel thought, but on the way he acted for the rest of the war. ‘It taught me to trust my instincts and premonitions. Before that I had been a strict rationalist. I learned to listen to my inner voices.’

Once outside the building, Michel went to a phone and placed a number of calls to Résistance friends and Jewish organisations. They immediately went to visit the various cafés used by the refugees to alert them of the Gestapo trap in the Rue St Catharine. ‘We warned as many as we could and also set up a network of people in the area to interrupt anyone on their way to the office. Despite the danger there were people who didn’t want to believe me. I had to insist.’

That winter’s day in February 1943 marked the beginning of Barbie’s terror operations in the city, and the brutality of his methods would earn him the title ‘Butcher of Lyon’. Almost a hundred foreign Jews were arrested at the office in the Rue St Catharine, and eighty-six were transported to Auschwitz and their deaths. Later, Barbie would claim that he did not know the fate of those he sent away, but when a UGIF committee member tried repeatedly to persuade Barbie not to shoot arrested Jews, he replied, ‘Shot or deported, there’s no difference.’ It is estimated that by the end of the war seven thousand, five hundred and ninety-one people were deported from Lyon by the Gestapo.

The Gestapo had commandeered sixty rooms on the second and third floors of the Hotel Terminus, twenty of which were for the interrogation of prisoners brought daily from Montluc prison. Barbie, then aged twenty-nine, divided his department into six specialist sections: Résistance and Communists; Sabotage; Jews; False ID; Counter-intelligence; and Intelligence. At first there were twenty-five men working under him, a number that gradually increased over time as he became responsible for an area covering fifteen thousand square miles. He was a hard-driving, efficient workaholic feared by his own men, with the absolute power of life and death over his victims. He also carried a personal grudge against the French: his father had been seriously wounded in the First World War.

In the weeks following the takeover of the city, Barbie worked to build up his connections with Frenchmen he considered sympathetic and trustworthy. Special kiosks for denunciations were introduced at which queues formed every day. Later, he said, ‘Without them I could never have done my job so well... At the beginning it was very hard for us. We had very few contacts. Everything was new. I had to build an effective team, carefully handpicking each recruit. We were showered with denunciations of the Résistance by the French and I usually tried to find long-term collaborators from amongst the denunciators.’
[100]

These French collaborators, handpicked by Barbie, came to form a private army one hundred and twenty strong dedicated to fighting terror with terror: ‘Millionaire Jews, bourgeois freemasons, you who subsidise and arm the assassins, you will pay with your life.’ The Gestapo expanded its torture facilities when it took over a large military school where three vast cellars were converted into cells. After initial interrogation on the ground floor, the prisoners were taken to specially equipped rooms on the fourth. Each room had one or two baths, a table with leather straps, a gas oven for heating pokers red hot, and electrical prongs. As music played in the background, men and women were stripped naked and hung from the ceiling by their wrists; children were tortured in front of their parents. The tortures imposed were a diabolical blend of ancient and modern: victims were plunged into freezing or boiling water, burned with cigarettes, had three-inch needles rammed into their rib cages, and acid injected into their bladders. They were savaged by dogs and had their backs broken with a spiked iron ball. Fingers and toes were severed with blunt knives, nipples ripped off with metal tongs, and one man had his eyes put out and was scalped. The workaholic Barbie was often present at these torture sessions. In between the ministrations of his experts he chose to work victims over with a leather cosh, pausing only to sip from a glass of beer or take a bite from a sandwich.

The escape from the encounter with this monster at Rue St Catharine saved Michel from a similar fate. His superiors in the Secret Army now considered him to be in great danger in Lyon. To slip through the fingers of Klaus Barbie once was great good luck; a second meeting would almost certainly prove fatal. Michel was issued with yet another identity and told to remain in Grenoble.

The pace of Michel’s Résistance activities quickened, and he worked around the clock, happy to be fighting back. His dedication and steely resolve soon attracted the attention of local leaders who burdened him with new duties and responsibilities. He still occasionally ran the gauntlet of
contrôles
and road blocks to go into Lyon, but most of the workload revolved around Grenoble. Although the city came under the jurisdiction of the tolerant Italians, the Gestapo employed the Milice, its home-grown French equivalent, to carry out its dirty work in the region.

The Milice was a political police force that had been created at the beginning of the year and was to give the Gestapo a run for its money in terms of violence and ruthlessness. The struggle between the Résistance and the Milice over the next eighteen months would take on the vicious nature of a civil war. The Milice was led by Joseph Darnand, a conspicuous and eager collaborator. He was the son of a railway worker and had little education but was a genuine hero of the First World War, one of only three men in 1918 to be given a citation ordaining them ‘artisans of the final victory’. He had been awarded the nation’s highest soldier’s decoration, the
médaille militaire
, by Marshal Pétain himself, although the old man had remarked that Darnand possessed ‘as much political intelligence as a kerbstone’. Despite his great personal bravery, and love of military life, the army did not consider him officer material. After the war Darnand ran a garage in Nice, nursing his bitterness about being passed over for a commission, and became a militant fascist denouncing Jews, Communists and Freemasons.

Darnand’s speciality in war had been guerrilla exploits behind enemy lines, and now the poacher turned heartless gamekeeper. His view on the Résistance was straightforward: ‘What is this Résistance shit? Shepherds to whom the archangel appeared?’ His view of de Gaulle was similarly robust: ‘He’s surrounded by Jews and Freemasons and assorted deserters.’
[101]

As local police, and even some German military units, lost their stomach for civilian repression, Darnand’s Milice filled the gap. At last the Nazis had what they had always hoped for in France - a paramilitary political police force manned by native toughs. It numbered twenty-nine thousand men and women throughout the country, and its members were chosen for ideological fervour rather than professional competence. The fanatic and unscrupulous Darnand, together with eleven of his senior men, were granted the great honour of being allowed to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler and being admitted into the Waffen-SS.

The uniform of the Milice comprised a dark blue jacket and trousers, khaki shirt, black tie and beret. Its emblem was a white gamma, the zodiacal sign of the ram. It had a marching song that proclaimed: ‘For those who brought our defeat/No punishment is harsh enough.’ The oath of allegiance made it clear exactly who was responsible for France’s defeat. Members swore to ‘fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection and against Jewish leprosy’.