The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (29 page)

‘This man can’t work,’ he said.

‘Tonight, he won’t feel a thing,’ the adjutant replied.

Later, the prisoners were pushed into unfilled craters and machine-gunned. A thin layer of earth was then spread over them.

Three days after this massacre another one hundred and ten male and female prisoners were taken from Montluc and driven to a disused fort outside the city. Among them was a priest who had hidden weapons and a radio operator in the vestry of his church. The Gestapo had cut off his ears and pulled out one of his eyes. At the fort, the prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs and they were led up a flight of stairs into a room where they were shot. According to the sworn testimony of a member of the Milice who worked in Gestapo HQ: ‘The prisoners had to walk over a heap of their former comrades. Blood was pouring through the ceiling and I could distinctly hear the victims fall as they were shot. At the end, the bodies lay one and a half metres high, and the Germans sometimes had to step on to their victims to finish off those who were still moaning.’

An old woman with a wrinkled face turned to the soldier about to shoot her and said, ‘I’m dying for France, but you, you bastard, you’ll rot in hell.’

The dead bodies were doused in petrol and set alight. SS men lit phosphorus bricks and left the building, wiping blood and brains from their uniforms. ‘While the fire was raging, we saw a victim who had somehow survived,’ the Milice witness said. ‘She came to a window on the south side and begged her executioners for pity. They answered her prayers with a rapid burst of gunfire. Riddled with bullets and affected by the intense heat, her face contorted into a fixed mask, like a vision of horror. The temperature was increasing and her face melted like wax until one could see her bones. At that moment she gave a nervous shudder and began to turn her decomposing head - what was left of it - from left to right, as if to condemn her executioners. In a final shudder, she pulled herself completely straight, and fell backwards.’

On 21 August, yet more prisoners were taken from Montluc to Bron airport. They too were pushed into pits and machine-gunned. A man at work in a hangar with the airport supervisor said, ‘Look boss, they’re shooting people.’

The supervisor went to the door of the hangar and saw a further eight men pulled from a truck by their hair and jackets. They too were pushed into a crater and shot. Later a German soldier came over to the hangar to chat.

‘It’s terrible what they’re doing, killing them like that,’ the supervisor said.

‘It’s nothing,’ the German replied. ‘It’s only Jews, good to make sausage for dogs.’

The Gestapo were becoming desperate in their murder. At headquarters in Place Bellecour prisoners were shot in their cells or taken to the basement for summary execution. Eight hundred prisoners remained in Montluc. A Résistance leader, unaware of the previous massacres, sent a signed letter to the Gestapo threatening to execute all German hostages taken by the Maquis if any prisoners were harmed. The immediate response of the Germans was to select fifty Jews and shoot them.

Cardinal Gerlier, horrified by reports of the massacre at the fort, went personally to Gestapo HQ to plead for the remaining prisoners’ lives. At the same time the Résistance, now aware of the murders, announced the execution of eighty German hostages. The Gestapo was informed that a further seven hundred captives would be executed unless the murder stopped.

At 9.50 on the evening of 24 August the survivors at Montluc discovered that the Germans had abandoned the prison, leaving the keys with the highest-ranking inmate. People in the streets outside the jail heard the prisoners singing an emotional rendition of La Marseillaise.

Klaus Barbie was among the last Germans to leave the city, taking a train out on 30 August. He was commended by his superiors for his work while in Lyon and duly promoted. Lyon was liberated by the Americans on 3 September.
[125]

The Thunderbirds rolled forward in the peculiar atmosphere created by the contrast between fierce combat and euphoric liberation. Michel immediately demonstrated his value to S-2 by establishing a network of Résistance contacts behind enemy lines able to supply vital information. ‘I interrogated prisoners about the strength and location of enemy troops. I questioned suspected Nazi operatives who had been captured on issues of sabotage or espionage.’ The officers in charge allowed him an increasingly free hand. And as his fellow intelligence agents wrote their reports, he was surprised to find himself frequently asked to spell words in English.

The pitiful retreat of the Germans from the region, often in trucks pulled by horses because they had no petrol, was described by Gertrude Stein, who watched motorbikes roar through her village. ‘Then there came along hundreds of German soldiers, walking, it was a terribly hot dry day and in the mountains the heat is even hotter than below, and these soldiers were children none older than sixteen and some looking not more than fourteen... these childish faces and the worn bodies and the tired feet and the shoulders of aged men and an occasional mule carrying a gun heavier than the boys could carry and then covered wagons... and later we were told in them were the sick and wounded, and they were being dragged by mules... and about a hundred of them were on women’s bicycles that they had evidently taken as they went along, it was unbelievable, the motorised army of Germany of 1940 being reduced to this, to an old-fashioned Mexican army, it seemed to be more ancient than pictures of the moving army of the American civil war... it was a sorry sight in every way.’

The mayor’s wife remarked that the Germans probably picked young soldiers because children could set fire to homes and kill without really knowing what they were doing, while even the worst of grown men drew the line somewhere. And once the Germans left - Stein’s dog, Basket, was so traumatised after a hundred soldiers moved through the house and garden that it was unable to bark for days - people awaited the Americans. A splendid rumour circulated through the village that all the officers wore ten-gallon hats, a story Stein did nothing to suppress.

The first Americans were from the Thunderbirds, and they arrived in a jeep. ‘What a day of days,’ Stein wrote euphorically about the liberation of her village. ‘Oh happy day, that is all I can say: oh happy day... We talked and patted each other in the good American way, and I had to know where they came from and where they were going and where they were born... After at least two years of not a word with America, there they were... Then we went to look at their car the jeep, and I had expected it to be much smaller but it was quite big and they said did I want a ride and I said you bet I wanted a ride and we all climbed in and there I was riding in an American army car driven by an American soldier. Everybody was so excited.’
[126]

The division advanced rapidly, clearing snipers out of some towns and villages, and taking others without a shot. ‘The Thunderbirds surrounded a German infantry unit and delivered an ultimatum to them to surrender or be destroyed. They didn’t surrender. It was insanity. So we went ahead and destroyed them.’ The survivors were taken as POWs, and most proved to be untrained, while some were not truly fit enough to serve. Michel was told by prisoners that when they took their medical they were passed with the words ‘Gut fur die Knochenmühle!’ - good for the bone mill! He questioned the commanding officer on his motives for refusing to surrender and inviting the slaughter of his own men. ‘I thought he was playing for time and waiting for reinforcements - something logical. I needed to find out, and asked him, “
What were you thinking?
I want to know: what were you thinking?”’

The officer stiffened as he answered.
‘Ein deutscher Soldat hat nicht zu denken!’
- A German soldier is not supposed to think!

Michel’s knowledge of the language and the country made him invaluable on reconnaissance patrols. Men volunteered to accompany him because of his confidence and demonstrable lack of fear. He began to make close friends in the S-2 unit. One, Gerhard Sachs, was a soulmate, a German Jew from Philadelphia. He had volunteered to fight despite the fact that members of his family had also been prevented from emigrating from Germany for lack of a quota number, and had subsequently disappeared.

Sachs was a respected figure who had displayed his mettle again and again in Italy. On one occasion elements of the Thunderbirds were held up by a German position dug into the side of a mountain. Sachs volunteered to go and talk to the commanding officer in German and try to convince him that both sides would suffer unacceptable casualties unless they surrendered. Someone said, ‘Are you crazy? They’ll shoot you soon as look at you, white flag or no white flag.’ Sachs said that it was a risk he was prepared to take and disappeared up the mountain carrying a white flag. There was no sign of him for most of the rest of the day, and although no shooting was heard, his platoon began to fear he had been killed. Suddenly, they spotted Sachs coming down the mountain from the fortified position accompanied by a German officer, while behind them trooped a company of unarmed German soldiers. Afterwards his colleagues joked that he could talk anybody into anything, and there were various suggestions that he be dropped into Berlin to have a chat with Adolf and wind up the war.

As combat and conversation drew the men together, his comrade gave Michel a lucky silver dollar. It had originally been given to Sachs by his fiancee at the beginning of the war, and now he wanted his friend to have it. Michel was deeply moved by the gesture. ‘It was like giving your heart.’

Sachs cheerfully told Michel, when he considered his friend overly enthusiastic about American democracy, that he had often been the butt of anti-Jewish remarks within the regiment. Prejudice ran deep, even at the front. ‘I was shocked. It didn’t fit with my thoughts of the United States and liberty. I was very idealistic about America. Sachs told me that outbreaks of anti-Semitism in the US were normal. This shook me up.’

As a result, Michel decided not to disclose that he was a Jew until he had won the respect of the regiment and proved himself. ‘I must say I did not experience this anti-Semitism myself - not ever - but for a while the stories made me cautious. I let them think of me as “the crazy Frenchman”.’ It was an image he reinforced when he roared along country lanes on a captured German BMW motor bike and sidecar, with the Stars and Stripes painted on one side of the petrol tank and the French tricolour on the other. A pennant of the Cross of Lorraine flew from the handlebars.

Colonel Wilson Gibson, who was in charge of a tank battalion and became a close friend, also gave Michel a silver dollar. Gibson was from New Orleans, Louisiana, and talked long and lovingly about the city and his family. ‘If we make it through this alive you’ve got to promise me you’ll come to New Orleans.’

‘Okay.’

‘The first place you visit if you ever come to the States. Solemn promise?’

‘Promise.’

Among the duties of S-2 was the interrogation of German prisoners, and because of Michel’s fluency in the language many of the important ones were questioned by him. Most were combat troops, or their officers, but SS and Gestapo men were also caught in the net.
[127]
All German soldiers carried a
Soldbuch
, a military passport with a photograph that contained each man’s record, including rank, unit, regimental postings, area of operation and citations. Michel was struck by the fact that almost every German soldier of whatever rank carried pornographic material of some sort. The SS officers also carried daggers and hand-crafted leather whips, custom-made to each man’s individual taste.

One SS prisoner, who was a physical giant, was brought to Michel for interrogation. He demanded the
Soldbuch
, leafed through it and put it to one side. He took the man’s bag and found the usual whip, dagger and pornography. He returned to the
Soldbuch
for a closer look. The officer’s unit had spent time in Cracow, Poland, and tucked into the back of the
Soldbuch
was a carefully folded paper. Michel opened it, saw that it was a service citation for a military decoration, and began to read.

It was a full account of the man’s activities assisting the Gestapo in Cracow and amounted to a paean of praise from his superiors. The citation extolled his dedication to duty when he had prevented a group of Jews rounded up for deportation from escaping. It was an extraordinary document in that it precisely articulated the inverted values of the Third Reich, where brutality was praised as bravery and inhumanity recognised as duty. And most disturbing of all, the man who stood before him had not thought to destroy the citation but carried it with pride.

German troops had been particularly brutal in Cracow. One scorching June day, in 1942, seven thousand Jews were rousted from their homes at dawn and marched to Harmony Square in the centre of the ghetto. They waited in the sun throughout the morning without food or water and were then moved to the railway station. A Polish Catholic chemist, with a shop in the square, witnessed the behaviour of the German troops and wrote an account of it.

‘Old people, women and children pass by the pharmacy windows like ghosts. I see an old woman of around seventy years, her hair loose, walking alone... Her eyes have a glazed look; immobile, wide open, filled with horror, they stare straight ahead. She walks slowly, quietly, only in her dress and slippers, without even a bundle or handbag. She holds in her hands something small, something black, which she caresses fondly and keeps close to her old breasts. It is a small puppy - her most precious possession, all that she saved and would not leave behind...