The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (3 page)

His mother grew alarmed at the severity of his condition and took him from one specialist to another without success. ‘I just couldn’t live in Poland, I felt the atmosphere that strongly. It was such a betrayal. At the age of six I had been made aware of the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew. I wanted out - to get away from Lodz.’

In later life, Michel analysed the virulent nature of Polish anti-Semitism. ‘It was worse even than Ukrainian or Russian anti-Semitism - far worse than in Germany. It was a direct result of the teaching of contempt for Jews by the Catholic Church to a largely ignorant and illiterate peasant population. These people emerged from their churches after a Sunday sermon hating the Jews whom they had been told had murdered Christ their God.’

Freida, who was a shrewd businesswoman and held an important position in the family company, travelled all over Poland and now began to take Michel along with her. Since the trauma he had become a difficult and demanding child, and his physical and psychological states were alarming. He was touchy and sensitive and resented doing what was expected of him even when it was agreeable. He grew increasingly stubborn and disobedient. ‘I had my own ways and got away with it.’

As they visited the towns of Poznan and Danzig, and other areas that had been part of the German partition of Poland, Freida noticed her son’s spirits lift. ‘Travelling on a train I can remember looking out at the countryside and everything seemed so beautiful... the cows, the horses, the landscape. Still I can see it - I can feel it, I can smell it. Through my childish eyes it was a different country because I was out of the Polish-speaking region.’

On one of these journeys, just before Michel’s seventh birthday when he was at his most difficult, his mother engaged him in a long and serious conversation. They walked through the streets of Poznan together and she explained the trouble he was causing, and the problems this posed for her. ‘Can you imagine if you had a son, a boy like you are? How would you handle him?’

Michel pondered the question. After some thought he recommended a regime of strict rules and harsh discipline, accompanied by draconian punishment for the least infringement. He elaborated on the rules, which were ruthless in their severity, and on the punishments that were equally extreme.

‘Very interesting,’ his mother said. ‘I have learned a lot. You have taught me how to handle you.’

‘Oh no!’ The child’s response was immediate. ‘For me it’s too late!’

The system was never introduced, and Michel kept his true feelings over the incident to himself, but he felt tricked. He had been betrayed by his own mother and was deeply hurt. ‘The only time I was ever hurt by my mother. I still feel it now.’

It was evident to the child as they travelled together that his mother was both well-known and respected. Michel also came to understand that his upbringing was somehow privileged and more comfortable than many of the children around him. Freida took great trouble to imbue him with her own philosophy, explaining that privilege and riches could be stripped from anyone at any time, and that the only true wealth was knowledge. The mind, she insisted, was something that a human being carried with him, a treasure trove that could be endlessly enriched and never taken away. ‘What you are and who you are and what you know - these are the only things that count. That has to be strong. Everything else can be destroyed.’ Freida was imparting a life lesson that would pay a high dividend in the future.

Michel’s condition remained extreme, but his relief when outside the Polish-speaking region was so evident that Freida decided her son’s health depended upon him leaving the country. Aunt Idessa had married and gone to live in Breslau, just across the border in Germany, where her husband owned a highly successful wholesale wine and spirits business, complete with its own vineyards. Some six months after the trauma it was decided that Michel should go to live with his adored aunt, something he accepted happily. ‘I was not homesick, or in tears -I was happy to be going. I knew I was not being sent away but that I was going to my aunt, who seemed like a part of my mother. I did not feel I was losing my mother - I knew she would always be with me. She was in my heart.’

But travel had been forbidden to Jews under the previous Russian regime, as had college education, and passports in the new Poland were still difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. The child would have to be smuggled out of the country. A German friend from Breslau arrived one sunny afternoon in an open convertible. Michel was excited at the prospect of the journey, which he saw as a grand adventure despite the welter of rules that seemed to govern it. Advice and instructions were piled upon him. Most important of all, he was told that during the journey he was not to speak at all in the presence of other people or attract attention in any way.

His mother pretended to be happy and excited about the journey as she saw him off. But as the car sped away and he turned to wave goodbye, he saw Freida collapse to the ground. Michel squirmed in his seat and wanted to turn back, but was assured with a comforting, adult nod from the driver that everything was as it should be.
[12]

It was a long journey that took all day. The driver spoke no Polish, and Michel no German, but they drove along comfortably enough in silence. The hood of the car was down and it was a sunny day. The man occasionally turned to the child beside him and smiled kindly. Somewhere near the border he pulled the car over to the side of the road and bought punnets of the first cherries of the season. He handed one to Michel, who ate the delicious fresh fruit greedily.

They crossed the border without incident. The man seemed familiar with the German frontier guards who waved them through after only a perfunctory inspection. The young charge was delivered to his aunt in the old part of the city of Breslau. He was delighted to see Idessa, who could not have been happier to have him. Michel had shed his first identity as a Polish child, and was about to enter his life as a German youth.

And suddenly he could breathe.

As a child, Michel adored Germany. The journey from Poland had been a passage from darkness into light, his arrival rebirth and liberation. True, the financial circumstances of the Weimar Republic were disastrous in the wake of the First World War (in 1914 the mark exchanged at four to the dollar; by November 1923 it was 130 million to one) but this hardly concerned a young boy who felt he had been delivered from hell. The family seemed to have everything and lived comfortably. His health improved dramatically -although he still had to be watched at night - and while he was a rather serious child for his years, he was adventurous and enjoyed life to the full. Slowly, the trauma began to fade. His mother visited him as often as she was able. Sometimes she would travel on a business passport that strictly limited the number of days the bearer was allowed to stay out of the country. On other occasions she would take great risks to enter Germany illegally. Even if his mother arrived in the dead of night Michel could sense her in the house, and her silent presence at the end of the bed was enough to wake him. ‘I would feel just a touch on my foot when I was sleeping and know it was my mother.’

The adults led him to believe that he was living in the most civilised country in the world, and his experience confirmed it. Breslau was the biggest and most important city in eastern Germany, with more than six hundred thousand inhabitants, and was a mixture of two cultures: old-world bourgeois-merchant and modern-industrial. A bishopric for a thousand years, the city had a sombre, no-nonsense burghers’ beauty and stolid charm. It had once been a fortress but Napoleon had ordered the destruction of the castle keep and walls, and only the moat remained. The city had a university, theatres, several newspapers and a number of attractive parks. It also had its monumental modern structures, such as the concert hall built in 1913 boasting the biggest cupola and organ in the world. The blocks of flats close to the factories in the working-class area were a uniform gloomy grey, but the young Michel felt he was living in paradise.
[13]
He had begun to learn German immediately on his arrival, fell in love with the language and made rapid progress. ‘I didn’t want to hear the Polish language, and didn’t speak it. As quickly as I learned German, so I erased Polish. It was total rejection.’ He was also taught to ski in the mountains of Silesia, and from the age of seven grew up on skis. ‘A winter without skis was unthinkable. I was not always the best, but the most daring.’ His aunt taught him to dance, something that became a lifelong love. He was taken to the opera and the concert hall, and classical music became important at an early age - primarily Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin. ‘I couldn’t imagine life without music. I wouldn’t go to sleep without listening to classical music’ He was also obliged to take piano lessons, a ten-year sentence that produced little result. ‘It was not handled well. I loved music but hated to practise. I resented the imposition of those daily sessions.’ It was an early example of how not to teach. ‘When I finally gave the piano up I played the trumpet to join the school orchestra, and because it was my own choice I loved it. I was very loud but not particularly good.’

At the age of seven Michel met a German girl his age who initiated him into the mysteries of sex. ‘She was a sweet little girl and we used to play together. She wanted to play a doctor and nurse game that was new to me and we went to the basement of her building. So we had fun, naked. But we were surprised by an old man who saw us
en passant
and walked away. It was terrible for me to be discovered like that. Terrible! I felt so guilty and ashamed!’ Michel was so bothered by the experience that he confessed everything to his aunt. ‘Idessa sat down with me and talked very simply about growing up and sex and love. She told me there was no reason to feel shame. She said that sex should be connected to love to make it meaningful and beautiful. “But not now! Wait until you grow up.”’

Other interests were encouraged, perhaps to steer the youngster away from precocious sex, and an early love of animals developed. ‘I grew up identifying with all life, and this extended to animal life. I developed a love and an understanding for animals, and ended up with dogs, cats and eighteen birds.’ He was given a canary named Mouki. ‘A wonderful singer! We were friends, and I always left the door to his cage open. In the morning when I had breakfast I would call him and he would come and perch on the table.’

A mate was found to keep Mouki company, and other birds followed. The family apartment in Breslau had a large balcony overlooking a garden and Michel and his birds colonised it. Half of the balcony was turned into a gigantic birdcage, modelled on one seen on a visit to the zoo, complete with grass, elaborate perches and a live tree. The outside cage was connected directly to Michel’s bedroom through a window. ‘I developed good personal relationships with all the birds, and they would fly around my room. I called to them individually and they would perch on my finger.’

The childish interest developed into a passion, and eventually led to a life-changing insight. At the age of eleven Michel was taken on a summer holiday in the mountains. His room had a terrace, and he discovered a bird’s nest with eggs under the eaves. At first the birds flew off at his approach, but slowly they grew accustomed to his presence. ‘I was very curious so every day I sat at a respectable distance until they finally accepted me. I watched the chicks hatch and saw how the parents taught them. They taught them. In bird language. The chicks learned to react to certain sounds - there were sounds for danger, so that they would keep quiet, and others for food when they were about to be fed. This was language, communication. And I learned with the little birds and found it fascinating.

‘They had to learn how to fly, and to be daring. Some of the chicks were timid, some courageous. The very timid ones had to be pushed out of the nest. I observed definite individual behaviour in each chick almost as soon as it hatched.’ These observations led to the conclusion that most animal behaviour was learned, not instinctive. It was an insight that changed the way he thought - that one of the powerful innate drives in all living beings is the urge to learn.

He became absorbed in mythology and devoured books on the subject. His imagination had been captured by the Romans and Greeks at an early age; as he grew older he was inspired by the romantic heroes of German mythology. He took a handsome leather-bound volume of
Legends of the Gods: Treasures of German Mythology
from the bookshelves of his uncle’s library, and read by torchlight beneath the sheets long into the night.
[14]
‘They were stories about values and about heroes who stood up for those values. I completely absorbed these Nordic heroes. Siegfried was a good example.’ This led to a love for the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas he heard at the Breslau opera house, especially the tetralogy
Der Ring der Nibelungen
.

Later, during the war when he learned that the great Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite, a deep conflict was created. Wagner, an extreme radical and revolutionary of his day, was Adolf Hitler’s ideological mentor and the composer’s political writings were his favourite reading.
[15]
‘Even though I learned very early on to separate the personality and character of an artist from his work, I could not listen to Wagner during the war. It took me years to go back to him.’

The German educational system of Gymnasiums demanded high academic requirements in order to move from one class to another. Only those pupils who were selected had a chance of a good education - as long as they kept up and could fulfil the academic requirements year after year. Although Michel excelled in the German language, and was good at sport - especially running, swimming and skiing - he deliberately chose to be average in most subjects. This made him popular. He understood that as a non-German he would have to do better than his peers to be accepted as an equal, but did not want to be identified with
Die Streber
- the swots. Instead he found that the combination of his independent nature and prowess at athletics was enough to make him accepted as a natural leader.