The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (8 page)

One of the distinguished Viennese who had previously put a brave face on events was Sigmund Freud. Although he had promised his family to leave if the Nazis ever took over, he proved reluctant when the moment came. This is my post and I can never leave it,’ he told an English colleague. The colleague responded with the story of an officer who survived the sinking of the
Titanic
who was asked why he had abandoned the ship. ‘I never left the ship, she left me,’ he replied. The argument that Austria no longer existed was a compelling one, and Freud departed for England, ‘the land of my early dreams’.
[35]

He was one of the fortunate few who acted before the Nazis purged the police and neutralised all opposition. Austria literally ceased to exist, its ancient name - Österreich - abolished and replaced with Ostmark, until even that was dropped and the country was administered as a series of districts directly from Berlin. Instead of a fading, imperial capital, Vienna became just another city of the Reich. Hitler’s revenge on the place of his youthful humiliation was complete.

Tens of thousands of Jews were jailed and their possessions confiscated, while half of the city’s one hundred and eighty thousand Jewish population attempted to purchase permission to emigrate by handing over everything they owned to the Nazis. The sole agency authorised to issue exit permits was the Office for Jewish Emigration, set up by Reinhard Heydrich of the SS. It was headed, from its inception to the end of the war, by an Austrian-born Nazi from Hitler’s home town of Linz, Karl Adolf Eichmann. Emigration was a lucrative business. Later, when there was no more money to be taken from the Jews, the office switched its efforts to extermination. In the weeks immediately following
Anschluss
, the concentration camp of Mauthausen was set up on the north bank of the Danube near Enns, saving the Nazis the trouble of deporting its enemies to camps in Germany.
[36]

Michel had been living in Vienna under a Polish passport, the same one he had used to leave Germany and obtain residence in France. He was now summoned to the Polish Embassy where the consul-general confiscated his passport. The Polish parliament had passed a law introducing a slew of new regulations under which citizenship could be taken away from Poles living abroad. This was aimed at preventing the Nazis from pushing tens of thousands of Polish Jews legally living in Germany - and now Austria - across the border.
[37]
Michel had no desire to return to Poland to live, but was now cut off from his family. Suddenly, at a stroke, he was stateless. ‘I became vogelfrei - fair game. It was an impossible situation for me because I also relied on my passport for my legal residence in France as well as Austria. Now I had no papers and no legal residence anywhere. And I could not travel. I had to go into hiding from that time, moving from one friend’s apartment to another.’

Cut off from parents, family and friends in Poland, he was helpless. A well-placed relative in the government in Warsaw tried to use his influence, but to no effect. Michel explored every possibility but there was nothing he could do to counter the Poles’ arbitrary action. Finally, through an Austrian friend, he was able to obtain a document identifying him as a stateless person. It was not much, but it was better than nothing.

The city’s numerous embassies and consulates were besieged by Jews trying to emigrate. Endless lines of desperate people waited day and night to be interviewed. ‘I stood in such a line at the American consulate and was told to forget it. I was treated like an undesirable. And the consulate turned people away even though the quota was never filled. Inhuman, cruel, despicable action.’

The
Anschluss
created a Jewish refugee problem of immense proportions. American president Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated an international conference in Evian, France, where thirty-two nations gathered to find a solution. In fact the conference was merely a kind of moral posturing and an act of political hypocrisy on the part of Roosevelt. Terms agreed in advance laid down that no country would be expected to receive a greater number of emigrants than was permitted under existing legislation. Immigration law in the US was notoriously restrictive at this time. No country offered sanctuary or concrete help, and the conference achieved nothing except to set up an Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees, which in the fullness of time also achieved nothing.

The conference had been opened with a strong statement by its American chairman that the time had come for governments to act, and to act promptly.
Newsweek
reported: ‘Most government representatives acted promptly by slamming their doors against Jewish refugees.’ The Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
crowed in a headline: NOBODY WANTS THEM. Hitler himself, who had offered to transport the Jews anywhere on luxury liners, gleefully drove the point home. They complain in these democracies about the unfathomable cruelty that Germany... uses in trying to get rid of the Jews... But it does not mean that these democratic countries have now become ready to replace their hypocritical remarks with acts of help. On the contrary, they affirm with complete coolness that over there, evidently, there is no room! In short, no help, but preaching, certainly.’
[38]

At this stage, the Germans still wished to remove Jews from Germany and send them elsewhere. There was even a half-baked idea considered in senior Nazi circles to resettle them on the French island of Madagascar. Michel found the world’s rejection a moral outrage. ‘At the beginning the Germans would allow anyone to leave who had somewhere to go; their aim was to have a judenrein - Jew-free Germany. But there was not one single country - not one single country on the face of the earth that would accept Jews. They were undesirable. There was nowhere for them to go, not a desert or a jungle, not the North or South Poles. Nowhere.’

The world’s apathetic response to the fate of the Jews was a surprise to the Germans, an unexpected bonus that led directly in 1942 to the policy of the Final Solution and mass murder. ‘The Nazis were given the green light by the civilised world and decided to get rid of all the Jews through the chimney. The total indifference of the world was an unpardonable sin because it was more than the physical destruction of human beings, it was the spiritual destruction of human beings - the destruction of hope.

‘I make a sharp distinction between physical death and the death of the mind - the death of hope. People can die as martyrs with the belief system intact. But to go to your death with hope and faith taken away, to feel rejected by the world, to have belief torn from your heart, you become nothing... nobody.

‘There were those who despaired and found the situation hopeless. But it is not part of my character to be nihilistic or even cynical. I was not prepared to let reality overwhelm me. I wanted to find a way to fight back.’

It was a bleak time when nothing seemed to work and hope receded hour by hour. One day Suzanne met Michel in a café in a state of great excitement and announced she had found the solution to their problems. A British priest had generously offered to get pre-dated baptismal documents identifying them as Christians, and this would enable them to leave the country.

‘And you can do that?’ Michel asked.

‘We must go right away.’ Suzanne glowed with excitement and hope. ‘This will save our lives.’

‘How could you offer to do such a thing?’ Michel said, his anger building. ‘I am a Jew and I have to survive as a Jew.’

‘It’s just to get false papers,’ Suzanne said, exasperated. ‘It isn’t real. Does it mean so much to you to use fake papers?’

‘No, it does not mean much to use fake papers, but to deny my Jewishness and owe my life to that, how could I live with myself? I have to face myself every day and every night -how will I after this, denying who I am?’

They both became increasingly angry. Suzanne felt Michel was being stubborn and unrealistic, while he believed he had been asked to abandon the bedrock of his identity. He told Suzanne that he was shocked she did not know him better than to suggest such a course.

‘It will save our lives!’ she insisted.

‘Save your own life, not mine.’

‘How can you say no?’

‘Look, you do what you have to do. It’s your life. You have to live your life and I have to live mine. But if this is what you want to do, we have to separate.’

They parted angrily. ‘I felt strongly for her. It was a loving relationship and I did not want to break up. But I really didn’t want to see her just then.’ Suzanne was the first to make overtures, which Michel resisted until he was certain she fully understood and accepted his position. He believed absolutely that any compromise made at that dangerous time would prove fatal in the struggle ahead.

They did not see each other for ten days, until one night he returned to the apartment he was staying in, turned on the light and found Suzanne curled up in his bed. She had convinced his landlady to let her in and had waited patiently for his return. Still he held back physically, although he was deeply in love. He was moved that she should offer herself to him, but felt he could give nothing in return. For Suzanne to be involved with a stateless Jewish student in Hitler’s Vienna exposed her to great dangers. He explained that he intended to find a way to return to France to re-establish his residence status, and would then try to arrange for her to join him.

Suzanne became emotional and insisted that Michel take her with him. ‘You cannot go without me!’

‘I’m vogelfrei - it’s too dangerous.’

‘And it’s safe for a Jew to remain in Austria?’ Suzanne asked drily. ‘If I want to share my life with you I must also share the danger!’

The courage of Suzanne brought the lovers closer together in their final months in Vienna. But Michel was reluctant to risk exposing her to the dangers of illegal flight. He told Suzanne that they could only go forward with the plan if her mother gave consent. Secretly, Michel hoped this would not be given and expected the mother to convince her daughter to take the safer course.

Suzanne was an only child, a minor, and adored, but Frau Adler was an unusual woman. ‘In normal times this meeting, and the subject of this meeting, would be absolutely unthinkable,’ she said flatly. ‘But this is not a normal time. It is an extraordinary time demanding extraordinary measures. I know how Suzanne feels. All I can do is to give both of you my blessing.’ And on a practical note, Frau Adler obtained a document from city hall bestowing legal majority on her daughter.

The obvious route to take to France at this time was through Switzerland or Italy, but Michel felt that both would be strongly guarded by German soldiers. His plan was to cross Germany and enter France across the Siegfried-Maginot Line, the supposedly impregnable network of underground frontier fortresses. ‘It was so crazy and unlikely that nobody would think of it - that was my logic.’

The couple left Vienna in October 1938 and crossed into Germany without incident. They made their way to Saarbrucken, the German town near the French border where Michel had crossed illegally before. They spent the night at a friend’s house and made their way the next day to the hill country, close to Voelklingen, abutting the Siegfried-Maginot Line. The plan was to observe the German patrols and sneak across between them. They watched patiently hour after hour, looking for an opportunity to make their move, but the moment they tried to cross they were spotted and caught. They were taken to a guard post where they sat in silence, listening to the rain drumming on the roof, awaiting the arrival of the Gestapo from Saarbrücken.

The officers turned out to be young men in the long black leather overcoats that were one of the trademarks of their profession. Michel and Suzanne were pushed into the back of a car and driven for what seemed like hours along a lonely road through woods. The uncertainty of the journey was close to unbearable, and they did not pass a single car in either direction. The driver eventually turned off on to a rough track and bumped along until they reached a low, camouflaged Gestapo building hidden among large, dripping trees. They were taken inside and interrogated in a straightforward question-and-answer session that seemed to bore their captors. Papers were filled out and stamped. One of the Gestapo men then announced they were to be driven that night to Dachau, where they would be interned. They were led back to the car.

Michel and Suzanne, of course, knew all about Dachau. Michel understood that they faced a long and lonely journey across Germany and that the present moment was possibly the only hope of escape. As they approached the car he gave a signal to Suzanne to run into the woods. She broke away and made for the trees, but one of the Gestapo officers gave chase and quickly captured her. Infuriated, he dragged her back to the car. His colleague unholstered his Luger and began shouting that he was going to shoot them both where they stood.

‘Why don’t you?’ Michel yelled, losing his temper. ‘Go on - shoot! What do you want from us? You want the Jews out of the country, and that’s all we’re trying to do - leave the country! And you bring us back! Where should we go? We’re not allowed to stay, we’re not allowed to go! You want to shoot,
shoot!
’

At first the Gestapo men seemed stunned by Michel’s outburst, but then they grew quiet, perhaps checked by the inescapable logic of his argument. They waved their guns and ordered the prisoners into the back of the car.