The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (17 page)

There was also the case of a Non-Deportable in the camp who was in love with a Deportable. He knew full well what would happen and also asked to be allowed to accompany his loved one on the transport. The authorities consented with cordial indifference. ‘It was so difficult to grapple with the realisation that there were creatures in uniform “doing their job” who could impassively send people to their deaths, yet there were other gentle humans who chose to die for love.’

As the days went by Michel was alarmed once again to feel the allure and pull of the Siren Song. ‘Now it mocked me:
So, you have delayed your fate. So? You are locked into your destiny and you cannot escape. You may as well sink into my embrace, let yourself be taken.’’
The temptation to give in never left him, and he had to be forever on his guard. ‘The seductiveness of its appeal tortured me and never failed to amaze.’

Only by concentrating fully on the future could he hope to believe he had one. He filled every waking moment by making impossible plans, but it was lonely work without comrades-in-arms. In his fantasies he yearned to escape and strike back, but still had no firm idea of how to avoid the next transport. When the train pulled into the siding beside the camp, the prison population was once again summoned to the yard. This time the guards had devised a more organised and thorough system and ordered everyone to gather in lines in alphabetical order. People seemed to obey like sheep. Michel deliberately stood in the wrong line.

As inmates jostled one another and attempted to comply with orders, the French guards searched the barracks thoroughly. They were not shy of using their bayonets to prod difficult-to-reach hiding places, and one or two inmates were dragged bleeding to the cattle cars. And this time the infirm in the camp hospital were not excluded, and several patients were ordered from their beds and forced on to the train, including those who had earlier taken poison or slashed their wrists in suicide attempts.

The roll was called and, one by one, men and women walked passively to their fate. Only a very few offered Résistance. As one struggling man was carried on to the train by guards, he screamed in English and in French,
‘Je suis un citoyen Américain!
I am an American! I am an American citizen! I demand to see my consul!’ He was ignored.

‘Kroskof, Michel!’ a guard called. Michel willed himself not to react and to remain stock-still. ‘It is surprisingly difficult to force yourself not to respond to your own identity.’

‘KROSKOF, MICHEL!’ the guard shouted impatiently.

As no one stepped forward the guard conferred with an officer. An examination of all the Rs in the line failed to produce Kroskof, a notation was made on a clipboard and the roll call continued. In the muddle of activity Michel moved unobtrusively to join the Non-Deportables who stood at one end of the platform glumly watching the proceedings. One man waved a handkerchief in the direction of the cattle cars, as if waving goodbye to someone going on holiday. Michel tried to look inconspicuous and indifferent to his surroundings. He watched as the tragic pair of lovers - the French woman with the long black hair and her Jewish husband - climbed aboard their respective cattle cars.

The long, hot afternoon wore on. The process seemed interminable and people began to faint in the heat. The guards themselves grew increasingly bad-tempered and prodded and kicked their victims. Despite the blazing August weather the guards sealed each boxcar as it was filled. There was nothing in the wagons but a thin layer of straw on the floors, buckets for toilets, and an inadequate water supply. As inmates locked in cars waited in the Provencal heat they begged for a breath of air and extra water. Occasionally, guards delivered packages to the cars and, in a surreal touch, the YMCA provided boxes of books. The boarding process dragged on into the night as deportees - three hundred adults, mostly all German and Austrian Jews - were ordered aboard the cattle cars.

The Non-Deportables eventually wandered back to their quarters, and Michel went with them. He picked one of the many empty spots, lay down and remained wide awake, braced for the locomotive’s parting death whistle. The train remained at the platform throughout the stifling night, delayed for one bureaucratic reason or another, while its occupants sweltered and suffered inside the cattle cars.

In the early hours of the morning yet another sad human drama was played out. The guards went from boxcar to boxcar calling the name of a woman. The precious piece of paper provided a last-minute reprieve, and she was eventually found and escorted from the train. Michel learned later that a friend or relative had arrived with papers from a foreign consulate. The tragedy of the situation was that the woman was the one whom the Non-Deportable man had insisted on accompanying. Their fates had now been reversed, and it was the man who was doomed.

The train finally pulled off in the early morning. The whistle blew.
‘That sound!
I felt if I did not get out soon my emotions would die, and my body would quickly follow.’

The Vichy government might have been able to delude itself that by ridding itself of foreign Jews - many of whom, they argued, came from Germany in the first place - they had not lost their moral compass. But the fate of the children of the soon-to-be-murdered was more complicated.

Whatever reasons were concocted to rationalise the deportations of the adults, the suffering of the children was impossible to disguise. At Drancy the number of orphans grew as their parents were sent to Auschwitz. The children had their names inscribed on wooden dog tags, except for the very little ones, who often didn’t know their family names. Groups of a hundred lived in bare rooms, with buckets for toilets on the landings. A diet of cabbage soup gave them acute diarrhoea. Soiled underclothes were rinsed in cold water without soap. Knots of semi-naked children milling about waiting for their underwear to dry became a permanent feature of the camp. Another was the sound of their weeping.

At first, Nazi deportation plans excluded children, limiting deportees to the ages of sixteen to forty. Indeed, before the deportation of children began, the Germans had sometimes spirited orphans from the Occupied Zone across the Demarcation Line, although Vichy was not happy to have this responsibility foisted upon them. Prime Minister Laval now requested that children under sixteen from the Unoccupied Zone be deported. He believed that not splitting up families was the right thing to do - a grotesque distortion of Vichy’s pious view on the sanctity of the family.

The request was passed along to Berlin, where there was a three-week delay, suggesting reluctance even on the part of the Nazis. Finally, after repeated pressure from France, Adolf Eichmann announced that Jewish children and old people could be deported. It was a concession. Previously, the orphans had caused all sorts of troublesome administrative problems, as well as political embarrassment, when their parents were sent separately to their deaths. Prime Minister Laval again made it sound like an act of compassion that in future children would be deported with their parents. Now they would be allowed to die alongside their kith and kin.

And the orphans created by earlier deportations would also be sent. These unfortunates were packed into freight cars in batches forty to sixty strong. French police accompanied their wretched cargo to the border, where they were handed over. Six thousand children were deported to Auschwitz from Drancy in 1942 alone; more than a thousand were below the age of six.
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German involvement was minimal. ‘No one and nothing could deter us from carrying out the policy of purging France of undesirable elements without nationality,’ Laval declared.

Behind the scenes the deportations created diplomatic waves, and the United States remonstrated with Laval. He asked sarcastically why America didn’t take the children, a point the French government had made repeatedly over the years, with some justification, when criticised by foreign powers. This time the US State Department offered a thousand visas with the possibility of a further five thousand for Jewish children, if the French authorities would agree to grant them permission to leave.

Laval went to the Germans with the proposal. Unsurprisingly, they raised the objection that a mass emigration of children to the United States to save them from deportation would become an occasion for anti-German and anti-French propaganda. As a result Vichy made the unrealistic demand of the Americans that there should be no publicity. Negotiations bogged down. At one stage the French agreed to issue five hundred emigration visas, but added so many qualifications that they were never granted. The instincts of the men in charge supported an ingrained bureaucratic tendency to avoid taking any course that would upset administrative routine, even one that would save children’s lives. The simple truth of it was that the children helped fulfil the quota requirement.
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Michel fought to stave off total dejection by scouring the camp once more for some hiding place where he might disappear for a few hours to avoid the next transport. He was now a fugitive within a prison camp, as the camp authorities continued to search for him. He found nothing - until he reconsidered the sealed wooden passageway that connected the two main buildings. He had initially dismissed the shaft as an impossible option after a close inspection of the doors at either end of the passage. They were not only locked, but had planks of wood nailed across them. However, the view of the structure from the courtyard gave him a new idea. Small windows were interspersed along the passageway’s length, big enough for an undernourished inmate of Les Milles to slip through. The problem was twofold: to reach the windows and remain unseen.

He took a closer look at the small shack that stood beneath and slightly back from the passageway. The gabled top of its sharply sloping roof was conceivably close enough to one of the windows for an energetic and lucky jump. This was difficult enough, but there was also the problem of climbing on to the roof of the shack in the first place. Michel made his way to the second floor of the barracks and looked out of the window. It was just possible to drop on to the roof, but any attempt would be in full view of the courtyard. ‘If I was seen by the guards I was lost. But what alternative did I have? I was lost anyway.’

Suddenly, an order came over the loudspeaker to assemble in the yard. Desperate to try his plan, he fought against the human tide swarming from the barracks and made his way up the stairs to the second floor. Guards were already moving people from room to room as he climbed outside the barracks window and leapt on to the roof of the shack below. He expected at any moment to hear a shout or a gunshot, and dared not glance behind him. He looked up at the window of the passageway. It now seemed much further away than he had originally estimated, an impossible distance. He jumped and stretched for the ledge, barely gripping it with his fingertips. He hauled himself up and tumbled through the window.

Inside he found a rusting conveyor belt that had once been used to transport supplies from one building to the other in the days when the camp had operated as a brickworks. Michel squeezed beneath it. Lying face down he could see through the cracks in the wooden plank flooring into the courtyard below. The sound of people being herded towards the train drifted up to him.

This time the guards conducted a thorough and systematic search of the building, checking the internal ID cards of the Non-Deportables. He heard a number of guards talking about the need to catch Michel Kroskof and discussing the possibility of the passageway as a hiding place as they looked down upon it. Moments later he heard one help the other down from the window on to the roof of the shed. Michel feared that he had been either spotted or betrayed. ‘It was all over. I knew that my life was being counted in minutes. I felt caught.’ The chase for me was on.

Michel had never considered himself a pious man, but now he cried out silently to his God. ‘I made a vow. A solemn covenant. “If I survive...”’ The terms of the covenant were to remain a secret between the man and his God until he was able to fulfil them, but he swore to dedicate his life to the task.

There was a sudden cry and clatter as the guard who had been hoisted on to the roof of the shack lost his footing and tumbled noisily to the ground. His companion shouted out and left the window. He heard scuffling below him and assumed other guards were helping their fallen comrade. Then there was silence. Michel waited anxiously for their return. Time passed. The guards did not come back. The accident seemed to have taken the impetus out of the search.

Later, different guards gathered in the yard, talking and smoking cigarettes. Michel presumed they had finished their day’s work of loading the cattle cars with their human cargo. The men seemed intent on loitering endlessly in the one spot. He was painfully uncomfortable and longed to change position. The blood to his left arm was cut off and it became dead, while his legs were agonisingly cramped. Added to the discomfort was an ever-increasing urge to urinate. His position made it impossible to cross his legs, and he was fearful that a single drop might fall to the ground and give him away. ‘I had only willpower to fight off the incredible urge to urinate that lasted for several hours until it was dark, when the guards had moved away and I dared to move.’
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The train was full and sealed, but as always it did not move off until late. Once again its doleful whistle took Michel to the edge of despair. Hours passed. He remained cramped in his hiding place and dared not risk leaving it in the dark for fear of breaking his neck. Once again the camp was almost empty except for the Non-Deportables. He remained under the conveyor belt throughout the night and left at first light. He climbed out of the window and dropped on to the roof of the shack with what seemed like a terrible noise. He looked around him. The yard was deserted and he seemed to have attracted no attention. He lowered himself to the ground and crept to the cover of the barracks’ wall, massaging his aching muscles. ‘I had escaped once again, only to remain in hopeless confinement in constant risk of deportation.’