The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (19 page)

‘Yes. He’s my husband.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be at the gate soon.’

The woman moved off in the direction of the camp and Michel pushed forward. He had calculated on having several hours - a full day even - in which to escape. Now he realised he might have only minutes. Once the woman arrived at the gate and the real Sam Fischer presented himself the alarm would be sounded.

It was a dark, cloudy night as he jumped a ditch and began to run through fields, cutting across country. Scarcely fifteen minutes passed before he heard the wail of a siren and the barking of dogs.

V - Fighting back

As Michel moved away from Les Milles he grew disoriented in the dark, and lost his bearings as he criss-crossed farmland to throw off his pursuers. He began to fear he might actually be heading back in the direction of the camp. At first he heard motor bikes and cars, and the occasional bark of a dog, and at one point a patrol came so close that he could hear them talking.

As the night wore on the clouds began to clear and he was able to locate the North Star. But the moonlight made it more difficult for him to conceal himself, although he could now see the patrols searching for him. He was driven to exhaustion, moving fast when he thought it was safe and hiding in ditches at the sight of humans. At daybreak he lay low behind a wall, and finally emerged on to a country road at around nine in the morning.

He struck out on foot in the direction of Marseille, stopping to seek shelter with friends he knew lived at a village en route. He had originally met the couple in Nice, but when they moved to the region of Aix en Provence they came to visit him in Les Milles. They had even brought three large suitcases of his belongings from the old apartment, thoughtfully packed by Suzanne’s mother. The guards stole everything. His friends were now afraid of having him in the house, but gave him food and some money and led him to a shelter in a wood to spend the night.

The next morning he went into Marseille and arrived at the home of his friend Simone, whom he had known since his university days in Bordeaux, only to discover that her husband had been arrested on suspicion of Résistance activities. It was no longer even safe to hide in the attic. He moved on and made his way to the main post office where he sent a telegram to the address given to him for the Corrèze Résistance by Yvonne, the woman who had visited him in the logging camp. He followed the instructions she had given him to arrange a meeting, coded in a seemingly innocuous message. But Michel made the clandestine message so obscure no one in the Corrèze Maquis could understand it. The telegram was passed from hand to hand until it reached Yvonne herself. She knew immediately that it had come from Michel and travelled to Marseille to make the rendezvous.

Yvonne took him to a suburb on the outskirts of town where a wealthy couple connected to the Résistance gave them rooms in a country mansion set in a large, overgrown garden. Despite her youth and flirtatious manner, Yvonne was a veteran of the Maquis and had a cool head in a crisis. Her handbag bulged not with cosmetics but with all the paraphernalia to prepare false papers: inks, stamps, gum, and a cornucopia of stolen travel passes, identity and ration cards.

‘What name do you want?’ she asked cheerfully.

It was to be the first of five identities Michel was to assume in the Résistance. Impressed by the risks Yvonne seemed prepared to take, he asked to keep his first name and suggested it might be convenient if he took her family name. In that way they could pose as man and wife and spend a few days together. ‘She liked the idea. And we had a very tender time in each other’s arms.’

It was one of the first of many brief encounters entered into during the war. ‘These were intense periods, dramatic times. Life was dangerous and uncertain. No one dared think of a future, let alone a life together... only the present, the moment. Everything was compressed, including emotions. Men and women who met for a day or two had a time together full of feeling because they did not have the luxury of stretching the relationship out. They were immediately open. Nothing was casual - the opposite of the sexual revolution of the sixties. The romance, the emotion and the physical were all connected whether it was short-lived or not. It was love, not just sex. The war pushed people together, and then the war pulled people apart.’

Yvonne returned to Correze and Michel moved on to Lyon with his new identity. He made contact with the Résistance through a friend he had known in Nice, Sammy Lattès, who had connections with a well-known publishing family. ‘From that moment on I decided that the time for fighting was at hand. I was tired of being an impotent prisoner. Neither Vichy France nor the Germans would ever again take me without a fight.’

Lyon was proud of its reputation as the capital of the Résistance. It had first experienced the German military in June 1940 when the Place Bellecour had been turned into a parking lot for Panzer tanks. Half the city’s half a million population had fled so there were few people on the streets to witness the arrival of the conquerors and see the swastika replace the tricolour over the town hall. An eyewitness observed: ‘What silence! One could sense the flow of the Rhône.’
[89]
Three weeks later the city was placed in the Free Zone, under the terms of the armistice, and the Germans duly departed. They left behind a ghoulish, racist souvenir: discovered in the cells of the préfecture were the rotting corpses of twenty-six black Senegalese soldiers, members of one of the few French military units to stand its ground in defence of the town.

The residents of Lyon had no desire to see the occupiers return and a Résistance movement began to take form. The city had a long history of rebellion: there had been uprisings against the clergy in the thirteenth century, the lynching of usurers in the sixteenth, and opposition to the Jacobins in Paris during the revolution when close to two thousand Lyonnais were guillotined in a period of four months. And even when the Germans had been in the city liberty remained demonstrably close, with the border of neutral Switzerland only eighty miles away.
[90]

There were three major Résistance movements in the Free Zone centred in Lyon: Combat, Liberation-Sud and Franc Tireurs Partisans (FTP). The groups operated independently of one another and were often in conflict as each was ideologically distinct and pursued its own agenda. The FTP recruited from the ranks of the French Communist Party, which was slavish to Moscow - a trend that continued until the end of the Cold War. The Communists had been inactive during the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and supported of the Germans, and the FTP only came into existence after Germany invaded Russia. It took a decision, without consulting other Résistance groups, to pursue a policy of assassination against German occupation soldiers, triggering the wholesale taking and shooting of hostages. The FTP also had a secret agenda to gain control of the Résistance, separate it from the Free French, and provoke a national insurrection at the time of liberation to bring the Communists to power.
[91]
‘We didn’t know any of this then,’ Michel says. ‘Just that the Communists had been with the Nazis in the beginning, so we didn’t trust them.’

In the early days the Résistance as a whole was disorganised, divided and largely ineffective. The Maquis in general displayed an amateurish quality exacerbated by factional rivalries. It was said that a member of the Maquis in Lyon could not walk a dozen yards without running into a secret comrade-in-arms he had to pretend not to know. At first the clandestine excesses of
résistants
became a national joke. Some of them actually adopted dark glasses, false beards and briefcases.

The risks of concentrating so many
résistants
in a single city were obvious. Security was abysmal. They always tended to choose the same spots in the city for secret rendezvous, such as the Port Morand, the steps of the municipal theatre, and ‘under the tail of the bronze horse’ at the equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the Place Bellecour. The desire to attack and hurt the enemy, while at the same time remain secretive and discreet, was a conflict impossible to overcome. Haphazard recruitment, youthful boasting, inexperience and lack of training often led to disastrous results when the arrest of a single individual inevitably implicated a chain of colleagues.
[92]

The effective reorganisation of the Résistance was largely the work of Jean Moulin, a man whose bravery and exploits became one of the lasting legends of the war. Small, reserved and nondescript, he did not look much like a hero and seemed cast more in the mould of a senior bureaucrat than a secret warrior. As the youngest regional governor in France, of the Departément Eure et Loire, he had been arrested by the Germans in Chartres, where only eight hundred of the population remained after the German invasion. He was tortured when he refused to sign a document stating that Senegalese troops of the French Army had committed atrocities against civilians. He was released after he tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a piece of broken glass. Vichy immediately relieved him of his position on the grounds of his ‘attachment to the ancien regime’.

He spent a year in the Free Zone making contact with Résistance groups, and then made a dangerous journey under an assumed name to London, where he joined General de Gaulle and the Free French. At the beginning of 1941 he was parachuted back into France in Provence, under the codename Max, and set to work reorganising the Résistance. His first step in the grand plan was the creation of the Armee Secrete (Secret Army), designed to co-ordinate paramilitary action among the various Résistance groups in the Free Zone. Each was reluctant to accept a single, Gaullist command structure, and it took considerable skill to convince and cajole the various factions. The Communists of the FTP refused to integrate until they were forced into making an alliance when Moulin cut off military subsidies from London.

It was this new structure - the Secret Army - that Michel now joined, travelling between Lyon and Grenoble. He had arrived in Lyon in September 1942 at a time when the popular mood was slowly turning against the Vichy government and the Résistance was beginning to take more effective shape. Attitudes among the French at large were changing towards the Germans following savage reprisals against hostages and the introduction of a forced-labour law. Volunteers had failed to present themselves in sufficient numbers to go and work in Germany with the result that Vichy now drafted young Frenchmen. Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) affected a large section of the population so that many previously uncommitted young men joined the Maquis.

The Grenoble Résistance undertook to provide Michel with a complete set of ‘genuine’ false papers. He was sent to see the mayor of Villard de Lans, a small town in the heart of the Vercors region of the Alps, who issued ID papers in the name of Michel Sberro, a Frenchman from a bombed-out village in Tunisia. ‘After the Allies invaded north Africa we used these identities because the Nazis couldn’t check them.’ He was also given demobilisation papers and a
carte d’alimentation
that enabled him to receive ration coupons.

Michel’s job was to recruit the disaffected to the cause.

‘Vichy France made my job easier with the forced-labour decree.’ Many young Frenchmen balked at the idea of going to work in Germany after the Résistance explained that they would, in effect, be fighting for the Nazis. ‘I told them it was their choice: “If you go to Germany you will replace a worker who will go to fight. So go and fight for Nazi Germany or for France.’” In fact, Michel was well aware that the choice was not so simple. ‘It often set them against their families. Pétainistes did not want their sons to avoid the draft and put themselves outside the law. So many wavered, unable to decide. Anyone who did not go automatically became an outlaw. But I could offer these men the opportunity to join a whole army of outlaws known as the Maquis.’
[93]
The impassioned call to fight for the historic French principles of liberty, equality and fraternity earned Michel the nickname among his fellow
résistants
of ‘Le Patriote’.

He worked with a Catholic priest in Lyon, Abbé AlexAndré Glasberg, whose humanitarian work inevitably led him into underground activity. ‘Lyon was one of the few cities in France where the churches opened their doors offering sanctuary,’ Michel explained, ‘but the Vichy authorities blocked the doors and prevented food being brought in. Then they waited for the Jews to starve or come out and be captured.’ Born a Polish Jew, Glasberg was a rumpled, myopic, untidy bear of a man who wore a tentlike black cassock. He managed to obtain the release of more than fifty adults from Gurs alone, hid Jewish families and provided them with false papers. He charmed, inveigled and browbeat mayors, prefects and policemen to agree to his plans for centres and residences to receive Jews liberated from camps. Glasberg became a one-man amateur social service, and the chaos of the times meant that numerous bureaucrats bowed to the assumed authority of this eccentric and troublesome priest. Later, he became openly defiant of Vichy and finally moved into armed Résistance.
[94]
Michel and Glasberg had much in common and instantly took to each other, speaking in Yiddish together, but never in Polish.

Michel learned that the previous August, when he had been in Les Milles, the priest had witnessed a round-up of Jews in Lyon. He had gone to an empty factory on the outskirts of the city that had been converted into a camp to visit five hundred and fifty men, women and children who were to be transported to Drancy, and eventually Auschwitz. He found families huddled together in the dark, frightened and confused, and tried to persuade the parents to hand over their children to his care so that he might save them. It was sad work, but he officially took care of eighty-four children - and a further forty unofficially - and moved them to safe houses in Lyon.