Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story - Hardcover

Robbins, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743202635 ISBN 13: 9780743202633

Publisher: Free Press, 2000

Synopsis

In a close-up portrait of Michel Thomas, the author of Air America paints a vivid portrait of the death camp escapee who became a resistance fighter and later, a hunter of Nazis. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Robbins is an accomplished journalist who has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Observer, The Independent and The Guardian in Great Britain and for many continental newspapers. He is the author of several books, including The Ravens and Air America, and has worked on many screenplays. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The memories of Michel Thomas stretch back to the crib: a huge but benign black dog the size of a bear viewed through the wooden bars of a playpen; the sensation of being pushed in a pram in the open air; the texture of a cloth pulled from the drawer of a sewing machine and its oily smell; the glittering silver shapes of the machine's metal frets used for different stitches, and their pleasing feel and cold metallic taste when placed in the mouth. His first erotic memory, vivid and thrilling, dates from the age of three. Crawling on the floor, he looked up at the towering figure of his young nanny and glimpsed under her skirt. The girl wore no underwear. Stretching heroically, the toddler reached up and touched bare flesh. "The naked female behind! I liked it -- I still see it!"

At a very early age he began consciously to recover and hold on to these memories of what he calls his "cradlehood." It was his first act against being overwhelmed by a hostile world.

Michel Thomas was born Moniek Kroskof, in Lodz, Poland, under the shadow of the First World War, into a prosperous Jewish family that owned a large textile manufacturing company. He was the only child of the second marriage of his mother, Freida, a strong, independent woman in her late twenties who was highly unusual for her time. Arranged marriages were then the norm among well-to-do Jewish families, and at the age of eighteen Freida had married a man considered to be from a suitable family. The relationship was a failure from the start, but instead of suffering within the marriage she rebelled and demanded a divorce. It was a scandalous decision for a young girl to make, but Freida insisted in the teeth of fierce family opposition.

She later met and married Samuel Kroskof, an engineer who had worked in the oil fields of Iran and Azerbaijan. The couple lived together in Lodz where the joy felt over the birth of a baby boy was tempered by fear of war. At the outbreak of hostilities, Poland became a battleground. As the German Army advanced towards Lodz, a part of Russian Poland at that time, the local population panicked. Poland was first partitioned by Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1772, after which the country's history became an endless cycle of insurrection and reprisal. After a nationalistic uprising in 1863, Russia imposed a harsh policy of Russification within its zone, stripping the country of all autonomy and turning it into little more than a province of the empire. Russian was adopted as the official language in schools, and the use of Polish was restricted. Jewish life became particularly difficult. Treatment of the Jews, many of whose families had lived in the city for hundreds of years, became vicious. There were daily executions by hanging of those accused by the Russians of sympathizing with the Germans, and the fact that a quarter of a million Jews served in the Russian Army did nothing to mitigate the prejudice against them. Shops and houses were looted, synagogues defiled, and hundreds of thousands of Jews living within the Russian partition were driven from their homes. They took to the road, carrying their possessions on carts and bicycles, struggling with suitcases and bundles, their children in their arms.

Samuel and Freida remained in Lodz with their baby during this terrible time of fear and privation. The city had always been an ugly industrial place of grime, smog and noise. Its factory chimneys belched foul smoke into sooty skies and the sun found it difficult to shine through the polluted air and dingy window panes. The city at war became dismal, its few scattered trees felled for firewood and its unpaved streets churned into liquid mud by troops and horses. Most of the remainder of the already diminished population fled, including the Russian bureaucracy that had been in the city for a century. Lodz became a ghost town.

When Michel was only eight months old, the German Ninth Army surrounded the city. The ensuing battle was waged on a monumental scale, the first great carnage of modern warfare, and for weeks the two armies fought each other to the point of exhaustion until winter paralyzed them. Icy winds brought temperatures to below freezing and at dawn each day both armies removed from the trenches the corpses of those frozen to death in the night.

The Germans finally took the city in December, but at a high cost: German losses in the campaign were about thirty-five thousand killed and wounded; Russian losses are unknown but conservatively estimated to be around ninety thousand in all. Germany went on to take over the whole country, stripping industry of everything valuable and sending the booty back to the homeland. Copper was collected from factories, church steeples, frying pans and even door-post amulets. The thick leather transmission belts from the textile mills were sent back to Germany for soldiers' boots, and roofs were stripped of lead. The country's raw materials were also plundered, paid for with vouchers redeemable after the war, which the locals said were not worth a plug groschen.

German sentries stood on every corner to prevent looting and riots. Food was scarce, even for the prosperous, and milk was unobtainable. There were ration cards for the terrible bread, made from a mixture of chestnuts and potato peelings and tasting of clay. Stray dogs and cats were rounded up and rendered down for their flesh, which was sent back to Germany as animal feed. Disease raged in epidemic proportions, the worst of which was typhus. Hospitals overloaded with military casualties were obliged to leave the sick to die, and corpses without shrouds were trundled to cemeteries in wheelbarrows.

As the war ground on, one terrible year after another, the desperate conditions took their toll on the health of mother and child. It also did nothing to help a failing marriage. Freida seemed unprepared, or unwilling, to give up the degree of independence that marriage demanded and broke up with Samuel. One divorce was a scandal, a second social disaster, but Freida seemed unperturbed by the opinions of others. She remained on friendly terms with her ex-husband and later took Michel to see him regularly. The child resented the visits as a duty and an imposition, and during his formative years became emotionally distant from his father.

Michel was brought up in a world of doting women. He lived together with his mother, his aunt Idessa -- two years younger than his mother and a beauty -- and his grandmother. With the collapse of tsarist Russia in the revolution of 1917, and the final defeat of Germany the following year, Poland once again became a nation. The factories of the family textile business, which had floundered and closed during the war, gradually picked up production. Michel grew into something of a wild child, independent and wilful, even as a toddler. The women in his life indulged him shamelessly. "I felt I had two mothers. I was surrounded by love. It was like air. Love was so much part of my life it was like breathing. The security of love was very strong. I am sure that is where I have drawn my strength over the years -- that absolute bedrock of mother love."

By the age of four Michel had developed an advanced case of rickets, news of which had been kept from his mother, who had been taken into hospital with typhus. He was cared for by his grandmother and aunt -- his second mother. By the time Freida returned home after an extended stay in the hospital, the child's legs were so bowed he could hardly walk. "I still see my mother as she came into the living room and her reaction as she saw me -- my horribly curved legs."

Rickets was common at this time and often left children permanently crippled, and his mother's initial joy at seeing her son turned to anguish. "Oh my God," she blurted, "he cannot walk!"

"Yes I can," Michel cried out, delighted to see his mother at home again and eager to please her. In a display of superhuman will and effort, he dragged himself around the dining-room table. He held on to the backs of the chairs and hauled himself from one to another. "See, I can walk!"

Freida wrote to all the experts in the field, and consulted family friends in the medical profession in a desperate search for a cure. She developed a remedy that was an early form of health cure and radical for the time. Michel was put on a diet of fresh vegetables, fruit juices and hot honey drinks with egg yolk -- and less palatable doses of cod liver oil. He was soon walking again and eventually recovered to the point that he began to excel at sports.

"When I went out with my mother, her friends would always talk down to me. Idiotic baby talk in a strained voice -- endless stupid questions that were meaningless. It irritated me. So I gave them strange, unexpected answers. They would become confused and embarrassed, and always they would say, "'How precocious!'" It puzzled him that adults talked to children in such a manner. "I wondered why they talked like that. I came to the conclusion that although they had all been children, they had somehow forgotten their childhood." It was an alarming insight. "A little while later I thought, If they have forgotten their childhood, when I grow up I will forget mine. And that horrified me! It was a terrible shock. To forget everything! To forget me as I am now! Every day was filled with growth and change and events -- and it would all be forgotten! And I would be forgotten -- cease to exist, wiped from the world! I could not let that happen."

He carefully began to develop a system to help him remember childhood. Unable to read or write, he adopted a mental process in which he forced himself to think as far back as he could and reclaim feelings and reactions. He flagged these with a child's mental markers of color, smell, touch and taste. In this way he could recapture and fix a moment in his memory, logging the significant events of his life into his system. It was a large task for a six-year-old but he conscientiously stuck to his method until, at the age of twelve, he spent weeks painstakingly writing the history of his childhood into a lined notebook, the Memory Book -- a document sadly lost to posterity. "I owe a lot to that child. He made a vow not to forget. He influenced my development as a man and laid out the pattern of a lifetime."

It was also at the age of six that he experienced an incident so powerful and disturbing that it forever changed his life. The family lived in a spacious apartment that had a balcony filled with oleander plants overlooking a large courtyard. In one corner was a well used as an emergency water supply on the occasions when the city's mains failed. One sunny spring afternoon his mother went out on the balcony looking down into the quadrant where the children played. Suddenly, she became rigid. A boy and his teenage sister ran to the well, leaned over its side and began calling down into it. The urgency of the children's voices echoed through the courtyard: "Moniek, Moniek -- come back up, your mother is calling. Moniek, come up!"

Freida was filled with dread that her mischievous son had fallen into the shaft. Fearing the worst, she ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard. She peered into the well and began to call for her son. There was no reply. The surface of the water was black and still with no sign of life. She became hysterical and began to wail, ripping at her garments and hair. A large crowd gathered to watch the display of grief in silence, as if at a theater performance.

Just then Michel ran into the courtyard. The sight of his distraught and inconsolable mother shook him to his soul. He had been climbing trees in a garden adjoining the apartment building and had not been near the well. An adult had called him down from a tree and led him back to the courtyard that had filled with people.

Michel was led through the crowd to his mother and she fell on him in relief, hugging and kissing him. The drowning had been a cruel, brutish joke hatched by a child and fed by adults. "These men and women who were our neighbors, non-Jewish Poles, enjoyed the spectacle of the despair of a Jewish mother. No one said anything, or tried to explain it was a joke gone too far, or that they did not mean it. Nothing! They were enjoying it.

"This viciousness and hatefulness traumatized me. My belief system as a child was totally shaken. It changed me. Changed the child. After that I was no longer wild but clung to my mother's side. I became a mother's boy. It took a physical toll on me and I became a sleepwalker. I would pick up a pillow from my bed, put it under my arm, and try to walk out of the house. My mother actually put a bell around my neck. I suffered nightmares -- terrible nightmares! Not of the incident itself, but of horrible monsters coming through the window to get me. I was scared of the dark and the things I imagined it held. I developed chronic asthma. That trauma was so deep, so strong, I quite literally could not breathe Polish air."

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 analyzed 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, traveled 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. "Traveling 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 ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0743202635
• ISBN 13: 9780743202633
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400