Free The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas by Christopher Robbins Page B

were walking along unconcernedly. And they were speaking French. Grateful, and somewhat bemused to be alive, Michel and Suzanne entered France.
    It was the Eve of All Saints - Hallowe’en - 1938 when Michel and Suzanne entered a French village in Lorraine, in the area of Metz. People were still out and about celebrating the festival, lights burned in the local cafés, and they attracted little attention. Michel enquired in the village if anyone operated a taxi service, explaining they had come to see friends and stayed on too late. He was directed to a house on the outskirts of town. It was in darkness and the owner was asleep, but Michel knocked loudly on the door, rousing the man from his bed. He explained they needed to be driven to Paris immediately on urgent family business. He knew it was late, and there was a long journey ahead, but he was prepared to pay. The man dressed and took the car out of the garage, and by three in the morning they were on their way. On the long journey across France, Michel and Suzanne discussed the strange action taken by their Gestapo captors. Nothing they came up with proved a completely satisfactory explanation, but there seemed to be a number of possibilities. The men might simply have had Hallowe’en plans and the arrest was an unwelcome interruption: a tedious night-time drive across Germany with unimportant refugees was both a low priority and a thankless chore. They might even have been persuaded by Michel’s argument and felt that by letting them go the Reich had to deal with two fewer Jews. And it was just possible that these young Gestapo officers retained a streak of human decency and sympathised with the plight of two young lovers caught up in forces beyond their control.
    Later in the war, when Michel interrogated numerous captured SS and Gestapo men, he often wondered what he would do if his captors came under his control. He decided that he would investigate the men’s subsequent war records and, despite an Allied policy of automatic arrest and imprisonment of all such officials, he would return the favour and let them go if they had no blood on their hands.
    On arrival in Paris Michel and Suzanne made straight for the house of a cousin, Dianne Dudel, on Boulevard Simon Bolivar. [39] The family not only had the unexpected pleasure of their company, but Dianne’s father was also obliged to pay the enormous taxi fare. In the days that followed Michel traipsed from one government office to another in order to reinstate his residence permit and establish Suzanne’s legal status. And finally, safe and saved in Paris, Michel and Suzanne became lovers.
    The couple had arrived in Paris at a pivotal moment in history. A seventeen-year-old Polish Jew from Germany, Herschel Grynszpan, was living illegally in the city, supporting himself by doing odd jobs. His parents lived in Hanover. In reaction to the Polish government’s decrees cancelling the passports of Poles living abroad, the Germans now ordered all male Polish Jews to be forcibly deported. (Michel did not know it, but his uncle was among them.) The Polish border guards turned them back with the result that the deportees became trapped in a no-man’s land. Most ended up in a concentration camp in Poland.
    Grynszpan heard of the deportations in a letter from his sister. He wrote a note to an uncle in Paris: ‘My heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy. I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest.’ He took a pistol and walked to the German Embassy and asked to see an official.
    He was shown to the office of the First Secretary, Ernst von Rath, took out the gun and shot the diplomat dead.
    The protest was seized upon by the Nazi government to initiate a ‘spontaneous’ pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria. The streets of the Reich’s cities became carpeted in the broken glass from synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. As a result, the pogrom became known as Kristallnacht . Hundreds of