MICHEL Thomas speaks 11 languages – but his life once depended on pretending he had no linguistic abilities at all.
It happened in France, during World War II, when Thomas was eyeball-to-eyeball with the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.”
Thomas, a Polish-born Jew who went on to track down countless SS and Gestapo henchmen after the war, was at the time a member of the French Resistance.
He tells how he ended up facing Barbie, who had learned about a secret meeting of Austrian and German Jews in an apartment building in Lyon and set a trap.
Thomas says he had an eerie premonition as he went to attend the meeting.
“Something told me I should stop, but I ignored the feeling,” he said.
He was grabbed by the Gestapo and immediately protested in French that he had come to the wrong apartment by mistake.
He knew that if the arresting officers figured out he understood German, he would be deported with the rest of the Jews who had been caught that day in Barbie’s roundup.
The officers led him to Barbie, who eyed Thomas and barked at him in German: “Where are your papers!”
He pretended to be confused. What were they saying? He didn’t understand.
One of the Gestapo approached, shoved his gun to Thomas’s throat, and said to Barbie: “I’ll just shoot him down. Shall I shoot him through the neck?”
Thomas forced himself not to flinch and, by keeping his cool, he convinced Barbie he was a French local who had blundered into the trap by mistake.
After the war, Thomas was no longer the hunted. He became one of the most prolific pursuers of war criminals ever.
“I caught thousands, and it was not difficult,” he shrugs.
“At that time, they were all over the place.”
THE 86-year-old bloodhound now lives in Midtown and runs a foreign-language teaching business with a celebrity client list that includes Woody Allen, Mel Gibson and Emma Thompson.
Born Moniek Kroskof into a well-off Jewish family in Lodz, Poland, Thomas knew stability for only a short time.
He was a student in Vienna when the Anschluss overran Austria in 1938. He escaped to France with his girlfriend as the war began, then lost his entire family to the Holocaust.
The Nazis caught up with him while he was with the Resistance in France. He survived two years in slave labor camps and one session of torture, where he was beaten for hours and his knuckles were crushed.
A confident, solidly built man who smiles easily and looks much younger than his age, Thomas downplays his wartime exploits.
But the recent publication of his biography has created a stir in Los Angeles and has producers clamoring for the film rights.
“Test of Courage: the Michel Thomas Story,” by British journalist Christopher Robbins, details a remarkable personal history – one so full of spy adventures, daring escapes and romance it could fill several screenplays.
Besides his face-to-face encounter with Barbie, Thomas’ biography tells of his daring escape from Les Milles, a deportation camp in the south of France known as the “slaughterhouse.”
It was here that Jewish prisoners were rounded up before being sent to Auschwitz. And it was here, Thomas says, that the horror of the Holocaust really hit home for him.
He escaped the gas chambers by hiding with a group of Turkish prisoners who were considered “non-deportable” for political reasons.
“The biggest fight in that camp was not to give in,” says Thomas. “I was chased . . . for six weeks. With each deportation, they emptied the camp to search. But they couldn’t find me.”
Thomas eventually escaped by swapping his ID for that of a Turk who had been given a rare, one-day pass. Thomas flashed the ID quickly and simply walked out.
THOMAS’ remarkable story continued after the war, when he led a group of American counterintelligence investigators who hunted down Germans suspected of atrocities, including Emil Mahl, the notorious Dachau commander, and Gustav Knittel, an SS leader who was know to have massacred American POWs.
“Here,” he says, handing the reporter a gruesome picture of a Dachau inmate who is hanging from his wrists.
Thomas, who was part of the American unit that liberated the concentration camp, says he took the photo as evidence of Emil Mahl’s work.
“They referred to him as ‘The Hangman of Dachau,'” Thomas says of Mahl. “This was his specialty. I caught him in Munich.”
He also tells how he landed a number of other Nazi monsters with a “Mission: Impossible” plan in which he posed as the great Dr. Frundsberg, an unrepentant Nazi hand-picked to lead the Fourth Reich.
The impersonation allowed Thomas and his men catch a whole network of diehard SS officials who were plotting a return to power.
THOMAS, who speaks 11 languages, is a legendary figure in the spy community and among Holocaust experts.
“I’ve known hundreds and hundreds of Holocaust survivors, and no one has that kind of story,” says Ernest Michel, a board member of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.
“I don’t know any survivor who was in the United States Counter Intelligence Corps, for example,” says Michel. “His story is totally unique.”
Thomas says he doesn’t like to live in the past, and now devotes his life to promoting his language schools in New York, Beverly Hills and London. He’s known for his unorthodox teaching methods, and claims he can teach almost anyone to speak a foreign language in five days.
His courses aren’t cheap. Prices range from $2,400 for group instruction to $18,000 for a series of one-on-one sessions. Last year, he introduced a set of tapes and CDs in four languages in Britain, where sales have topped the one million mark.
His goal is not to become rich, but to educate.
He says education “is a political issue” and blames the rise of Hitler on the poorly educated German masses who were made to feel inferior by the elite.
“As [Thomas] Jefferson said: ‘You can’t be ignorant and free.’ This is what I lived through. I saw how easily a democratic system can fall to pieces.”