Michel Thomas | |
|---|---|
| Born | Moniek Kroskof February 3, 1914 Łódź, Russian Empire |
| Died | January 8, 2005 (aged 90) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Occupations | Nazi hunter, linguist, language teacher |
| Spouse(s) | Christiane Schmidtmer, Alice Burns |
| Children | 2 |
Michel Thomas (bornMoniek Kroskof, February 3, 1914 – January 8, 2005) was apolyglotlinguist and decorated war veteran. He survived imprisonment in severalNazi concentration camps after serving in theMaquis of theFrench Resistance and worked with theU.S. ArmyCounter Intelligence Corps duringWorld War II. After the war, Thomas immigrated to theUnited States, where he developed a language-teaching system known as the "Michel Thomas method". In 2004, he was awarded theSilver Star by theUnited States Army.
Thomas was born inŁódź,Poland, to a wealthyJewish family who ownedtextile factories. When he was seven years old, his parents sent him to Breslau, Germany (nowWrocław, Poland), where he fitted in comfortably. The rise of theNazis drove him to leave for theUniversity of Bordeaux inFrance in 1933, and subsequently theSorbonne and theUniversity of Vienna.[1]
Thomas's biography gives an account of his war years. WhenFrance fell to the Nazis, he lived inNice, under theVichy government, changing his name to Michel Thomas so he could operate in theFrench Resistance movement more easily. He was arrested several times, and finally sent toCamp des Milles, nearAix-en-Provence. In August 1942, Thomas got released from Les Milles usingforged papers and made his way toLyon, where his duties for the Resistance entailed recruiting Jewish refugees into the organization. In January 1943, he was arrested andinterrogated byKlaus Barbie, only being released after convincing theGestapo officer that he was an apolitical French artist. He would later testify at the 1987 trial of Barbie inLyon.[2]
In February 1943, after being arrested, tortured and subsequently released by theMilice, the Vichy militia (or "FrenchGestapo"),[3] he joined acommando group inGrenoble and then the U.S. ArmyCounter Intelligence Corps (CIC), working unpaid as a scout and interpreter. WhenDachau was liberated on April 29, 1945, Thomas learned the whereabouts ofEmil Mahl (the "hangman of Dachau"), whom Thomas arrested two days later.[3] Thomas, along with CIC colleague Ted Kraus, subsequently captured SS MajorGustav Knittel (wanted for his role in theMalmedy massacre). Thomas also engineered a post-war undercoversting operation that resulted in the arrest of several formerSS officers. A 1950Los Angeles Daily News article credits Thomas with the capture of 2,500 Nazi war criminals.[4]
In the final week of World War II, Thomas was instrumental in rescuing from destruction a cache of Nazi documents that had been shipped by the Gestapo to be pulped at a paper mill in Freimann, Germany. These included the worldwide membership card file of more than ten millionmembers of the Nazi party.[5]
After the end of the war, Thomas learned that his parents and most of his extended family had been murdered inAuschwitz.[1]
In 1947, Thomas immigrated toLos Angeles, where an uncle and cousins resided. He opened a language school inBeverly Hills called the Polyglot Institute (later renamed The Michel Thomas Language Center)[6] and developed a language-teaching system known as the "Michel Thomas Method", which he claimed would allow students to become conversationally proficient after only a few days' study.[7]
He remained unmarried until 1978, when he wedded Los Angeles schoolteacher Alice Burns; the couple had a son and daughter before the marriage ended in divorce.[8]
Thomas's clients included diplomats, industrialists, and celebrities.[6] The success of the school led to tours and a second school inNew York City, as well as a series of instructional books and tapes in French, Spanish, German, and Italian.[9] At the time of his death in 2005, Thomas's tapes, CDs, and books were the leading method of recorded language-learning in the United Kingdom.[10]
In 1997, Thomas participated in aBBC television science documentary,The Language Master, in which he taught a five-day course in French to a group of UKsixth form students who had no previous experience with the language. Throughout the course of the five days, the feelings of the students toward the project would radically amend from low esteem prior to the first session to highly confident by the last day.[11]
In 2001, when theLos Angeles Times published a profile casting doubts about Thomas's war record,[12] he unsuccessfully sued the newspaper fordefamation.
In a seemingly contradictory U.S. District Court ruling, Judge Audrey Collins said that although readers of the article might conclude that Thomas lied about his wartime experiences, the newspaper did not actually intend to convey that implication:
"A reasonable reader or juror might conclude, after reading the article and considering the various points of view presented, that Thomas had in fact lied about his past. But no reasonable juror could find that Defendants intended to convey that impression."C.D. Cal.,Thomas v.Los Angeles Times.[13][14]
In 2004, after archival documents and recent testimonials of Thomas's surviving World War II comrades were submitted to the U.S. Army bySenatorJohn McCain andRepresentativeCarolyn Maloney, Thomas was awarded theSilver Star for "gallantry in action against the enemy in France from August to September 1944 while a lieutenant in the French Forces of the Interior attached to the [U.S.] 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division."[15] The award was presented by former SenatorRobert Dole and SenatorJohn Warner, both decorated WWII veterans, at theNational World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 25, 2004 — the week the Memorial was dedicated.[16]
Thomas died of cardiac failure at his home in New York City on January 8, 2005, aged 90.[17]
Michel Thomas is known to have been fluent in seven tongues: Polish, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Yiddish. Some reports state that he could speak another five, but precisely which ones is unclear.
As a language teacher, Thomas used a specific approach. He proposed that there is no such thing as a student with learning difficulties, only teachers with teaching difficulties.[18] According to Dr. Jonathan Solity ofUniversity College London, Thomas held that there are three critical components of the teaching environment:
The method presents the target language by interleaving new with old material, teaching generalization from language principles, contextual diversity, and learning self-correction in an environment that attempts to be stress-free, as the teacher is responsible for learning, not the student.[19]
Thomas felt his method would "change the world"; he only started with languages as he felt that it was the most alien thing a person could learn. Solity claims the method "has huge implications for teaching anybody anything".[20]
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