The story of Michel Thomas reads like a thriller in which adventure and heartbreak combine to produce a unique form of wisdom. Boldly escaping Vienna after the Anschluss, having refused to make accommodations for being Jewish, he arrived stateless in France one week before Kristallnacht. But rather than let this most precarious of positions defeat him, Thomas began to fight what was to become a fantastic and ultimately heroic personal war against the forces of barbarism that engulfed his world. Arrested by Vichy France, Thomas was starved for two years in a concentration camp at the foot of the Pyrenees and forced into slave labor in a coal mine in Provence. He avoided being sent to Auschwitz by hiding within the confines of a deportation camp for six weeks as its infuriated masters took increasingly dramatic action to capture him at all costs -- and ultimately to no avail. He then joined the secret army of the Resistance and during one mission was captured and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, Butcher of Lyons, whom he barely deceived into releasing him. Re-arrested by the French Milice (Gestapo) and tortured, Thomas held out by entering a psychological state in which he no longer registered pain, and after six and a half hours his defeated tormentors threw him into a cell. He survived and promptly rejoined the fight. After the Allies liberated France, he joined the American forces, fought his way into Germany in active service and was with the troops that liberated Dachau. There he caught, interrogated and obtained the handwritten confession of the head of the camp's crematoria, known as the "Hangman of Dachau."