Jacques
Lusseyran (September
19, 1924–July 27, 1971) was a blind French author and French
Resistance leader. Born in Paris, he became totally blind in a school
accident at the age of eight. He soon adapted to being blind and
maintained many close friendships. At a young age he became alarmed
at the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and decided to learn German so
that he could listen to radio broadcasts and follow the advancement
of the Nazis. Less than a year after the German invasion of France,
in the spring of 1941, at the age of seventeen, Lusseyran formed a
resistance group called the Volunteers of Liberty with fifty-two
other boys. Because of his ability to read people as a blind person,
he was put in charge of recruitment, and the group grew to over six
hundred young men. The group later merged with another Resistance
group called Défense de la France, which published an underground
newspaper that eventually achieved a circulation of 250,000. After
the war, it became one of France’s most respected
newspapers, France
Soir.
In July 1943, Lusseyran was arrested, along with twenty-five other
leaders of Défense de la France, and spent nearly fifteen months in
the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp. When the U.S. Third Army
arrived at Buchenwald in April 1945, Lusseyran was one of roughly
thirty survivors of a transport of two thousand French citizens.
After the war, Lusseyran became a university professor in the United
States. He died in a car accident in France in 1971.
From
the book And
There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the
French Resistance in World War II by Jacques
Lusseyran.
Copyright © 1963 by Jacques Lusseyran.
[quote about time in Buchenwald.]
Towards the end of the month all of a sudden it became too much for me and I grew sick, very sick. I think it was pleurisy. They said several doctors, prisoners like me and friends of mine, came to listen to my chest. It seems they gave me up. What else could they do? There was no medicine at all at Buchenwald, not even aspirin.
Very soon dysentery was added to pleurisy, then an infection in both ears which made me completely deaf for two weeks, then erysipelas, turning my face into a swollen pulp, with complications which threatened to bring on blood poisoning. More than fifty fellow prisoners told me all this later. I don’t remember any of it myself. I had taken advantage of the first days of sickness to leave Buchenwald.
Two young boys I was very fond of, a Frenchman with one leg, and a Russian with one arm, told me that one morning in April they carried me to the hospital on a stretcher. The hospital was not a place where they took care of people, but simply a place to lay them down until they died or got well. My friends, Pavel and Louis, didn’t understand what happened. Later they kept telling me that I was a “case.” A year afterwards Louis was still amazed: “The day we carried you, you had a fever of 104 or more, but you were not delirious. You looked quite serene, and every now and then you would tell us not to put ourselves out on your account.” I would gladly have explained to Louis and Pavel, but the whole affair was beyond words and still is.
Sickness had rescued me from fear, it had even rescued me from death. Let me say to you simply that without it I never would have survived. From the first moments of sickness I had gone off into another world, quite consciously. I was not delirious. Louis was right, I still had the look of tranquillity, more so than ever. That was the miracle.
I watched the stages of my own illness quite clearly. I saw the organs of my body blocked up losing control one after the other, first my lungs, then my intestines, then my ears, all my muscles, and last of all my heart, which was functioning badly and filled me with a vast, unusual sound. I knew exactly what it was, this thing I was watching: my body in the act of leaving this world, not wanting to leave it right away, not even wanting to leave it at all. I could tell by the pain my body was causing me, twisting and turning in every direction like snakes that have been cut in pieces.
Have I said that death was already there? If I have I was wrong. Sickness and pain, yes, but not death. Quite the opposite, life, and that was the unbelievable thing that had taken possession of me. I had never lived so fully before.
Life had become a substance within me. It broke into my cage, pushed by a force a thousand times stronger than I. It was certainly not made of flesh and blood, not even of ideas. It came towards me like a shimmering wave, like the caress of light. I could see it beyond my eyes and my forehead and above my head. It touched me and filled me to overflowing. I let myself float upon it.
There were names which I mumbled from the depths of my astonishment. No doubt my lips did not speak them, but they had their own song: “Providence, the Guardian Angel, Jesus Christ, God.” I didn’t try to turn it over in my mind. It was not just the time for metaphysics. I drew my strength from the spring. I kept on drinking and drinking still more. I was not going to leave that celestial stream. For that matter it was not strange to me, having come to me right after my old accident when I found I was blind. Here was the same thing all over again, the Life which sustained the life in me.
The Lord took pity on the poor mortal who was so helpless before him. It is true I was quite unable to help myself. All of us are incapable of helping ourselves. Now I knew it, and knew that it was true of the SS among the first. That was something to make one smile.
But there was one thing left I could do: not refuse God’s help, the breath he was blowing upon me. That was the one battle I had to fight, hard and wonderful all at once: not to let my body be taken by the fear. For fear kills, and joy maintains life.
Slowly I came back from the dead, and when, one morning, one of my neighbors — I found out later he was an atheist and thought he was doing the right thing — shouted in my ear that I didn’t have a chance in the world of getting through it, so I had better prepare myself, he got my answer full in the face, a burst of laughter. He didn’t understand that laugh, but he never forgot it.
On 8 May, I left the hospital on my two feet. I was nothing but skin and bones, but I had recovered. The fact was I was so happy that now Buchenwald seemed to me a place which if not welcome was at least possible. If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope.
It was the truth. I still had eleven months ahead of me in the camp. But today I have not a single evil memory of those three hundred and thirty days of extreme wretchedness. I was carried by a hand. I was covered by a wing. One doesn’t call such living emotions by their names. I hardly needed to look out for myself, and such concern would have seemed to me ridiculous. I knew it was dangerous and it was forbidden. I was free now to help the others; not always, not much, but in my own way I could help.
I could try to show other people how to go about holding on to life. I could turn towards them the flow of light and joy which had grown so abundant in me. From that time on they stopped stealing my bread or my soup. It never happened again. Often my comrades would wake me up in the night and take me to comfort someone, sometimes a long way off in another block.
Almost everyone forgot I was a student. I became “the blind Frenchman.” For many, I was just “the man who didn’t die.” Hundreds of people confided in me. The men were determined to talk to me. They spoke in French, in Russian, in German, in Polish. I did the best I could to understand them all. That is how I lived, how I survived. The rest I cannot describe.
[ from after becoming blind at age of 8]
“At
this point some instinct- I was almost about to say a hand laid on me
– made me change course. I began to look more closely, not at
things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place
to one further in, instead of clinging to the movement of sight
toward the world outside. immediately, the substance of the universe
drew together, redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware
of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place
which might as well have been outside me as within. But
radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. It was
a fact, for light was there. I felt indescribable relief, and
happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and
gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light
and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that
from that time on light and joy have never been separated in my
experience. I have had them or lost them together.”
