When Germany occupied France less than a year after the start of World War II, Jacques Lusseyran was only fifteen, yet he soon became the leader of an underground resistance movement of six hundred youths. What made his achievement even more remarkable was the fact that he’d been completely blind since age eight.
Shortly after losing his sight in a schoolyard accident, Lusseyran had acquired a kind of second sight, made possible by what he described as “an inner light.” All sensory input became, in his head, complex patterns of light and color. In some ways, this granted him greater powers of perception than normal vision.
As head of a resistance movement, Lusseyran used this unique awareness to determine which potential recruits were trustworthy. He was, in his own words, “nearly infallible.” He let pass only one boy who’d raised doubts in his mind, and it was this same boy who betrayed his movement to the Germans. Lusseyran’s mistake landed him and many of his confederates in a German concentration camp.
Because he was a Christian, Lusseyran was not sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but to the hard-labor camp at Buchenwald. There, he was left to die in “the Invalids’ Block,” but was sustained by a rekindling of his inner light. When the camp was liberated in 1945, he was one of thirty survivors out of the two thousand who’d arrived with him.
Lusseyran went on to become a professor, despite French laws at the time barring the disabled from public employment. He later moved to the U.S., where he taught at several colleges, including Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1971, at the age of forty-six.
In the following edited excerpt from Lusseyran’s autobiography, And There Was Light (Parabola Books), what stays with the reader is not just the details of his amazing story, but what he calls “the real subject”: the joy and light that remained with him through it all.
— Andrew Snee
In this first section, the author describes how he discovered his inner light soon after he was blinded at age eight.
Being blind was not at all as I had imagined it. Nor was it as the people around me seemed to think. They told me that to be blind meant not to see. Yet how was I to believe them when I saw? Not at once, I admit. Not in the days immediately after the operation. For at that time I still wanted to use my eyes. I followed their usual path. I looked where I was in the habit of seeing things before the accident, and there was anguish, a lack, a void that filled me with what grown-ups called despair.
Finally, one day, and it was not long in coming, I realized that I was looking in the wrong way. It was as simple as that. I was making something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses without adjusting themselves. I was looking too far off, and too much on the surface of things.
This was much more than a simple discovery; it was a revelation. I can still see myself in the Champ de Mars, where my father took me for a walk a few days after the accident. Of course I knew the garden well, its ponds, its railings, its iron chairs. I even knew some of the trees personally, and naturally I wanted to see them again. But I couldn’t. I threw myself forward into the space, which I did not recognize because it no longer held anything familiar to me.
At this point some instinct — I was almost about to say “a hand” — made me change course. I began to look more carefully, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place at one further within, instead of 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 could just as well have been outside me as within. But the radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, a light. It was a fact.
I felt indescribable relief and a 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 separate in my experience. I have had them or lost them together.
I saw light and went on seeing it, though I was blind. I said so in others’ presence, but for many years I think I did not say it very loud. Until I was nearly fourteen, I remember, I called the experience, which kept renewing itself inside me, “my secret,” and spoke of it only to my most intimate friends. I don’t know whether they believed me or not, but they listened to me, for they were friends. And what I told them had a greater value than being merely true; it had the value of being beautiful, a dream, an enchantment, almost like magic.
The amazing thing was that this was not magic for me at all, but reality. I could no more have denied it than people with eyes can deny that they see. I was not light myself, I knew that, but I bathed in it as in an element. Blindness had suddenly brought light much closer. I could feel it rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them — withdrawing or diminishing is what I mean, for the opposite of light was never present. Sighted people always talk about the night of blindness, and that idea seems to them quite natural. But there was no such night for me. At every waking hour and even in my dreams, I lived in a stream of light.
Without my eyes, I perceived light to be much more stable than it had been before. There were no longer the same differences between things lighted brightly, less brightly, or not at all. I saw the whole world in terms of light, existing through it and because of it. Colors, all the colors of the rainbow, also survived. For me, a child who loved to draw and paint, the colors were an unexpected celebration. I spent hours playing with them, and all the more easily now that they were more docile than they used to be.
Light threw its color on things and on people. My father and mother, the people I met or ran into in the street, each had a characteristic color that I had never seen before I went blind. Yet now this special attribute impressed itself on me as definitely as any impression created by a face. Still, the colors were only a game, while light was my whole reason for living. I let it rise in me like water in a well, and I rejoiced.
A light so continuous and intense was so far beyond my comprehension that sometimes I doubted it. Suppose it was not real, I thought, that I only imagined it. Perhaps to imagine the opposite, or just something different, would be enough to make it go away. So I tested this theory out, and even tried resisting the light. At night in bed, when I was all by myself, I lowered my eyelids as I might have done when they veiled my sight, and I told myself that behind these curtains I would no longer see light. But light was still there, and more serene than ever, looking like a lake at evening when the wind has dropped. Then I gathered up all my energy and willpower and tried to stop the flow of light, as I might have tried to stop breathing.
What happened was a disturbance, something like a whirlpool. But the whirlpool was still flooded with light. At all events, I couldn’t keep this up very long, perhaps for only two or three seconds. While this was going on, I felt a sort of anguish, as though I were doing something forbidden, something against life. It was exactly as if I needed light to live — needed it as much as air. There was no way out of it. I was a prisoner of the light. I was condemned to see.
(As I write these lines, I have just tried the experiment again and gotten the same result, except that with the years the original source of light has grown stronger.)
At eight I came out of this experiment reassured, with the sense that I was being reborn. Since it was not I who was making the light, since it came to me from outside, it would never leave me. I was only a passageway, a vestibule for this brightness.
Still, there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid. If, instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-open door, the key in the lock; if I said to myself that all these things were hostile and about to strike or scratch, then without exception I bumped or wounded myself. The only easy way to move around the house or the garden was by not thinking about it at all, or thinking as little as possible. Then I moved around obstacles the way they say bats do. What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear. It made me blind.
Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. Though the minute before I knew just where everything in the room was, if I got angry, things went and hid in the most unlikely corners, mixed themselves up, turned turtle, muttered like crazy men, and looked wild. As for me, I no longer knew where to put hand or foot. Everything hurt me. This mechanism worked so well that I stopped being angry and became cautious.
When I was playing with my small companions, if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be first at all costs, then all at once I could see nothing. Literally, I went into fog or smoke.
I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was lost inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. So is it surprising that I loved friendship and harmony when I was young?
Armed with such a tool, why should I need a moral code? For me this tool took the place of red and green lights. I always knew where the road was open and where it was closed. I had only to look at the bright signal that taught me how to live.
It was the same with love. The summer after the accident, my parents took me to the seashore. There I met a little girl my own age. I think she was called Nicole. She came into my world like a great red star, or perhaps more like a ripe cherry. The only thing I knew for sure was that she was bright and red.
I thought her lovely, and her beauty was so gentle that I could no longer go home at night and sleep away from her, because part of my light left me when I did. To get it all back I had to find her again. It was as if she were bringing me light in her hands, her hair, her bare feet on the sand, and in the sound of her voice.
How natural that people who are red should have red shadows. When she came to sit down by me between two pools of salt water under the warmth of the sun, I saw rosy reflections on the canvas of the awnings. The sea itself, the blue of the sea, took on a purple tone. I followed her by the red wake that trailed behind her wherever she went.
Now, if people should say that red is the color of passion, I should answer quite simply that I found this out when I was only eight years old.
In the following excerpts, the author tells of his participation in the youth resistance movement he helped to start, and his subsequent capture by the German police.
In the courtyard in front of me, when the early sun cast its first musical rays, the delectable aroma of salt and sugar mixed together came up from the bakery next door. It smelled as sweet as it always had, before the days of the Resistance Movement. It made you want pleasure, not serious deeds. Among all the dangers that beset me, there would always be that one to reckon with, the one that comes from the enjoyment of everyday things.
I had stripped myself of the right to dream. Or, at any rate, now my dreams could take only one path, and I should never know what lay at the end of the road until it was upon me.
We had already had to form a Central Committee for the Movement. Central Committee! It sounded like a farce, almost as if we were playing at tin soldiers. All the same, the need was real, and we were working at it. You see, there could be no question of getting expert advice from politicians, officers, or even from our parents. And when fifty boys have to be persuaded to do something — or, worse, be prevented from doing it — tactics are a must.
The first Central Committee had met the evening before near the Porte d’Orléans on the south side of Paris, in one of those poor apartment houses that are like beehives and where there is constant coming and going on the stairs. Still, we arrived and departed each according to an itinerary decided on in advance and different from those of all the others. Only I was paired with another. I would have to be the exception to the rule.
The Central Committee, by unanimous vote with a single abstention — mine — had come to a decision: for the first three months, I would be in sole charge of recruiting. That was my job, my specialty. They claimed I had “the sense of human beings.” In my first encounters, I had made no mistakes. Besides, I would hear more acutely and pay better attention. People would not easily deceive me. I should not forget names or places, addresses or telephone numbers. Every week I could report on the outlook without resorting to scraps of paper or lists. Everything written down, even in code, was a risk that none of us had the right to run.
I had abstained from voting but did not refuse what they offered me. Nothing in the world could help me more to live than the confidence of my friends and this danger I faced, which for some weeks might be even greater than theirs. Later on, if it was necessary to spy, to carry arms, to flee, or to fight, I would turn the task over to someone else. But before my eyes condemned me to the rear, as they might one day, I should have my eyes to thank for the chance to be in the front lines.
In less than a year, nearly six hundred boys came to see “the blind man.” In most cases they did not know my name, and didn’t even ask it. One of the fifty-two from our original group would watch a classmate for several days, sometimes for several weeks. Eventually, if he believed the classmate could be trusted, he sent the boy on to me. The rules were strict. I was never to receive individuals whose coming had not been announced, and I was not to receive them unless they arrived within five minutes of the appointed hour. If their coming did not meet these conditions, and if I was unable to send them away — a difficulty which was likely to arise — I would ask them in, but, pretending there had been a misunderstanding, would talk of nothing that mattered.
What picture could these newcomers — sometimes three or four of them in the same evening — have had of the mysterious young man I was? Each visitor knew only one thing about me: that I was blind. If he had carefully observed the rules about arrival, he followed me down a dark corridor. (I almost always forgot to turn on the light.) Two doors in succession closed behind him. At the end, he was introduced into a narrow room with a window onto the court, a bed, an armchair for him, a straight chair for me, and a low, slim chest. Through a door that always stood open to a second room he saw piles of Braille books extending all the way up three walls. Opposite him was a boy whose extreme youth was thinly concealed by the pipe he was always smoking. But the boy spoke with an intensity and an assurance the visitor had not anticipated, the assurance of an adult mixed with the enthusiasm of a child, or something very like it — in any case, with a mixture of mystery and candor that inspired confidence.
While this was going on, I was putting my every instinct to work. I had no system, surely, and the idea of adopting one never occurred to me. I saw the only way to know my visitor was to test him out — in a vacuum, to begin with. For the first ten minutes at least there would be no settled topic of conversation. (Perhaps that in itself might be a method, after all.) I had planned out a whole series of vague or unexpected exchanges without connection to my plans. Some of my visitors were irritated immediately by this hit-or-miss way of going at things. Anger being an emotion it is very hard to fake, and one which never rings true when it is simulated, it saved time with these people, and I came to know them right away.
But most of them were disconcerted and rather uneasy. Then they tried, by every means possible, to get over it. They stammered out complicated explanations. And, as every psychologist knows, nothing is more revealing of any individual than elaborate explanations. But in the end, these tactics amounted to very little. If I could plumb their hearts and consciences — and I felt sure I could — it was because I was blind and for no other reason.
When I was young I had acquired the habit of guessing, since I could no longer see, reading signs instead of gestures and putting them together to build a coherent world around me. What is more, I admit I was madly happy to be doing this work, to have men in front of me, to make them speak out about themselves, to induce them to say things they were not in the habit of saying because these things were set too deeply in them — suddenly to hear in their voices the note above all others, the note of confidence. This filled me with an assurance that was very like love. Around me it drew a magic circle of protection, a sign that nothing bad could happen to me. The light which shone in my head was so bright and so strong that it was like joy distilled. Somehow, I became invulnerable. . . .
From the depths of my happy sleep at about five in the morning I heard my father’s voice: “Jacques, the German police are calling for you.” Arrest! Here it was.
“Just a minute, please,” I said, while I jumped out of bed and dressed with trembling hands.
My father’s voice sounded pretty much as it had when I was small. He wanted so much to protect me, but of course he could do nothing. Strangely enough, it was more my job to protect him, at least to keep them from arresting him or my mother or my little brother. That was the first thing to be done, but how to go about it?
There were six Germans, two officers and four soldiers, and the imbeciles were armed. Perhaps no one had told them that I was blind. They were not brutal, however. They gave me time to get ready. They let me take a pack of cigarettes and my lighter. They searched my two small rooms methodically, if you can call scattering five or six thousand sheets of Braille, which they obviously could make nothing of, a search. In any case, what they were looking for wasn’t there. It was in my head, and at the time my head was in a confusion from which the most diabolical interrogator could have extracted nothing at all.
The main question I asked myself was monstrous: who had denounced me? Already there was a plan: first, see to it that Mother and Father were not arrested; then find out who the betrayer was. Granted, a plan, but there was not a single coherent idea in my head, not one lucid fiber in my whole body. When you are caught in a trap, you cut a poor figure in your own eyes. Not liking yourself, you would willingly endanger yourself.
Fortunately, one of the officers who was questioning me didn’t know how to go about it. He had a paper with names on it, but his French was bad and he got all the names jumbled. To gain time I was trying to play the terrified little boy who mixed everything up. The SS officer got nowhere, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He ended up taking me by the arm in a fatherly way and leading me down the stairs. Thank God, they were taking only me. They had let me say goodbye to my parents.
Now in the moving car, as I leaned against those heavy, immovable German bodies, it was much less difficult. Things were getting interesting again. So there was a future after all. If only one could arrive later, later still.
The car stopped in the middle of a large courtyard. And from that time on, for hours on end and without any explanation, I was taken from office to office and floor to floor by ten surly, silent Germans, who handled me as though I were breakable. The only thing they asked me, each of them in turn and often twice over, was whether I was really “the blind one.” I answered, “Yes, I am the blind one,” and that seemed to make things easier for them.
For that matter, on that day it was appallingly true. I was stone-blind. Because of my creeping anguish about what was going to happen, I saw hardly anything at all. For hours, nothing had been going on while they were walking me around and showing me off. Then they sat me down in a parlor on a soft bench and told me to eat a thick pea soup I didn’t want. Finally, a man fell on me like a rock, waving his fist in front of my eyes and cursing, and pushed me into a room where I could hear the sound of a typewriter.
So far it was nothing but a questionnaire about identity. They asked stupid things, whether my father’s parents were Jewish, or his grandparents. They seemed delighted to learn that this wasn’t so. I asked why I’d been arrested. Everyone laughed, from the orderly to the typist. But all the same, I was right to ask the question, because the man who spoke French was giving the underground names of Frederic, Denis, Catherine, Simone, Gérard, and nine others just as real. He wanted to know if I knew why they had all been arrested. He wound it up with “Where are Georges and Philippe? They are the only ones we are still looking for.”
I felt as though I were breathing in gas. My nerve centers stopped functioning. And then, all of a sudden, I was set free. Literally, I was no longer afraid. Electric light bulbs went on in every corner of my head. I saw the man from the Gestapo and the secretary. I had to clench my teeth to keep from bursting out laughing. If I stayed like this, they could keep on forever and never find out anything.
At random, I made up three or four names out of whole cloth, asking if they, too, had been arrested. I asked my captors if they had really caught all the people who were at that surprise party at Saint-Germain-en-Laye two weeks before. (There never was such a party.) To my delight, I saw that my questions got them all mixed up.
But this was only a bright interval. They took me back to the soft parlor where I had not eaten the soup. They left me there a long time. In succession, about ten people were let into the room. Every time one of them came in, I said, “Who are you?” but none of them answered. They must have known that we were being watched. There must have been a jailer somewhere. My eyes, I would have given so much to have my eyes. If only they could have been loaned to me just for a day!
At night — I knew it was night for I had just heard nine o’clock strike — they left me in a washroom. There were a basin, a chair, and a transom high up under the ceiling. I could hear them sliding the bolts. I was by myself for twelve hours.
The most distressing thing in such circumstances is that one keeps on thinking in spite of oneself, and not thinking straight. I have been over the subject with hundreds of men, of every character, social class, and age. On this point they all agree. Thought runs away from you, like a car with no brakes in the middle of a hill. It no longer bothers about you. You can stay in it or jump out. It is a machine and doesn’t care at all. Thinking is always a machine, especially in people of intelligence. And I put this question to those who still doubt it: “Have you ever spent a night all alone before being interrogated by political police?” Your thoughts slip through your fingers.
Your body, meanwhile, goes off in another direction by itself. It is nothing but a miserable shell with slackened muscles. And when the muscles stiffen, it is no better, for then they quiver. Something hurts all the time, either dryness in your throat, buzzing in your ears, rumbling in your stomach, or tightening of your lungs. And at all costs, don’t try saying to yourself, “I am a man of character; it can’t happen to me!” It happens to everybody.
Obviously, they had been telling the truth about arresting fourteen of our chiefs. These arrests would very likely mean fifteen deaths in the coming days or weeks, my own among them. But I couldn’t bring myself to think about that. It was one of the few things that the machine had cast out when it got away from me on the slope.
It surely was not by accident that they had made such a catch. It was a mass betrayal so fantastic that it didn’t seem real.
I said a prayer, two prayers, and more. Words flowed. Then, by chance, I hit my elbow hard on the wall. It hurt a little, and that did me a world of good. I cried aloud, “I am alive. I am alive.”
In this final section, Lusseyran recounts his time in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
I came very close to dying. But how can I make you believe it, alive as I am today? I shall tell my story badly, but since I have promised, I am going to tell it.
In March, I had lost all my friends. They had all gone away. A small child was reborn in me, looking everywhere for his mother and not finding her. I was very much afraid of the others, since I didn’t know how to defend myself. One day out of two, people were stealing my bread and soup. I got so weak that when I touched cold water my fingers burned as if they were on fire. All month long a blizzard that had no beginning and no end had been buffeting the Buchenwald hill.
Being blind, I still avoided one of the greatest miseries, the labor commandos. Every morning at six o’clock, all the men who were fit to work left the camp to the blare of the orchestra, an efficient orchestra playing the liturgy of forced labor. The whole day these men moved rocks and sand in the quarries, dug into the frozen ground to put down pipes, carried rails for the tracks, always in range of submachine guns and SS Kapos blind with rage. The prisoners came in at five o’clock at night, but never all of them. The yards were littered with the day’s dead.
They were dying, whatever they might be doing: pulled down by the weight of a rock on the slippery paths in the quarries; felled by blows or bullets in the night; executed with ceremony before the eyes of a hundred thousand fellow prisoners, under floodlights clouded by a snowstorm, to the strains of a funeral march, to set an example on the square where the roll was called; or hanged more obscurely in the barn they called the movie house. Others were dying of bronchial pneumonia or dysentery or typhus. Every day some were electrocuted on the charged wires that surrounded the enclosure. But many were dying, quite simply, of fear.
I was spared the labor commandos because I couldn’t see, but for the unfit like me, they had another system: the Invalids’ Block. Since they were no longer sure of winning the war, mercy had become official policy with the Nazis. A year earlier, being unfit for physical work in the service of the Greater German Reich would have condemned you to death in three days.
The Invalids’ Block was a barracks like the others. The only difference was that they had crowded in fifteen hundred men instead of three hundred — the average for the other blocks — and they had cut the food ration in half. In the Invalids’ you had the one-legged, the one-armed, the deaf, the deaf-mute, the blind, the legless — I knew three of them — the aphasic, the ataxic, the epileptic, the gangrenous, the scrofulous, the tubercular, the cancerous, the syphilitic, the old men over seventy, the boys under sixteen, the kleptomaniacs, the tramps, the perverts, and, last of all, the flock of madmen. They were the only ones who didn’t seem unhappy.
No one at the Invalids’ was whole, since that was the condition of entrance. As a result, people were dying there at a pace that made any count of the block impossible. It was a greater surprise to fall over the living than the dead. The stench was so terrible that only the smell of the crematory, which sent up smoke around the clock, managed to cover it up, and only on days when the wind drove the smoke our way. For days and nights on end, I didn’t walk around; I crawled. I made an opening for myself in the mass of flesh. My hands traveled from the stump of a leg to a dead body, from a body to a wound. I could no longer hear anything for the groaning all around me.
Toward 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 for dead. What else could they do? There was no medicine at all at Buchenwald, not even aspirin.
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 that threatened to bring on blood poisoning. More than fifty fellow prisoners told me all this later. I don’t remember any of it myself.
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 better. My friends, Pavel and Louis, didn’t understand what happened. Later, they kept telling me that I was “a case.” A year afterward, Louis was still amazed: “The day we carried you in, 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 it 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. 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 had the look of tranquillity. That was the miracle.
From then on, I watched the stages of my own illness quite clearly. I saw the organs of my body blocked up or losing control one after the other: first my lungs, then my intestines, then my ears, then 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, yet 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 into 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 — had taken possession of me. I had never lived so fully before.
Life became 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 toward 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 that I mumbled from the depths of my tranquillity. 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 the time for metaphysics. I drew my strength from the spring of light. 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 in much the same way right after my childhood accident, when I found that I was blind. Here it was all over again, the Life that sustained the life within me.
The Lord took pity on the poor, helpless mortal before him. Certainly, 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 that I could do: accept God’s help, not refuse 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 May 8, I left the hospital on my own two feet. I was nothing but skin and bones, but I had recovered. The fact was, I was so happy that Buchenwald now seemed to me a place that was, if not welcome, at least possible. If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope.
I still had eleven months ahead of me in the camp. But today I have not a single evil memory of those 330 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 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 toward them the flow of light and joy that had grown so abundant in me. From that time on, they stopped stealing my bread and 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 mere 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 to me 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.
And There Was Light was first published in 1963 by Little, Brown and Company. © 1963 by Jacques Lusseyran. This excerpt, from an expanded edition brought out last year, appears here by permission of Parabola Books, (800) 560-6984, www.parabola.org.
