And There Was Light
More Praise for And There Was Light
by Jacques Lusseyran
“Most beautiful.”
— Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia
“Astonishing, life changing, and magical, And There Was Light is one of my favorite books of all time, and one I frequently give as a gift. A true story with the power to change what you think is possible.”
— Marc Lesser, author of Less and Know Yourself, Forget Yourself
“Jacques Lusseyran’s extraordinary memoir is a gift of light that brightens our darkest days. Blinded when he was eight, he learned to see with his inner senses, reading the world around him better than those who see only with their eyes, never losing his love of life, always expanding his capacity for friendship and his certainty that there is a saving power. That a blind teenager could become a moving spirit and key organizer in the French Resistance — knowing who to trust by the sound of a voice and the pressure of a hand — and could help to found one of France’s leading newspapers, on clandestine presses, makes you want to stand up and cheer. His account of how he survived Buchenwald is one of the great narratives of human courage, giving us heart for the challenges in our own lives. This is essential reading, above all for its eloquent message that we only truly find joy, and light, within.”
— Robert Moss, author of The Secret History of Dreaming and The Boy Who Died and Came Back
“Some years ago I asked the eminent historian of religion Huston Smith what he believed to be the greatest spiritual teaching of all. Without hesitation, he said, ‘Follow the light, wherever it may lead.’ If Jacques Lusseyran had been asked a similar question, I suspect his answer would have been startlingly similar, though as a blind leader of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, he would have insisted that the light does not come from without but comes from within. This incandescent memoir is graced with both, for light radiates from every page, and glows within the heart of the reader who dares to brave the heart of darkness that Lusseyran illuminates.”
— Phil Cousineau, author of The Art of Pilgrimage and editor of The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
“Hope is what pours over you on every page of Jacques Lusseyran’s memoir. It’s unavoidable. It’s the DNA of the book.”
— Jesse Kornbluth, www.headbutler.com
“Like Lusseyran’s light, this inspiring book draws the reader into the experience beyond the ordinary, a world illuminated and quickened by a spirit of wholeness and humanness that is a joy to read and remember.”
— Noetic Sciences Review
“And There Was Light is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It is why books are published at all. Lusseyran’s inner experience of blindness is a testament to the existence of a spiritual world, a guide for all of us.”
— Mark Nepo, author of Reduced to Joy and Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
“And There Was Light is the little-known but thoroughly luminous autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, a blind man who discovered the gift of inner sight after losing his vision in a childhood accident — and then put his gift to use in the struggle against Nazism. Lusseyran allows us to glimpse both heaven and hell on Earth through the eyes of a man who has lived through both. His description of what it is like to ‘see’ as a blind man is fascinating and inspiring; his account of Buchenwald, where he was condemned to the living hell of the ‘Invalids’ Barracks,’ is one of the most anguishing fragments of Holocaust testimony that I have ever encountered.”
— Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
“A magical book, the kind that becomes a classic….How do you explain the incredible suspense of this book? You know he lives — he’s gone on to write it down after all. So why is your breath caught in your throat and why can’t you put this book down even the second or third time through it?”
— Baltimore Sun
ALSO BY JACQUES LUSSEYRAN
Against the Pollution of the I: Selected Writings of Jacques Lusseyran
Copyright © 1963 by Jacques Lusseyran
First published by Little, Brown and Company in 1963
Second edition published by Parabola Books in 1987
Third edition published by Morning Light Press in 2006
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Text design by Tona Pearce Myers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lusseyran, Jacques.
[Et la lumière fut. English]
And there was light : the extraordinary memoir of a blind hero of the French resistance in World War II / Jacques Lusseyran ; translated from the French by Elizabeth R. Cameron. — Fourth edition, First New World Library edition.
pages cm
Translation of: Et la lumière fut.
ISBN 978-1-60868-269-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60868-270-6 (ebook) 1. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, German. 3. Lusseyran, Jacques. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, French. 5. Prisoners of war—France—Biography. 6. Prisoners of war—Germany—Biography. 7. Guerrillas—France—Biography. 8. Blind—France—Biography. I. Cameron, Elizabeth R. (Elizabeth Ripley), 1907– translator. II. Title.
D802.F8L773 2014
940.53'44092—dc23
[B]
2013042898
First New World Library printing, March 2014
ISBN 978-1-60868-269-0
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper
New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For George and Virginia McMillan
CONTENTS
1. Clear Water of Childhood
2. Revelation of Light
3. The Cure for Blindness
4. Running Mates and Teachers
5. My Friend Jean
6. The Visual Blind
7. The Troubled Earth
8. My Country, My War
9. The Faceless Disaster
10. The Plunge into Courage
11. The Brotherhood of Resistance
12. Our Own Defense of France
13. Betrayal and Arrest
14. The Road to Buchenwald
15. The Living and the Dead
16. My New World
Epilogue
About the Author
WHEN YOU SAID TO ME: “Tell me the story of your life,” I was not eager to begin. But when you added, “What I care most about is learning your reasons for loving life,” then I became eager, for that was a real subject.
All the more since I have maintained this love of life through everything: through infirmity, the terrors of war, and even in Nazi prisons. Never did it fail me, not in misfortune nor in good times, which may seem much easier but is not.
Now, it is no longer a child who is going to tell this story and that is regrettable. It is a man. Worse yet, it is the university professor I have become. I will have to guard myself very carefully from trying to expound and demonstrate — those two illusions. I will have to return to the simplicity of a child and in addition reach back to France, leaving in thought this America where I live reassured and protected, to find again the Paris which held for me so many frightening experiences and so many happy ones.
[ 1 ]
CLEAR WATER OF CHILDHOOD
AS I REMEMBER IT,
my story always starts out like a fairy tale, not an unusual one, but still a fairy tale. Once upon a time in Paris, between two world wars, there lived a happy little boy. I was that little boy, and today when I look back at him from the midpoint of life which I have reached, I marvel, a happy childhood is so rare. Besides, it is so little the fashion these days that one can hardly believe in it. All the same, if the water of my childhood runs clear, I am not about to muddy it up. That would be the worst kind of foolishness.
I was born in 1924, on September 19 at noon, in the heart of Paris in Montmartre, between the Place Blanche and the Moulin Rouge. I was born in a modest nineteenth-century house, in a room looking out over a courtyard.
My parents were ideal. My father, a graduate of a school for advanced physics and chemistry and a chemical engineer by profession, was both intelligent and kind. My mother, who had studied physics and biology herself, was completely devoted and understanding. Both of them were generous and attentive. But why say these things? As a small boy I was not aware of them. The small boy attributed no special qualities to his parents. He did not even think about them. There was no need, for his parents loved him and he loved them. It was a gift from heaven.
My parents were protection, confidence, warmth. When I think of my childhood I still feel the sense of warmth above me, behind and around me, that marvelous sense of living not yet on one’s own, but leaning body and soul on others who accept the charge.
My parents carried me along and that, I am sure, is the reason why through all my childhood I never touched ground. I could go away and come back. Objects had no weight and I never became entangled in the web of things. I passed between dangers and fears as light passes through a mirror. That was the joy of my childhood, the magic armor which, once put on, protects for a lifetime.
My family belonged to “the petite bourgeoisie” in France in those days. We lived in small apartments but they always seemed to me large. The one I know best was on the Left Bank of the Seine, near the great garden of the Champ de Mars, between the Eiffel Tower, with its four paws spread apart, and the Ecole Militaire, a building which was only a name to me and whose shape I have quite forgotten.
My parents were heaven. I didn’t say this to myself so precisely, and they never said it to me, but it was obvious. I knew very early, I am quite sure of it, that through them another Being concerned himself with me and even addressed himself to me. This Other I did not even call God. My parents spoke to me about God, but only later. I had no name for him. He was just there and it was better so. Behind my parents there was someone, and my father and mother were simply the people responsible for passing along the gift. My religion began like this, which I think explains why I have never known doubt. This confession may be something of a surprise, but I set store by it because it will make so many other things clear, my recklessness, for instance.
I was always running; the whole of my childhood was spent running. Only I was not running to catch hold of something. That is a notion for grownups and not the notion of a child. I was running to meet everything that was visible, and everything that I could not yet see. I traveled from assurance to assurance, as though I were running a race in relays.
I see myself on my fourth birthday as clearly as a picture hanging in the middle of the wall of my room. I was running along the sidewalk toward a triangle of light formed by the intersection of three streets, Rue Edmond Valentin, Rue Sédillot, and Rue Dupont-des-Loges where we lived. A triangle of sunlight opened out like a bit of seashore toward the Square Rapp. I was being projected toward this pool of light, drawn up by it, and waving my arms and legs, cried out to myself: “I am four years old and I am Jacques.”
Call it the birth of personality if you like, but be sure that it was not accompanied by any feeling of panic. It was simply that the beam of universal happiness had fallen upon me like a bolt from the blue. I had my share of misery and grief as all children do. But truthfully I don’t remember them. They vanished from my memory just like the presence of physical pain. As soon as it leaves the body, it leaves the spirit.
The violent, the ridiculous, the shady and the uncertain, all these I knew later on. But I cannot place any of them in the earliest years of my life. And that is what I meant just now when I spoke of the clear water of my childhood.
[ 2 ]
REVELATION OF LIGHT
FOR SEVEN YEARS I JUMPED, I ran, I covered the paths of the Champ de Mars. I scoured the sidewalks of the narrow Paris streets where the houses were crowded into the fragrant thoroughfares. For in France each house has its characteristic smell. Grownups hardly notice this, but children know it well, and can recognize the buildings by their odors. There is the smell of the creamery, the smell of the pastry shop, the confectioner’s, the shoemaker’s, the druggist’s, and the smell of the shop belonging to the man who has such a beautiful name in France, “the merchant of colors.” These buildings I knew by sniffing the air like a small dog.
I felt sure that nothing was unfriendly, that the branches I used to swing on would hold firm, and that the paths, no matter how winding, would take me to a place where I would not be afraid; that all paths, eventually, would lead me back to my family. You might say that I had no story, except the most important of all, the story of life.
Still, there was light, and light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour. None of the rooms in our three-room apartment has remained clear in my memory. But the balcony was different, because on the balcony there was light. Impetuous as I was, I used to lean patiently on the railing and watch the light flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left.
This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.
There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.
This fascination did not stop when night fell. When I came in from outdoors in the evening, when supper was over, I found the fascination again in the dark. Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.
Whenever I ran across the Champ de Mars I was still chasing light. I was just about to jump into it, with my feet together, at the end of the path; to catch hold of it as you catch a butterfly over the pond; to lie down with it in the grass or on the sand. Nothing else in nature, not even the sounds to which I listened so attentively, was as precious to me as light.
When I was about four or five years old, I suddenly discovered that you can hold light in your hands. To do this you only need to take colored crayons or blocks and play with them. I began to spend hours doing all kinds of coloring, without much form I am sure, but I kept diving in, as you plunge into a fountain. My eyes are still filled with those colors.
They told me later that even at this early age I had poor sight. Myopia I think it was, a condition which positive people would think quite adequate to explain my obsession. But as a young child I was not aware that I did not see very well. I was not concerned about it, because I was happy to make friends with light as though it were the essence of the whole world.
Colors, shapes, even objects, the heaviest of them, all had the same vibration. And today, every time I assume the attitude of tender attention, I find the same vibration once again. In those days
, when people asked me what was my favorite color, I always answered “Green.” But I only learned later that green was the color of hope.
I AM CERTAIN THAT CHILDREN always know more than they are able to tell, and that makes the big difference between them and adults, who, at best, know only a fraction of what they say. The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole beings, while we know it only with our heads. When a child is threatened by sickness or trouble, he knows it right away, stops his games and takes refuge with his mother.
In just this way, when I was seven years old, I realized that fate had a blow in store for me. It happened in the Easter holidays in Juvardeil, a little village in the Anjou where my maternal grandparents lived. We were about to go back to Paris and the buggy was already at the door to take us to the station. In those days, to travel from Juvardeil to the railroad station at Etriché-Chateauneuf, seven kilometers away, we used a horse and buggy. The grocer’s truck was the first automobile I really knew in the village, and that was not until three or four years later.
That day in the country, as the buggy was waiting and jingling its bells, I had stayed behind in the garden, by the corner of the barn, alone and in tears. These are not the kind of tears they tell you about later, for I still feel them deeply whenever I think of them. I was crying because I was looking at the garden for the last time.
I had just learned the bad news. I couldn’t say how, but there was absolutely no doubt. Sunlight on the paths, the two great box trees, the grape arbor, the rows of tomatoes, cucumbers and beans, all the familiar sights which had peopled my eyes, I was seeing for the last time. And I was aware of it. This was much more than childish sorrow and when my mother, after looking for me, finally found me and asked what the trouble was, I could only say: “I am never going to see the garden again.” Three weeks later it came about.
On the third of May, I was at school as usual, the elementary school in the part of Paris where my parents lived on Rue Cler. At ten o’clock I jumped up with my classmates who were running for the door to the playground outside. In the scuffle, an older boy who was in a hurry came up from the back of the room and ran into me accidentally from behind. I hadn’t seen him coming and taken off guard lost my balance and fell. As I fell, I struck one of the sharp corners of the teacher’s desk.