And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II

by Jacques Lusseyran

Overview

When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608682706
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	02/15/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	200,661
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jacques Lusseyran (September 19, 1924, to July 27, 1971) was a blind author, professor, and French Resistance leader. Born in Paris, he was blinded in a school accident at the age of eight. At age seventeen, less than a year after the German invasion of France, 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 daily 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, despite his service as part of the underground and his brilliant schoolwork, Lusseyran was denied admission to the École Normale Supérieure, an elite university for training French academics, because of a decree passed by the Vichy government barring “invalids” from public employment. Although for years he was prevented from becoming a professor, he repeatedly presented his case and was eventually able to teach in France. Later he moved to the United States, where he first lectured at Hollins College and then became a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He was a professor at the University of Hawaii in 1971 when, at age forty-seven, he was killed in a car accident with his wife, Marie, not far from Juvardeil in France, where he had been happy as a boy.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

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.

Table of 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 Bind
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
Addendum

Editorial Reviews

“A magical book, the kind that becomes a classic.”
— Baltimore Sun

“One of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever encountered...[Lusseyran’s] experience is thrilling, horrible, honest, spiritually profound, and utterly full of joy.”
— Ethan Hawke, in the Village Voice

“One of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It is why books are published at all.”
— Mark Nepo, author of Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

“Lusseyran writes like an angel, like a mystic. His response to losing his sight at an early age is so surprising that it will change the way anyone thinks about blindness.”
— Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark

“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 stunning revelation of human courage and love arising in the midst of implacable human evil. Under it all runs a deep current of mystical truth and hope.”
— Jacob Needleman, author of An Unknown World

“An exciting, inspirational account of a life without sight.”
— Library Journal

“What normally would seem a tragic plunge into darkness becomes a thrilling journey into light.”
— Peter Brook, director of the International Centre for Theatre Research, Paris

“This book is his testament to the joy which exists in all of us, a joy which no conditions — not even the worst — can kill.”
— Roshi Philip Kapleau, author of The Three Pillars of Zen

From the Publisher