And There Was Light

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Jacques Lusseyran

And there was light: the autobiography of a blind hero in the French resistance.

Jacques Lusseyran was born at noon, the 19:th of September, 1924 in the midle of Paris. He was living a happy life with both of his pretty wealthy parents in a house near Moulin Rouge. Jacques was a pretty normal eight year old kid, playing and going to school, just as all the others in his age, until one day in May when he in school, accidentaly, became blind. When the classroom clock rang and all the kids were heading for the door, Jacques amongst them, a bigger boy run into him from behind by accident. Jacques fell forward and struck the teacher´s desk. The glasses he wore broke and went deep into his eyes. Now, the fact that he was blind, was only to accept. That must have been the hardest thing to do. Imagine losing sight at the age of eight, what a entrance to hell. I´m sure he didn´t know visual colors and shapes were making such a big impression on him before he went blind. Everything is just black, the whole world turns inside out, the only light is the one from inside of you. And that was just what he discovered. Now he had to feed on the light from his soul and spirit, not to die from starving. Everybody needs some kind of light to live.
He used his inner torch.
If you read the book you can tell when your´e finished that the world would have been different now if he hadn´t became blind. When he got blind he got more clever in a way. He saw and heard things nobody else saw or heard. His mind got brighter.
Thanks to that he has done great things. He became a man of true intelligence living a life surrounded by intelligence and intelligent friends.

In 1939 the world war two broke out. Hitler wanted to expand his empire and exterminate all Jews, homosexualls and mentally retarded humans.
When the germans marched into France from north and occupied the country all the way to Paris, thing started to get hot around them. The germans had the power to do anything. They introduced a curfew starting nine o´clock pm. A friend of Jacques were taken to prison because of jewish ancestors. They even took control of all media. All the French newspapers and radioprograms disappeared. The only thing you could hear on the radio was a German newschannel. But it was forbidden to listen to it, and with fear for the Gestapo the majority obeyed orders. Some few people were listening to the radio regularly, but they told no one. If they would have told even a close friend, they would be expecting Gestapo at the door in a few days. Everybody was talking and Gestapo had undercover spies. No one could keep their mouths shut. They didn´t mean anything bad, they were just too damn stupid not to talk. You couldn´t even say what you wanted, Hitler exterminated all those who raised objection, or had another opinion. It certainly was a hard time.
Because of this many people didn´t know what Hitler was doing, all the killing took place behind a front. The poeple could only hear the good things about Nazism.
Jacques and his friends were upset about this and decided to fight Nazism, Hitler and Germany. They decided to start a resistance movement, but in what way could they fight a power like this? To build an army was of no use. They could never in a whole lifetime build an army able to compete with the German SS army. To start with they needed loyal members, and they couldn´t just go out in the city and ask anyone to join the resistance. That was a great danger. Nobody could know who was in the resistance. But all should know there was an opposition to Hitler. All had the rights to know how devastating his army really were, what miseries he caused and how the war went on.
The resistance movement needed people to know they existed, they needed poeple to know what was going on in Europe, they needed people to oppose Hitler. They decided to make a small newspaper which should be carried around the city, to start with, and distributed for free to the people. Some kind of informationflyer.
Ofcourse it would take a lot of men to handle this. In the beginning few persons knew about the resistance and it was growing slowly. But at least it grew, and they started to distribute a small amount of papers. The whole orginasation was divided into small cells, every cell took care of it self but had special tasks given to them. They had special ways of communicating to each others cause they couldn´t have meetings, the Germans should soon notice them. They had special mailboxes and messengers. Everything was very secret.
The resistance movement grew to a big network of cells, in the beginning just operating in Paris, but later on even in biger cities in both northern and southern France. In the end the movement even had cells in London.
Jacques were a very good student but at the same time he worked both day and night with the resistance and he really had a compassion for it. He knew he was doing a good and important thing and he was burning. Many fires he lit and many fires he kept burning. People were very atracted to him, he had the charisma, the guts, the will, the fire and the strength to change the world. But without his friends he wouldn´t have gotten very far. He needed fuel for the fire, and the compassion of his friends were exactly the right fuel. He influenced many others and they influenced him. They feeded on each other.
The war went on and the resistance were growing bigger, faster and faster. Jacques had the ability to feel if people were lying or telling truth, strong or weak, friends or traitors. That was an ability he had gained by not being able to see. If one lose one ability, one gets another. Or improves existing abilities. All new members had to pass a test with Jacques. He could hear and feel if they were true and fit to be members of the big resistance movement. Gestapo had many informers trying to sneak in so they had to be very careful, but still none of the spies had passed the test.
As the network vere growing the newspaper grew and soon they wanted to do other things too. They had manage to get some connections and one of them were working with helping shot down warpilots. The resistance movement now got inte a new buisness, though sticking to the other one as well. They were now making newspapers and saving pilots.
Pretty often they could see, at a distance, allied bombplanes got shot down by german fire and the pilot thrown out of the plane with the parachute on their back. Then they went to get him by car, they gave him food, medicine and sleep and then he got help to get to the allies in Great Brittain to continue fighting.
They worked like this for a time in collaboration with their secret connection until the Germans started to understand what were going on. The last thing they heard of theyre contact was that they should get in touch with a guy named Philipe who had another underground paper.
Jacques and his crew, now thousands of young men, stopped the saving pilot mission. In one way or another they got in touch with this Philipe. They decided a meeting should be good. Jacques and Georges, Jacques closest man in the network, went to meet Philipe, who showed out to be a fellow of loyalty and leader of Defence de la France, a underground resistance movement bigger than Jacques. The matter of fact the biggest movement in France. Jacques, Georges and Philipe decided to unite the two movements to one single enormous network. Philipe was by god made a leader. He, Jacques and Georges and a couple more were the leaders of Defens de la France, which now had cells over whole France and even some in Great Brittain. Philipes crew had full access to a printing house and the number of distributed papers raise as never before. One edition of the Defens de la France, wich also was the name of the newspaper, could contain 50.000 papers. And it kept rising. In the end they had reached a level of 250.000 papers/edition.
Jet no traitorous had managed to infiltrate the movement. Everything went well.
One day a close friend of Jacques brought a possible member. Jacques investigated him and were a little bit confused. He wasn´t really sure of the new boy, Elio. But the possitive feeling weighed more than the negative and Elio became a full member.
Still nothing bad had happened. Everything went allright except that the Germans were growing and expanding territory. Jacques loved life. Though it was bad times he loved life and he allways found the light and love in everything. The war was making him more loving and more living.
One day when Jacques woke up and went to the window and pulled up the curtains, he saw the car of Gestapo. The car of hell. The car wich would take him away. He was more afraid than he ever had been before. He wasn´t thinking of himself but of his mom and dad. He was afraid they would take them as well. That mustn´t happen.
When the Gestapo knocked on the door he was allready finished to leave. He let them take him and was very happy about them not even touching his parents. The Gestapos were pretty nice towards him after all, he noticed. But he knew that was only a front. The Gestapos took him to some kind of investigation central were he was investigated but he refused to say anything they didn´t knew. They told everything they knew about Defens de la France and Jacques admitted everything they knew, but nothing else did he mention of the truth. He told them some lies to make them confused. He understod they had an informer inside the movement. He also understod that it must be Elio, ´cause everything they knew Elio knew, and what Elio didn´t knew, Gestapo did neither. If Jacques hadn´t been blind they had tortured him. So they did with all his friends. When they had finished the investigation they sat him down in the waitingroom. He was very amazed when he saw one of his closest friends from Defens de la France sitting in the room. He was glad to see him and understod right away that Gestapo had made a raid and captured many of the members. This friend was beaten up badly by the investigators but he hadn´t said anything. Together they were pushed into a small space in a truck and driven to a place they later found out to be a train station. Every load taken from the investigation central contained 2000 human beings.
The only thing they could know was that they were going to be taken by train to somwhere. Where they did not know.
Jacques and his friend were separated when they should go on board the train. They were pushed tightly together in cargowagons, no one could sitt down ´cause the lack of space, everybody had to stand. The train went on for days without anybody knowing where we were headed. People died on the train, starved to death, people were ill, people were shouting, crying, fighting, pissing. Only one man alive were lying on the floor and took very much space for himself. He was a Wrestling champion and biggest in the whole wagon. Everytime anyone told him to rise upp, he hit that poor man ´till he was out of concience. Then the big man lay down again and nobody dared to say anything. After some days they finally reached their destination: Buchenwald. Buchenwald was a workingcamp for people not of jewish origin. I cannot quite remember how many people lived there but i think around 100.000 from all the different countries in Europe. They were all living in blocks. Jacques were living in the invalids block. Around 4000, in some way invalid people, stayed there. The whole place was a deathcircus. People got insane by living there. People died of diseases and hunger, got murdered or beaten up. There were no gaschambers and they didn´t execute people in a row. But that did just mean a slower death. The SS soldiers didn´t care how many died and if one did a single mistake he was executed on place. Hundreds of enslaved people died each day. Some had to work just to work. They carried stone and mud from one place to another and then back again, over and over again, in surveilance of the soldiers. The Germans were smart. They knew poeple would rise in revolt if they weren´t maintained. But Jacques didn´t have to work becaue he was blind, what work could he do? And the food was very poor of nutrients and in too small amounts. A cup of soup and a breadslice wasn´t making anyone satisfied.
Jacques met some old friends in Buchenwald. Among them Georges who had been Jacques best companion in the resistance. Georges had changed. Buchenwald had made him, like so many thousand others, gone mad. The only thing keeping him alive was the hate against Nazism. Before he was one of the most strongly burning resistanceworkers, living on the love for France. Now he only felt hate and Jacques noticed he wasn´t going to make it.He was lost. He would be dead in some weeks, long before the Americans would come to rescue them. Oh yes, Jacques were shore of that they would be rescued, in one year or two. The war couldn´t last forever...
The time went by and the killing went on. Jacques were getting weaker and weaker. Unfriendly people kept stealing his food. The diseases increased the huge amount of dead men. Soon Jacques felt the disease coming closer to him and he got the fever and inflammation of his ears. Now he was very weak. His whole body got inflamed. He thought he would die, and so he almost did. He got so ill that he fell in a coma. But he was lucky. They took him to the hospital and there he stayed for some days ´till he got better and could return to the camp. Now he knew how hard it was to stay alive when the wonderful death were so close. He started to help people, he felt he had to do something good for others who had it worse than him. For example people who couldn´t stop bringing up old memories. That was the worst thing one could do to oneself. You had to stop remember, or you´d be torn apart in your soul and dead. Jacques talked to miserable people, he showed them the path of light and life in the dark time of death and prisonment. That was his fire now. Saving lives could keep him going for eternity, and it made him pretty wealthy in some kind of way. He was living a good life in Buchenwald and thanks to all this he got a special respect in his block and nobody ever took his food again. He was the psychologist everybody needed.
Later he also started to spread news in the camp. A lot of false news were circulating the blocks and some people even spread false news just to make a hell for others. For exampel one man could tell another man from Warzaw that nobody had survived the terrible bombings of Warzaw, just to se the Polish man take his own life because he thought his hole family was dead.
Jacques and his small crew of companions had to hunt down those who spread false rumours and then tell all the people the truth. I can´t remember from where they recieved the news but they certainly did. Maybe they had a radio.
The allied countries were closing from both east and west and Germany suffered great defeats. The whole camp felt the freedom was closing in. But then, in September 1944, the SS corps recieved orders not to leave a single man alive in case of total defeat. The explosive charges were ready and the machineguns too. The people had no future, no hope, nothing to live for and in the winter of 1944-45 the food ration were cut down. People were so weak that they couldn´t even think of the future they could only live on the spot. When the great news came that the allies had crossed the Rhine, nobody reacted. They all were to weak to have hope. They could hear the allied planes flying above them and they could hear big factories blow up in the surrounding plains. The SS control over the camp strengthened and the public hangings increased. The bombardments came closer each day and there was no doubt, the allied troops were coming. But nobody reacted to that neither.
On the 9:th of April the food ration stopped completely. The SS certainly new they were going to lose. The next day the SS command offered an alternative to all prisoners. But what an alternative. The prisoners could follow the SS troops to the east, or stay in the camp and take the risk of being bombed by their own allies. How could one chose? Nobody had the smallest idea of what either choices would bring. Which way led to freedom? The SS gave the prisoners the false freedom to chose their own destiny. Panic broke out. They had two hours to decide. Then the SS would leave on the roads leading to what? Life? Jacques had allready made a decision and crawled around with his last powers and tried to convince poeple to stay, why he didn´t know. He felt that was the right thing but he knew nothing more than the other prisoners. But 80.000 thousands of them left with the SS. 20.000 stayed. A few hours later the Americans arrived. But that didn´t mean life. The whole food storage had been poisoned by the SS and they had to wait another 36 hours for food. That meant thousands of dead. When the food finally came, that meant even more dead. People ate too much too fast.
With time the life came back to the survivors, more and more. They were free. No longer oppressed by the Nazis. Free men of France, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Italy, Schweiz and all the other countries of Europe.
Later they heard on the radio, all the 80.000 prisoners who left the camp, had been executed with machineguns. Only ten of them had survived.
Three persons from Defense de la France had survived. One of them was Philipe. The three of them reunited. Defense de la France still existed, but not underground. It had become France-Soir, the most important daily newspaper in Paris. Jacques later moved to America and became a university proffessor...