Surely here is one of the most extraordinary of the participants in
the French Resistance. Jacques Lusseyran was totally blinded in an
accident at the age of seven. Owing to his parents' sympathetic
awareness of his need to be accepted in a world of sighted people,
he learned to live a normal life. He was a brilliant student and
had a wide circle of friends when, during the first Nazi spring in
Paris, he experienced intense revulsion at the cruelties inflicted
upon Jews and other "undesirables", and transformed his friends
into lieutenants in a resistance movement. He was seventeen years
old. At the beginning, they circulated a secret newspaper, but in
time the organization grew and then affiliated itself with other
underground groups dedicated to aiding fugitives, downed Allied
airmen, etc., escape. Lusseyran's handicap became a blessing for he
was accustomed to relying on his memory rather than written
records, and his special status as a blind person had given him an
invaluable sixth sense about people. Still, in July of 1943, he and
a dozen close co-workers were betrayed and sent to Buchenwald. He
alone survived. More striking even than the author's conquest of
his handicap, endurance in the face of suffering, restraint in
recounting iniquity, is the strong spirit of optimism and joy in
life that pervades this story of real and metaphorical darkness.
(Kirkus Reviews)
'Light is in us even if we have no eyes.' It is a rare man who can
maintain a love of life through the infirmity of blindness, the
terrors of war, and the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. Such
a man was Jacques Lusseyran, a French underground resistance leader
during the Second World War. This book is his compelling and moving
autobiography. Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight in an accident when
he was eight years old. At the age of sixteen, he formed a
resistance group with his schoolfriends in Nazi-occupied France.
Gradually the small resistance circle of boys widened, cell by
cell. In a fascinating scene, the author tells of interviewing
prospective underground recruits, 'seeing' them by means of their
voices, and in this way weeding out early the weak and the
traitorous. Eventually Jacques and his comrades were betrayed to
the Germans and interrogated by the Gestapo. After a fifteen month
incarceration in Buchenwald, the author was one of thirty to
survive from an initial shipment of two thousand.
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