And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

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 which 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 that of all the others. Only Georges and I were paired. 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. The Committee thought this risk was mine by right, as the moral initiator of the whole affair, and because I was blind.

  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 would 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 also from refusing what they offered me. Nothing in the world could help me more to live than this confidence on the part of my friends, and this danger itself, 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. I would stay in the rear, necessarily. But before my eyes condemned me not to make war, as they might one day, I should have my eyes to thank for the chance to make it first, in the front lines.

  IN LESS THAN A YEAR nearly six hundred boys took the road to the Boulevard Port-Royal. They came to see the blind man. It will be easier to understand the times and the burden of their secret if I explain that in most cases these people did not know my name, and didn’t even ask what it was.

  One of the fifty-two from the original group would watch a classmate for several days, sometimes for several weeks. Eventually, if they believed he could be trusted, they sent him 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 very likely to arise — I would ask them in, but, pretending there had been a misunderstanding, would talk of nothing that mattered. The members of the original group knew I wasn’t joking. They knew it all the better because they were not playing games themselves. “Go to the blind man,” they would say to the neophyte. “When he has seen you, I shall have something to tell you.”

  Then they explained that I lived on the Boulevard Port-Royal, opposite the Baudeloque Maternity Hospital, and that the door of my house was between a drugstore and a sweatshop; that they must take the main stairway in the building to the fourth floor, and give two short rings and one long on the bell. I would open the door myself and take them to my quarters. After that they were to let things take their course, and answer any questions I might ask.

  In the first weeks only the very young ones came, boys between seventeen and nineteen, who were finishing their secondary schooling at the lycée. But little by little older boys came along, people with more self-confidence and harder to know. They were scholars from the colleges of letters, science, medicine, pharmacy, law, the schools of advanced agronomy, chemistry, physics. The Movement was growing at the pace of a living cell. What is more, it had a name. We called ourselves the Volunteers of Liberty.

  Every week I gave an account of my decisions before the Central Committee. So-and-so was admitted unconditionally. He joined the group from the College of Law, on an equal footing with the others. So-and-so was admitted “on probation.” He would be under surveillance for the time being. A founding group existed only if it included two members, one in action, the other revealing his intentions to no one and with specific responsibility for watching over doubtful cases.

  To anyone who has not lived through this period of the Occupation, these cautious measures may seem exaggerated. But they were not, and the future would prove it. As for our plans, were they on such a grand scale that we needed six hundred young men to carry them out? Actually, they were modest but also difficult to carry out. They justified the gathering of all our forces.

  Our first task was to give people the news. The only papers which were coming out in France at the time were censored from the first to the last line. In spirit, sometimes even to the letter, they were copies of the Nazi press. Often they even went further, following the principle that traitors must behave even worse than brigands. The French people were completely ignorant of the war, and because of this they had only instincts to rely on.

  True, there was the radio of Free France in London. But in nine cases out of ten, its broadcasts were jammed so effectively that you couldn’t make out the words. Besides, listening to the British radio was forbidden. And even if the Germans exercised only sporadic control, fear ran wild and very few families listened. Our first job was to bring out a newspaper — a paper, or if that should be beyond our means at the start, a loose-leaf news bulletin, one we could circulate in secret from hand to hand.

  A number of members of the Movement would be set to listen to the British and the Swiss radios. We were going to gather the real news of the war, put it in order, distribute and appraise it.

  It was urgent to guide public opinion and set it straight. Never forget that in those days in the middle of 1941, most of our compatriots, and almost the whole of Europe, had lost hope. The defeat of the Nazis seemed improbable at the least, or postponed to an indefinite future. It was our duty to declare, to cry out our faith in the victory of the Allies.

  News was needed, surely, but courage even more, and clarity. We were resolved to hide nothing. For here was the monster to be fought: defeatism, and with it that other monster, apathy. Everything possible must be done to keep the French from growing accustomed to Nazism, or from seeing it just as an enemy, like enemies of other times, an enemy of the nation, an adversary who was victorious just for the moment. For our part we knew that Nazism threatened the whole of humanity, that it was an absolute evil, and we were going to publish its evilness abroad.

  Our third task would take longer. We must uncover in the youth of France all that was left intact. We must sort the strong from the weak, the faithful from the cowards. The time for subtleties was past.

  We were aware that the triumphant return of the Allies would not be accomplished from one day to the next. We also knew that when it did come, the country would need hosts of men ready to receive and help the invasion of the liberators.

  Men in readiness, that meant men who had committed themselves months, perhaps even years ahead, who had tested themselves in patience and underground work, men who would be incapable of treachery or any kind of moral lapse. And for this task not just men but young men were needed. The evidence stared us in the face. The men over thirty round about us were afraid: for their wives and their children — these were real reasons; but also for their possessions, their position, and that is what made us angry; above all for their lives, which they clung to much more than we did to ours. We were less frightened than they were. The years ahead would prove the point. Four-fifths of the Resistance in France was the work of men less than thirty years old.

  There was another way we could help. Young as we were, we could easily go all over, pretend to be playing games, or making foolish talk, wander around whistling with our hands in our pockets, outside factories, near barracks or German convoys, hang about kitchens and on sidewalks, climb over walls. Everything would be on our side, even help from the girls if there happened to be any on the spot.

  The Volunteers of Liberty were going to build an information network, not an organization of professional agents but something better, an organization of agents dedicated and nearly invisible because they looked like harmles
s youngsters. In the end, we should have to get in touch with London, but even this difficulty failed to alarm us.

  Finally, we should be a movement with no arms in our everyday work. But the Central Committee was going to assemble those of us — some twenty — who had been mobilized or had enlisted as volunteers in 1939 and knew how to handle arms. We were going to set up a few training centers in the outer suburbs of Paris, or even on isolated farms in the countryside. We had already made some contacts with farmers in the region between Arpajon and Limours. According to a meticulous plan, we were going to maintain a hundred of our number ready for any eventuality. None of us had the illusion of being important, but all of us were sure of being necessary.

  BUT LET US GO BACK to my apartment, and the conferences I was holding there.

  What picture could these newcomers — sometimes three or four of them the same evening — have had of the mysterious young man I was? The visitor only knew one thing about me, that I was blind. If he had carefully observed the rules about the bells, 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 on the court, a bed, an armchair for him, a straight chair for me, a low slim chest. Through a door that always stood open to the second room he saw piles of Braille books extending all the way up the three walls of the room. 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 with the enthusiasm of a child or something very like it — in any case with a mixture of mystery and candor which encouraged confidences.

  Was the newcomer suspicious of the blind man? But how in the world could a blind man be fishing in troubled waters? At any rate, if the visitor was still suspicious, he had eyes and had only to use them to observe. He might blush at his ease if emotion caught him, or make sudden movements with his head or his fingers, might twitch, draw back or smile. A blind man does not see these things.

  While all 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 must be no settled topic of conversation. After all, that in itself might well be a method.

  I had scouted out a whole series of vague exchanges, vague or unexpected but without connection with 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, I gained time with these people and 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 nothing is more revealing of any individual — as every psychologist knows well — than elaborate explanations. But in the end every one of these tactics amounted to very little. If I could plumb these hearts and consciences — and I felt sure I could — it was because I was blind and for no other reason.

  When I was very 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 deep in them — suddenly to hear in their voices the note above all others, the note of confidence. This filled me with an assurance which 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.

  Then too I became infallible, or nearly. And my comrades in the Central Committee and all the rest in the Movement knew it. They told me so, some of them embarrassed and half ironical as they said it, the others, like François or Georges, with the conviction of faith.

  As each day went by, some of us had to get used to some strange phenomena. Since we had been in the Resistance our mental powers had grown stronger. Our memories were unbelievably agile. We read between the words and the silences. Deeds which only two months before seemed impossible to us, putting walls or phantoms in our path, were now broken down into a dust of easy little tasks.

  Georges was right when he called our state “the state of grace.” As far as I was concerned, I was aware that my conscience was in touch with the conscience of hundreds of others, growing in rhythm with their sufferings or their hopes.

  These reinforcements came with every day. I was surprised to find I knew things they had not told me, surprised when I awoke in the morning feeling a sense of purpose strong and entirely new to me — one which I found out was shared, three hours later, by two or even ten of the comrades. The spirit of the Resistance was born, and was using me as its instrument. Yet who could have said what it was, the spirit of the Resistance? Among the Volunteers of Liberty it had twenty faces.

  For example, Georges was a nationalist — I mean a patriot and a jingo, to the point where if he wanted to sing the “Marseillaise,” he could never get to the end of it. It made him weep like a little girl. How we teased him!

  So, if he was making resistance, and he was making it like a lion, it was to save France. Germany could die the death, and England and the five continents along with her! I had undertaken to convert him to a world freed from national fanaticism, but this conversion took me more than three years, and it was never really completed.

  Claude and Raymond were the philosophers. They thought France was only one among the circle of democracies, and that it was democracy itself that must be defended, deserving every expenditure of courage.

  Others, like François and Jean, and before long the majority, put their reasons for fighting less clearly, but knew them better. The words mattered as little to them as to me. They were fighting for honor, liberty, the ideal, the right to live, purity, Christianity, respect.… Quite simply they could no longer stand civilians being bombed and starved, lying in public in accordance with the law, looting in the name of friendship and practicing police tyranny in the name of protection.

  Above all, we did not want people to go on treating a monster — or even a man, Adolf Hitler — as if he were a god. “God is neither a German nor a Russian nor a Frenchman,” I kept saying to Georges. “God is life, and everything that does violence to life is against God.”

  We did not want them to torture prisoners because they were prisoners, or kill Jews because they were Jews. But the Nazis were torturing and killing everywhere.

  Since the morning of June 22 and the German invasion of Soviet Russia — how right our history teacher had been — they had been scorching the earth in Galicia, White Russia and the Ukraine, field by field and house after house.

  On August 23 we got the news that they had shot two Frenchmen that day, Gabriel Péri, one of the Communist leaders, and D’Estienne D’Orves, a conservative Catholic officer, both of them heroes. This double death was official. London had confirmed it.

  But what was less known — though known to us — was that the eighty-seven members of a Resistance network had been arrested ten days before. There were several distinguished anthropologists and ethnologists among them. They were men and women who had thrown themselves into the fighting through idealism just as we had. They had published two underground papers, La France Continue and Résistance, and we had been receiving these papers in bundles of a thousand copies. The members of the Movement had then passed them around. We learned that several of these men had already been beheaded at the Fresnes, the Santé and the Cherche-Midi, the three largest prisons in Paris, and that the others had been moved toward Germany, toward the fortresses and concentration c
amps and a slower death.

  Everyone was becoming more frightened, we saw that too. German victories in Russia were crushing as the summer went on. London was being bombed. America did not move. Perhaps our resistance was without hope.

  All this gave François a new lease on life. He would shake me and say, “What a ball! Just think! What a celebration if after all this there is not a chance! They are just ghosts, the ones who think people fight to win! They fight because they like it.”

  Surely we were happy to fight, even on such a modest scale. In my own efforts I was throwing sparks. I passed the second bachot like picking a flower, with the mark “very good.” It was so much less difficult than the Resistance! And now I was about to enter the University.

  It was at this point that Gérard, my friend who was held hostage because his father was in London, was set free for no reason we could see. He rushed off to my house and talked for five hours. When he left he had joined the Movement.

  Yet he was one who knew the score better than anybody else. He had seen men coming back mutilated after questioning by the Gestapo. He had heard and seen that they were killing every day. But that didn’t stop him, on the contrary. Besides, none of my friends were hesitating any longer. To tell the truth, many of them were burning to die. Death at twenty is still possible, so much more so than it is later on. All of us had plunged into courage. It was our element. We were swimming in it and had no eyes left but for the shore.

  [ 11 ]

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF RESISTANCE

  THERE WAS NO LONGER ANYONE over me, and the loneliness of command was beginning to cost me dear. I had told my parents about the kind of activity I was involved in. They had courageously silenced their fears. They had given me their full support, but we were agreed that from now on I should not tell them anything. What good would it do to multiply the risks? They were putting their apartment at our disposal, and that already was dangerous enough.