Even in the Central Committee I found no one to advise me. When we were in trouble we were in it together. All of us were apprentices, but what I needed at all costs was a chief. The man who has no admiration or respect for anyone but himself is in a bad way. His soul is sick. I had to find someone I could confide in, someone who would vouch for me. And this had to be an exceptional person because what we were doing was quite out of the way. One day Jean, who felt the need as much as I did, took me to see our history teacher.
This man was superlative. He listened to what we had to say, approved, but interrupted us very soon. “Now I know quite enough,” he said to us. “Keep the rest to yourselves. You have my full confidence. Come back and see me once a week. Each time you come I will give you two hours. Bring me your troubles. They concern me deeply. In return, whenever I can I will help you.” That was all I needed. With this support, this confidence behind me, I was ready to meet the dangers, even the disasters if they came.
Jean, for his part, had a hard time adapting himself to our new life. Suspicion he regarded as shocking. It was not that he was short of courage. With him it was a question of decency. Like the rest of us from here on he had to suspect people, assume they were hiding their plans or lying, on occasion he even might have to lie himself to be sure they were telling him the truth. But to beat around the bush, to besmirch the heart! The idea made poor Jean tremble with disgust. He could never have believed that the pursuit of the ideal was such a jumbled business.
His greatest joy had always been in giving himself, right away, to the people he liked, and then never drawing back. The boy was as transparent as glass. And how can glass make itself cloudy? To me he used to say, “I shall never be a good soldier of the Resistance. It is only through you that I shall be able to be in it. Send me wherever you want to. If I go there in your place don’t be afraid. I will go. But remember, if I were all alone, I should do nothing for I should not have the strength.”
At this point, Jean began to travel all over Paris on errands which I entrusted to him. Since he had enemies and knew it, but could not think about them because he found it too painful, he went straight ahead, with the stiff gait of his long legs, and never looked around. He was not careful. “Caution disgusts me,” he used to say, “it is so stupid.”
François and Georges, on the other hand, were in their element. The more they had to conceal, the more intelligent they grew. François particularly had adopted the manners of the gentlemen’s gentleman in a comedy. He no longer went into bourgeois apartment houses except by the back stairs, in order to avoid putting the concierge on her guard. To look less like a student he dressed like a workman. He was so much in the habit of looking around that even when we were alone in my room he kept turning his head. None of this affected his health. I should say not. He had a job to do, and he was doing it well.
He had turned himself into a secret agent, full-time. To do more for the Movement, to work for it day and night, he had stopped his studies. He lived in a garret, at the top of a dark house, in a maid’s room which could be reached over the rooftops to make escape easier when it was needed. Collections taken up in the Movement assured him of the thousand francs a month which kept him from starving.
For two years he lived like this, getting thinner and thinner, more and more agile, and always happier. There was an electric quality in the tone of his voice. It seemed to say that he could have made heroes out of cowards. “All this comes from my Polish ancestors,” he said; “they have been persecuting us for five centuries.”
Even Jean could not blink away the fact that we had enemies. Our activities were growing fast. Twice a week we put out a bulletin for communication and for information. The object was to keep our people clearheaded and always on their guard, and also to denounce Nazi atrocities as we heard about them. They were taking place all around us in great numbers.
Ours was still only a bulletin, not yet a real newspaper. Still, we had to have paper, and since the sale of paper was entirely controlled by the Army of Occupation, we had to steal it. Georges and François had organized the raid.
Later there was the business of the ink and the machines for mimeographing. Without accomplices we could get nothing. Yet each accomplice was a potential traitor. But when and where could the duplicating be done? This question the Central Committee addressed to me. They all seemed to think I was blessed with a special gift, the gift of somehow finding the answers. And in a surprising way they were right. For the very next day I had a visit from a doctor, a young psychiatrist a comrade had sent me because “he had some useful information.”
Henri, the psychiatrist, had friends in the French police. From time to time he would be in a position to let us know, an hour or two ahead of time, about police blockades set up by German order. This information would be very valuable.
But it was not long before our conversation touched on his patients, the poor crazy women he was treating at Sainte-Anne, the psychiatric hospital. The solution to the problem of mimeographing had slipped out almost without the doctor’s knowing it. Sainte-Anne had padded cells reserved for violent patients. As a rule not all of them were in use at the same time. One could serve as our workshop. Henri took the arrangements in charge. When I gave the news to the Central Committee, they accepted it as a matter of course. They were a bit too quick in forming the habit of miracles.
Though our bulletins were not very well written, they were potent to say the least. They circulated throughout the Movement, and we had even made up three teams to distribute them outside. François was in charge of the first, Georges of the second and Denis, a newcomer, of the third.
Denis, what a man he was! A good-natured lad of twenty, blond as wheat, with innocent eyes, a pink and white complexion, something timorous, even entreating in his voice, hands hot and a skin as soft as a girl’s; devout (he was often telling the beads of the rosary in his pocket); ready to laugh at anything but never doing it for fear of arousing the curiosity of others; and always so polite with us, with an old-fashioned, rather clumsy politeness, almost as though he regarded himself as a small child and us as old men weighed down with honors.
The distribution of the bulletin meant trips to apartment houses in Paris, copies slipped under doors, one boy on our team watching the exits to the building while the others flew from one floor to the next with their shoes in their hands. Traitors were coming closer. Nothing was to be gained by deluding ourselves. It was not the professionals we were afraid of. We knew they were not common and almost always maladroit. But there were still the unintentional ones, and they were the devil. Just try defending yourself against people who are crazed by fear.
Disagreeable as it might be, it was necessary to swallow the bitter pill. Half of Paris was made of people of this sort. Their intentions were not criminal. They would not have hurt a fly as the saying goes. But they were protecting their families, their money, their health, their position, their reputation in the apartment house. To them we were terrorists, and they did not hesitate to say so. They talked about it among themselves, on the doorstep and over the telephone. If only we had not had them to reckon with. But they were worse than the Gestapo. Like all frightened people they were flighty. They would gossip about us without reflecting. They would denounce us without giving it a second thought.
They did denounce us. In January 1942, a member of our Movement was arrested because his neighbor on the same floor used to say at the grocer’s and the baker’s that he had no idea what the printed matter was that the boy across the hall was carrying around, but that if he were his father he would put a stop to it because it was dangerous.
One day Georges said to me, “I must introduce you to Nivel. This character doesn’t seem to be at all reliable.” Like the others Georges had the idea that, being blind, I had greater faculties — tremendous ones — for seeing through people. He was going to have me meet Nivel, who for some time had been much “too well-behaved,” too zealous, too knowing. Georges thought the a
ccusation was probably ridiculous, but he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
So one evening he took me to a spot between the Place d’Italie and the Gare d’Austerlitz, to a vacant factory warehouse where, in the midst of piles of empty crates, scaled-off walls, coils of rusty wire and many drafts, the test took place.
This Nivel was not known to me, and I was not really relying on Georges’s fears. But as soon as Nivel came in, bursting out with a greeting full of gaiety, the diagnosis came without groping for it: “Let this character go! Get away from him as fast as you can!”
The warmth of his voice, the well-turned phrases made up the face I saw first. But under it was another, perceptible almost immediately, now withdrawing and hiding, but then again in evidence in spite of all he could do. It gave the impression of something swollen, for there were lumps in the man’s voice.
He chatted for half an hour. He may have thought we liked him. After he was gone, I told Georges he had been quite right to be suspicious. And then Georges told me that during the whole interview I had seemed far away.
It was true that I had gone down into the depths. Inside me there was a secret chamber, and when I had a notion to go there, everything at once became simple and clear. People, above all, found themselves washed clean of appearances. I could hear a threat in a soft word and fear in boastfulness. And, strange as it may seem, this place of brightness was nothing more than the inner space which had become familiar to me when I went blind at eight years old.
I never knew exactly what mishap my intuition had spared us. But some months later Nivel, the suspect, was seen among the special police of the Rassemblement National Populaire at a meeting for collaboration with Germany. He was wearing the badge of the party, and along with the others was shouting, “Heil Hitler.”
THE TIME WAS SURELY BLESSED when I was only aware of my body as something that gave me pleasure. The fifteen-mile hike I took with Jean each Sunday was enough to wipe away the small physical discomforts that came from mental strain. At night we were dead tired. The next day, when we got up at five o’clock, it was as if it were the first day of the world.
The well of my strength never dried up. The later I stayed up, the better I slept. The more I learned, the more I was able to learn. My memory only knew how to say yes. It made room for everything, for the thousand and fifty Paris telephone numbers I needed for my work in the Resistance, and which I had learned by heart in 1942 to keep from writing anything down. It made room too for the system of monads according to Leibnitz, for Turkish history in the nineteenth century, even for those fifteen pages from the letters of Cicero in Latin. Whenever a new contingent of facts presented itself, my memory, instead of tightening up at their approach, expanded. It was much simpler that way.
My mind was a world in growth, one which had not found its limits. And if my intelligence hung back a little at the effort, I could always turn to other worlds within myself, to the worlds of the heart and of hope. They immediately sent up a relay, and I kept running continually.
I had not yet acquired the hardness of a man, and was still as resilient as a child, a fact which accounts for my accomplishments between 1941 and 1943. When I think of them now at the midpoint of life with its weariness, I find it hard to understand them.
I had entered the University of Paris in the fall of 1941. I had chosen the field of literature, which fitted in with my ability and my tastes. At the end of these studies there shone the prospect of the only professions I could care for, the ones which would put me in direct touch with other men — the professions of diplomacy and teaching.
Nevertheless, I had not turned into a run-of-the-mill student. On the advice of my teachers I had gone into a special class which, I believe, exists only in France, the Upper First. In the country as a whole there were not more than a dozen such classes. They gathered in the brightest students of literature from the graduating classes in the lycées, same forty students to a class and all of them involved in a highly competitive game. The passion which others devoted to physical sports, we devoted to the sports of the mind. But how frantic they were!
At the end of two or three years of study, depending on the circumstances, the pupils of the Upper First went into the competition which opens the way — for the ones who are accepted and that is not easy — to the highest institution in the French educational system, the school of schools, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d’Ulm.
The work to which we were subjected was intensive — a sort of production line of knowledge — in any case not to be compared with the regular courses at the University. Thirty hours of class work a week, in which teachers chosen for their talent and learning were supposed to teach us all of Latin, Greek and French literature, philosophy, the history of the ancient world and world history from 1715 to the present day. Don’t smile at these ambitions! In the Upper First, everyone was in earnest, both teachers and students.
I had to stand this hellish pace for two years, and to my great surprise I managed it successfully. But at the same time I had to work in the Resistance. Could I succeed in combining both tasks or could I not? I had made it a point of honor to set up a balance between my two lives, the public and the secret. My days oscillated between studies and action at a frightening pace. In the morning between four o’clock and seven, I walked through books two or three steps at a time. From eight to noon I listened to the teachers, took frenzied notes and tried to absorb knowledge as fast as it was given out. In the afternoon, from two to four, I was still in class. Then at four o’clock the Resistance began.
There were trips across Paris by routes set up in advance for greater safety, meetings, surveys, judgments, discussions, orders to be given, worries, putting the doubting ones back on the road, supervision of founding groups, calls for coolness to those who thought the Resistance was like a detective story, deliberation over the articles for the bulletin, sifting of news, time lost in the kind of summons which could be made neither by letter because of the censorship nor by telephone because of lines tapped. By this time it was already eleven o’clock at night, and I believe I only stopped because of the curfew.
Alone in my room at last, I immersed myself in my studies again, and kept on learning until my fingers grew stiff on the pages of Braille. Since my interest in life and my confidence in it were boundless, everything seemed to me as significant the tenth time I encountered it as it had the first. And that gave me an enthusiasm which enabled me to go through fatigue without feeling it, through food which was already very bad, even through cold.
Those winters of the Occupation were freezing. The good people said it was always like that in wartime, most of them claiming the winter was frigid because of the war, but others, more daring, saying that there was war because it was cold. In any case, in Paris there was nothing left to heat with. French coal was all going to Germany. In the evening just one stove was lighted at our house, and since I had to shut myself off in my quarters I got hardly any of the good of it. To be able to read Braille — the sense of touch does not function adequately below ten degrees Centigrade — I had to keep the meager heat of an electric bowl only an inch away from my fingers.
I repeat that none of this bothered me. For all the ones like François, like Georges, like Denis and for me, there was eternal spring. Even in the difficulties of living we found an exhilaration that gave us strength. Somehow difficulties only sharpened the edge and made us better able to cut through the barriers. We had our miseries, but they were different, and most pressing of all was the fact that we were the exceptional ones. This none of us could disregard.
We, the exceptional! But why, when we were convinced that we were doing the simplest thing, the “only thing to do”? Without a doubt. Yet there were not many of us. We had no illusions about the six hundred active members belonging to the Volunteers of Liberty in 1942. To keep six hundred boys we had had to turn down six thousand. And yet young people represented a picked group in society, the most disinterested and the most r
eckless. After two years of Occupation, the Northern Zone had yielded only a few handfuls of Resistance fighters. In the nature of the case they could never be counted. The optimists, like Henri, the psychiatrist, said there were some twenty thousand.
In the two Upper Firsts at Louis-le-Grand, the elite classes as they were called by the teachers who did not mind putting a point on it, out of ninety boys we had found only six, counting Jean and me, who had agreed to enlist in the Resistance. The others never even considered it, some because of moral laziness (Jean said, “I promise you they will never be happy in life”); others because of the disease that often goes with an overdeveloped intelligence, the inability to choose; others because of bourgeois selfishness, even at nineteen; still others because they had cold feet. Finally, and most painful of all, there were the ones who had chosen the other side.
To be sure there were not many of these. But the two or three in class, who patiently noted all the signs, being careful to write them down, who spread the rumor that the six of us were involved in the Resistance, who never missed a meeting of the Association France—Allemagne, who harped on the swift coming of Fascism all over the world; the ones who spied, informed, denounced — we should find this out one day to our cost — those two or three made us more unhappy, because they were what they were, than all the rigors of a bitter winter.
They symbolized the fact that Hitler could count cowardice without a country and without boundaries among his allies (for our part, we much preferred the Germans who were going out to be killed in Russia). They proved that Nazism was not a historical disaster confined to a single time and a single place, a German disaster: “Let us kill the Boches, and the world will be happy.” They proved that Nazism was a germ to be found everywhere, a sickness endemic to the human race. It was enough to cast a few handfuls of fear to windward in order to gather in the next season’s harvest of treason and torture.
And There Was Light Page 16