As for the six of us in the Resistance in the Upper First, with each day we had a better idea of our reasons for being in it, and they were not limited to patriotism. For it was not just France that was threatened, it was man himself.
When we had a teacher of French literature who was “a collabo” — there was one — all six of us had to hold ourselves under a tight rein, and consult each other ten times over to keep from spitting his shame back into his face.
I shall not try to defend our cause to anyone who may still think we were too harsh and behaving like “real young lunatics.” This kind of severity was a thing to take or leave. But have you ever known anyone to choose indulgence as a weapon in a fight?
ONE DAY WHEN FRANÇOIS ASKED ME what fault I found hardest to bear in other people, my answer shot out with the speed of a bullet — “Dullness.” We laughed a lot because just at the moment when I was shouting my reply, he was shouting his and they were the same. There was no doubt that we were completely in tune with each other.
Dullness, mediocrity! Whether they were Catholics, Jews, Protestants, freethinkers or not thinkers at all, all the men of the Resistance shared the same credo. For them life was not made to be lived halfway.
This conviction was second nature to us. “It has reached the point where I have to hold on to myself,” as Georges put it. “If some character says yes to me to be obliging and just to be let alone, I want to hit him.” Society for me was divided into two parts, the Hard and the Soft. It was not cowards one found among the soft ones, and certainly not traitors, for traitors were almost always the hard ones who had gone wrong, but the formless race of the procrastinators, all the ones who approved of what we were doing and were careful not to be involved in it. These, of all times, were not times for meaning well.
The year 1942 was very black. Seen from the vantage point of Europe it seemed several times to be a complete loss. The German advance into Russia was deeper than anyone had predicted. Toward the end of the summer its force was broken in the suburbs of Stalingrad. But Stalingrad, as we saw it, was already past the heart of the U.S.S.R.
For the first time, the Germans were making some of their killings public. The names of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen had appeared in the bulletins of the Volunteers of Liberty. It was true that America had come into the war. Our history teacher had been a good prophet. But America was still far away and completely absorbed in the Pacific, in battles which we knew were terrible but still an unknown quantity.
At last, on November 8, the Allies had made a landing in North Africa. This was Europe’s first piece of good news in two and a half years, but immediately afterwards the Germans had occupied the Southern Zone. The last scrap of French independence was gone, and as a result it became necessary to organize the Resistance not just from Nantes to Paris and from Paris to Lille, but from Lille to Marseilles and all over the country. Those of us who hated dullness were suddenly faced with acrobatic feats. May God forgive us, but we were almost at the point of rejoicing in the misfortunes of France.
Since in those days I was being nourished at the springs of universal wisdom, I began to have scruples, saying to myself, “I am too positive.” The philosophers never stopped saying it, saying that everything in this world is tempered with good and evil; there are always at least two faces to truth. What another man does which seems to us a crime is often only the result of a first mistake, a mistake so small and so hard to detect that we too may be making it from one minute to the next. This was the kind of sermon that some of my friends had been preaching to themselves for some time past.
At the end of December Georges, who didn’t read the philosophers because they gave him a headache, said to me, “You are falling by the way, my boy. Throw all your brainy schemes to the winds, they are nothing but nightmares. The Movement is stagnating. For three months our number has stayed at six hundred. We are still just passing out the bulletin. Don’t you see that this damnable war is moving at a faster clip than we are?”
I did see it, and it disturbed me. But what we needed was new ventures, and I didn’t know how to go about them. Fortunately Georges had an idea. He said there was only one way to set me on fire — girls.
I balked, knowing this side of Georges very well, his night side. He was three years older than I was, and having enlisted in 1939 had been thrown into the life of the barracks at the age of eighteen, and had a coarse idea of love. “Have fun while there is still time,” he would say. “Later, we’ll be starting a family.”
I had some real battles with François about Georges. In this respect as in every other, François was angelic, but that didn’t keep him from understanding Georges. “Whatever road men take to their source of strength, so long as they reach it, I bless them for it.” Here perhaps was another occasion for compromise. Moral purity was not necessarily bound up with the purity of the body. As Georges liked to say, “Real soldiers have always been real rakes.”
So they undertook to cure me. The treatment was not what you might expect. Georges respected me too much to take me to disreputable places. It never even entered his head. But one day, since I couldn’t resist the temptation to talk to him about Aliette, he made it plain, without openly making fun of me, that I was a rare kind of fool. Loving a girl who had never given you anything but smiles — and even that only in passing because it made her more beautiful — loving her without knowing if she returned it, and still loving her after two years of separation, without ever having been tempted to put another girl in her place, this kind of stubbornness seemed to Georges not just ridiculous but downright dangerous. It represented an unbelievable lack of realism, and was quite enough to account for the sluggishness of my ideas.
So, for weeks on end I was dragged from one party to the next. These gaieties far outshone the modest dances in the family circle that I had been frequenting for two years. It was hard for me to understand how Georges could have so many friends and such frivolous ones without my knowing anything about it. Because hard liquor was scarce in occupied Paris, we were drinking a brand of sparkling wine that made us tipsy, but slowly.
Most of the girls had nothing in their heads. That didn’t seem to bother anybody and I got used to it too. I did my best to overcome my shyness, and most of all the notion, quite new to me, that my blindness kept me from attracting people. As a matter of fact, I was as successful at this as the others — once I put aside my seriousness which was absolutely no help. It was enough to talk nonsense, if you did it in a certain way, to pretend you were at a show and that nothing really mattered. All you had to do was drink, get worked up over unimportant feelings, and keep dancing. You got your reward right away. Girls were a strange breed. They managed to breathe life into your body and even into your mind.
It was not that they were beautiful, at least not to me. My companions would whisper, “Dance with Henriette. My boy, she is divine.” But not to me. Being brittle and selfish, how could she be beautiful? She had such a way of belittling everything, and of sharpening her claws under the caresses of her smooth hands, that I wanted to run away. I turned to the girls who were not so pretty but who, at least, seemed capable of love.
Never mind if my sense of beauty was not just like the others’. One thing we had in common, the sense of intoxication. Putting your hand on a girl’s hip, following the budding curve of her arm, embracing her shoulder, diving, with empty head, into the many-colored brightness that comes from a girl’s body, hearing the rustle of a skirt or a handkerchief, not wanting to stop dancing, because so long as the girl is close, with her hair against yours at each step, the world can go to pieces without your caring. All these things were making me well as Georges had said they would.
It was at this point, as we were leaving a dance in the front hall of a rich house in the suburbs, that a new idea suddenly came to me — it had to do with those Allied airmen shot down every day by German fighters. I had been told a hundred times that most of them survived thanks to their parachutes. If they fell in German territory the
y were lost, with only one chance in a thousand. But what if they fell in France? They were lost just the same (most of them didn’t know a word of French), lost unless people like us took them in charge.
By now we had our cells in Normandy, in Brittany, in the Nord and in Franche-Comté, and I was about to notify the provincial sections of our Movement to be on the lookout for fallen airmen, and to send them on to us in Paris. The rescued pilot, dressed in civilian clothes, must be accompanied by a member of the Movement. Our man was not to move an inch away from him. A fine plan, but what to do with the flyers once they were in Paris? How to send them on to the Spanish border and get them across?
When I submitted my bright, impossible idea to Georges, he burst out laughing. He knew the answer. Running a small risk would do the trick. For the last six months he had been in touch with a man named Robert — a settled person, forty years old, married, a Catholic — Robert had never said exactly what he did. But by all kinds of signs Georges was convinced that he was doing just what we had in mind. The two of us would go to see him and offer him the services of the Movement.
As a matter of fact, Robert had been repatriating Allied airmen for two years. He had set up an amazing system of camouflage in Paris and the surrounding country. His network had about fifty accomplices on the Spanish border, on the Catalonian side and in the Pays Basque. They were mountaineers and customs men. Only one thing was missing, at least in part: groups of men in the provinces, men who were brave and fast, and capable of getting information in the country without giving the show away. We were all he needed, and now we were available.
Once more ideas were in ferment. After the airmen came the turn of the false papers. In Paris, where the number of professional fighters was growing every day — besides François, we already had five others in the Movement — the business of false identity became urgent. You could no longer eat without food stamps. Everything, including bread and potatoes, was rationed, and in the town halls tickets were given out only to people whose papers were in order. Besides, what a terrible risk for the families, if one of them, the one in the Resistance, should be arrested under his own name. The Volunteers of Liberty would have to see to the making of false papers.
None of us was deluded into thinking this would be easy. My first order of this sort I sent on to the groups in Arras and Lille. In May and June, in the north of France in 1940, many villages had been bombed or totally destroyed. The papers in the town halls had disappeared, but the people had vanished along with them. We could find out their names by questioning the inhabitants carefully. Our first false cards of identity would be made out in the names of men who could not be found and were believed dead.
In January 1943, we were on the brink of great things, but we were a long way from guessing that in a short time we should be walking into history by the front door.
Jacques Lusseyran (center) at age eight in 1932. The boy to his right in white is his younger brother, Pascal.
Lusseyran at age nine, in 1933.
Lusseyran’s class at Lycée Louis Grand in 1941. Lusseyran, age 17, is the fourth from the right in the front row. His dear friend Jean Besniée is the fourth from the left in the second row, with glasses and a white handkerchief.
Fabricated stamps used by the Resistance for all correspondence to avoid giving money to the Vichy government.
Lusseyran (left) and a radio journalist in 1953.
Lusseyran in 1953.
Jacqueline Pardon, a fellow member of Défense de la France, in 1943. Pardon was Lusseyran’s first wife. They were married from 1945 to 1954.
Author and philosopher Albert Camus (left), Lusseyran, and Jacqueline Pardon, Lusseyran’s first wife, in 1953.
Lusseyran in 1963, the year And There Was Light was first published in the United States.
Lusseyran in 1968.
Lusseyran in 1971, the year he died in a car accident in France. At the time, he was a professor of French literature at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.
[ 12 ]
OUR OWN DEFENSE OF FRANCE
LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN LIFE that matters, it came about not at all as expected but much faster and more simply. It happened through a young officer in the tank corps whom I was about to receive at Georges’s request. But within five minutes the man in front of me was no longer an officer. He was a philosopher, a conspirator, a big brother, and my chief, Philippe.
Let me explain. It had taken only a month to tie up the threads of Robert’s network and our Movement. Four RAF flyers had already been brought into Paris by our people, two from the hills around Dijon, one from near Reims, the fourth from the suburbs of Amiens.
At the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est and the Gare de Lyon, Georges and Denis were the ones who had taken them in charge. Quite rightly they were the only ones who knew where Robert’s hiding place was. We had never had any serious doubts about this man, but on this occasion we revered him. Picture a face that was always full of fun, a traveling salesman with the gift of gab, but one who also had the gift of meditation. All of a sudden Robert would stop making jokes and retreat into himself. What was he doing there? Praying I feel sure, building up his reserves of courage. And he needed plenty every minute of the time. Of all the men in France he was one of the most exposed.
He knew very well what would become of him if this Donald Simpson or John Smith, RAF pilots, turned out to be German spies. It had happened in some of the networks near us. Then it was not one man who would die, himself, Robert the chief, but thirty or fifty of them, and after what kind of interrogation!
He was even able to joke about it and without ever abandoning his humility. He was so modest he never spoke of himself in the first person. He would screw up his eyes and say, “The network wonders whether … The network has decided that …” The man was a missionary, indulgent to the faults of others, without pity for his own, fighting his way into Nazi territory as though it were the land of the heathen.
But Robert did not want us to help him too much. He believed our work should be completely divided from his. And finally he insisted that we should not continue to meet. “I smell fire,” he said, “and if I am going to be blown up, I prefer to be blown up without you.”
But in his final meeting with Georges he had made us a gift of a name — Philippe, an officer in the war of 1939—1940, twenty-six years old. And he had added, “I can’t do better”; that was always his last word, whatever else he might have said.
On January 31 at about ten o’clock in the morning, Paris was shivering in the cold though the sun was shining — that is just how clearly details can be imprinted on the memory — Georges and I were waiting for Philippe. I must admit we had no high hopes of this event. For all Robert’s blessing, we were on guard, with every hair bristling. “Please,” Georges said to me, “if this individual doesn’t please you, give me some kind of a sign to keep my mouth shut. For officers I have a weakness. And if he is an officer in the regular army, I am likely to lose my bearings.”
It was not a professional officer who came through the door, but a great hulk of a man. Over six feet tall, broad in the chest, with strong arms and powerful hands, a quick and heavy step, the sense of brotherly protectiveness emanated from his person. Besides, he had a voice which was warm though not very resonant, a voice which came close to you immediately, which got right inside you because it was so convincing.
I am describing him badly. This was not a man I saw approaching, but a force. There was no need to tell you he was a leader. He could handle himself any way he wanted to, sprawl in every armchair in the room, pull up his trousers and scratch his leg, be unintelligible because of a sputtering pipe that got in the way of his speech, run his hands through his hair, ask tactless questions and contradict himself. In the first ten minutes of our meeting he had done all these things many times, but somehow you didn’t mind them.
His coming placed a mantle of authority upon your shoulders. The well-being you felt in its enveloping folds was someth
ing you could not contain. His authority was not false and certainly not calculated. Instead, it was like the spell cast by some women as soon as they come near you. You were seduced, you were almost paralyzed, at least to begin with. For the first half hour, Georges and I would have been physically incapable of voicing the least objection.
I looked at this casual, tempestuous devil in front of me, and wondered what kind of monster we had drawn from his lair. But it was no good my calling on all the presence of mind and all the distrust I had left, I could not manage to be disturbed. They say that strength enchants. The magnetism of this man was his strength.
He seemed to have endless mines of energy. He exuded feeling, purpose and ideas. Here was a real phenomenon. Shaking his mane of hair, stretching his arms as though he were lazy, then suddenly coming to attention, he was at once great and good, gentle, talkative and secretive, precise as a watchmaker and vague as an absentminded professor. Confidences and meaningless generalizations were all mixed up in his talk.
Since he started in an hour before, we had learned that he was married and in love with his wife, that his wife was expecting a child and that he adored the child even before it was born. In the same breath he had spoken several times of Saint Augustine, Empedocles, Bergson, Pascal, Marshal Pétain, Louis XVI and Clémenceau. I can vouch for this, for I heard it with my own ears. I couldn’t tell you what part they played in the conversation, but all the same they were in it. As I said, Philippe was phenomenal.
In an hour he had expressed what most people would never tell you in a lifetime. As you listened, it seemed as if nothing remained that would be hard to do, even in the Paris of January 1943. He tossed solutions at insoluble problems right on the spot. He took them by the hair of the head, shook them in front of his great face, looked them straight in the eye, and laughed out loud. When they got this kind of treatment, the insoluble problems just didn’t come back.
And There Was Light Page 17