And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  Besides, Philippe had a good way of putting it: “In some circumstances nothing is easier than being a hero. It is even too easy, which poses a frightful moral problem.” And then he began quoting Saint Augustine, Pascal and Saint Francis Xavier all over again.

  As you may have guessed I was dumbfounded; in other words I was happy. This was not the happiness of love, but for all that it was happiness: mine and Georges’s (though he had not opened his mouth I knew he was as captivated as I), and last of all the happiness of Philippe. Already he seemed to know us well though he had hardly heard us speak. He confided in us fully, told us how much good we were doing him, carried us along on his saddle and never stopped talking,

  He said he was glad to be in the Resistance as we were and along with us. To him this last point was a mere detail, and he had already settled it. I may have given you the false impression that Philippe was flighty, or that Georges and I were, in following him at such a pace. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In those days when every meeting was a matter of life and death, relations between people were clearer than they are today. Either one was on guard or one gave oneself. There was no third choice, and one had to choose quickly. Let us say further that Philippe had laid his whole hand before us. “I am going all out,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you won’t be seeing me again.”

  He had known Robert for three years, and Robert had vouched for him. Just before the war he had been a student in the Upper First like me. We had had the same teachers and friends in common. In the end, he had decided not to ask us our secrets but to tell us his.

  He had organized a Resistance movement at exactly the same time as I had organized the Volunteers of Liberty, in the spring of 1941. His was called Défense de la France. He had an underground newspaper with a circulation of ten thousand a month, not mimeographed but printed, the genuine article. Georges and I were familiar with it. Our Movement had distributed some of the issues.

  Défense de la France had a print shop manned by amateurs turned professional. It had presses, paper, arms and machine guns, ten underground branches in Paris, one with cork-lined walls for the noisy work, several small trucks disguised as delivery wagons, a factory for counterfeit papers which could produce twenty-five hundred “absolutely genuine” fake cards a month, an organized editorial board for the paper, a radio transmitter which though improvised was able to function, an open channel to General de Gaulle’s government in London, dependable supporters among the peasants of Seine et Oise, south and north, thirty miles from Paris — and others in Burgundy in case escape from the capital should be necessary — and fifty agents with two years’ experience, “dependable,” according to Philippe, as he was himself. Fifteen of them were already working full-time in the underground.

  For us Volunteers of Liberty who were vegetating, not ingloriously, but without making any further progress, a new world was opening, a world of the immediate and the real. Already our usefulness was making itself felt, for Défense de la France, which had all the things we lacked, lacked what we had, a general staff, a commissariat and a corps of engineers but no troops. We were an army with generals — Georges, François, Denis and I — who had never had time to complete their training.

  Without further precautions I turned to Georges, looked at him hard and heard him say under his breath, “Go ahead.” Then, to Philippe, I said that plans for our working together in the Resistance had become clear.

  As a founder of the Volunteers of Liberty I was going to exercise my rights. I was going to ask all my people to join Défense de la France, and within a week I should know about all the ones who might refuse to follow me out of fear or confusion. With them I would break off, whatever the cost.

  The industrial resources of Défense de la France made it possible to increase the run of its newspaper and multiply its circulation ten times over in a few weeks. Georges and I gave our word to do this, and Philippe gave his. To carry it out we needed only to supply the human material to correspond with the machines. Our six hundred boys made up the material.

  Perhaps we had not succeeded in making them accomplish great things in the last two years, but we had sharpened their morale to a razor edge. We had them in hand, and could answer for them as for ourselves.

  Barely two hours had gone by since the officer-philosopher had taken possession. With us he exchanged a complicated system of drop-offs, mailboxes and hidden communications. He gave us the wartime names of five or six of his agents, three girls among them. I was astonished, as I had never dreamed that women could be in the Resistance. But it wouldn’t be long before I found out how wrong I was.

  Philippe took his leave, but we should be seeing him nearly every day for the next six months. Georges and I had hardly enough strength left to speak or comment on what had happened. We were filled with contentment and with a conviction which could not be described in words. We were moving toward the unknown, toward a fate that was sure to be victorious and as certain to be terrible.

  THE NEXT SIX MONTHS were a battle, of a special kind but without interruption. Only the facts concern us here, and I will report them without comment. Less than a week after our first interview, Philippe asked me to meet him in the back room of a small restaurant. My house, with all the going and coming of the past year and a half, was too easy a mark for informers.

  I had the right to run the risk but he didn’t. He couldn’t come there anymore. He told me that the Executive Committee of Défense de la France was inviting me to join it. Georges was taken in at the same time, as my inseparable partner, my double. I was to go to the meetings with Georges, and never with anyone else. Besides, the principle had to be established that for all the important moves from now on Georges would be the only one to accompany me. “For your security and ours we need someone with eyes in the back of his head, and the reflexes of a wild creature. Georges is our man.”

  At the very first meeting of the Executive Committee which I attended I understood that every dimension of the task was altered. I saw that we were acting for the country as a whole, and officially, for all we were underground. Philippe was there, two other young men between twenty-five and thirty, a young woman and a girl. They were the ones who held the reins of the Movement. They held them soberly, and each held his own, without telling the others about it.

  Since each member of the Executive Committee had the right to sit on the editorial board of the paper, I took part in this work also. My new friends said our presence was justified by their hope that we could carry out our promise to set up a system for distributing the paper, and one which could be worked out in six months. The resources of Défense de la France were entirely at our disposition, but we alone were charged with the job.

  The night before, at the Central Committee of the Volunteers of Liberty, I had signed the marriage contract between my old Movement and Défense de la France, or as we now called it DF. I had counted on some opposition from Claude and Raymond, my two philosophers. I knew them to be nobly entangled in arguments and hesitations, and as it turned out they did not fall in with the decision made so abruptly. It brought us a loss of some thirty members, who were their followers. But the merger of all the rest with DF was an accomplished fact.

  I turned in some figures to the Executive Committee of DF which surprised everyone except Georges and me. Could they print twenty thousand instead of ten thousand copies of the next number of the paper by the middle of February? If, as we believed, the teams for distribution which we were offering to DF — and they were already organized — could absorb the first shock, we would ask that the issue of March 1 be thirty thousand, increasing after that at the pace of ten thousand per issue, until our forces were stretched to their limit. I had no way of judging this limit, but I felt sure it was far off. I knew our six hundred boys, their discipline and their impatience. The Executive Committee made me responsible for distribution of the paper all over France.

  It was then, for the first time, that my blindness was mentio
ned. The Committee believed that its effects were only physical. Someone was needed to watch over every one of my actions in the Resistance, and warn me of all the dangers that only eyes can see. This same person would have to carry out my decisions or any move I made, from the point where they required the use of eyes. Georges said quite simply: “That will be me.” A perfect pairing, for Georges could do all the things I couldn’t and vice versa. From this moment — to be truthful — I should no longer say “I” but “we.”

  Our principal weapon was a newspaper. Défense de la France was a real paper, poor, covering only two pages — we had to wait four months to grow to four — but printed. Besides, our four opposite numbers in the underground press, Résistance, Combat, Libération, Franc-Tireur, were not doing any better. Each was doing the same thing on its own. Their papers passed through our hands regularly, but we had no channels which allowed us to go to the source. That was the special curse of the fight in the underground. It had to be carried on in units that were hermetically sealed. The risks being what they were, no kind of overall organization was conceivable or even desirable. If one of the papers was captured, the others must, at all costs, remain unknown.

  In 1943 a real paper was a precious thing. Every line of print was drawn from so much courage and so much skill. Every line of print held within it the possible death of all those who had written or composed it, put it through the press, carried it, distributed it and commented on it. There was blood at the bottom of each page, and not just in a manner of speaking.

  The name Défense de la France bore witness to the will to patriotism, and that we certainly had. Still, our paper was far from being nationalistic. If we were defending France, that was because she was being attacked, above all because she was being threatened — we repeated this in every issue — with a fate worse than the death of the body, the death of the spirit. The paper’s chief task was the awakening of conscience.

  We had several ways of bringing about this awakening. The first, as always, was news. In February 1943, for instance, we said what no one in Europe was saying at the time, specifically that the Nazi army had just fallen into a trap at Stalingrad, and that the future course of the war was about to be reversed in the ruins of that city. Then too we told the French people about the terrible things of which we had proof in mounting numbers every day. If it hadn’t been for us they might have suspected them, but they could not have known them. We told how the Gestapo’s arrests were carried out and where, and what happened in their interrogations. We exposed the existence of political prisons and concentration camps in Germany, and the most incredible fact of all, the systematic extermination of the Jews across Europe.

  We advised the population about ways of spreading passive resistance. Most of all we made it clear that there was an active Resistance at work, and one that was growing from day to day. It was invisible to our readers and must remain so. The only sign it could give at this stage was our two-page printed sheet.

  To the public we suggested ways for them to help us, when and how to keep silent, what news to credit and what attitudes to maintain. Our goal was to keep France from abdicating, to see to it that she was present and intact when she was liberated.

  Ours was not a political paper. Not one of us at Défense de la France had any commitment to a doctrine. We were too young for that, and other things were more pressing. We placed our trust in the ideal of Western democracy as embodied then, in forms that differed but were of equal merit in our eyes, by Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. To perfect democracy would be the task of the peace. We had no partisan cause, no material interest to defend. We were poor and full of ardor.

  The only belief shared by all the members of Défense de la France was the survival of Christian values. Ours was frankly a Christian paper. But let us be clear on this point. We were not protecting any one church at the expense of the others. There were many Catholics among us and very devout. But there were also Protestants, equally sincere. We were not even speaking in the name of the churches, for some of our people did not belong to any. It was simply that we stood for Christian morality and its absolute demands for respect and love.

  We signed all our articles with pen names of course. Philippe was “Indomitus,” the unconquerable. We edited the paper from beginning to end, all ourselves. Paris at this point was not a town where you could telephone people to ask for their help. At whatever cost, we had to live in secret and sufficient to ourselves. Still, there were certain men who were known personally to some one of us. That was how, on several occasions, a Catholic bishop, Monseigneur Chevrot, and a member of the French Academy, Robert d’Harcourt, came to give us articles that they had written.

  Every word was weighed by the editorial board of the paper, not for its literary value, as you may guess, but for its power to impress. Besides, in each case, we had to consider whether what we were saying was going to do good or harm, to safeguard lives or place them in jeopardy. When we had to publish our first article on the tortures administered by the Gestapo to arrested members of the Resistance, we had more than thirty concrete proofs in our hands. Still, should such horrors really be brought to light? We decided unanimously that they should. But the decision was made only after whole nights without sleep, and even at the last minute our fingers trembled.

  It was the same way the first time we had a chance to publish a picture in the paper. It was a picture of a common grave, an open pit of bones on the edge of a concentration camp in Germany. It was authentic, for a prisoner heroic to the point of madness had stolen it from the archives of the Gestapo in Hamburg. But it is too soon to tell this story. Let us go back to February 1943.

  THE FIRST WEEKS WERE A GAMBLE. We knew our comrades were prepared, but we had no idea they were prepared to this extent. We had to call for emergency measures at the Executive Committee, specifically for the printing of fifty thousand copies of the March 15 issue. Georges, in his turn, had become a professional operator, he was on hand at all hours. And that was not excessive, for the sections had to be reorganized from top to bottom.

  For us there was no longer any question of recruiting from the ranks. This was much too risky and too fruitless. Our contact now was with the chiefs of the groups, and only a dozen of those at most. The group chiefs were people we had known for at least a year. They were entirely responsible for their sections, making all the decisions about admission or exclusion and without appeal. Of course, every group was to receive an alias and false papers to correspond.

  In two months the number of people in charge of circulation grew from six hundred to about five thousand. The Paris region had to be divided into well-defined zones, five for Paris itself, seven for the suburbs. The work in the suburbs was easier, for there the police had not drawn such a tight net.

  Provincial France posed a more difficult problem in communications because of the distances involved. For each region we needed a responsible person of the first quality, one who knew neither fear nor fatigue. It broke our hearts but we had to cut ourselves off from François. He alone could take care of Brittany, as the model province, the place where the percentage of Resistance fighters was highest at the earliest date. Champagne and Franche-Comté were turned over to Frédéric, the older brother of one of our first comrades. We had someone for the Nord, and someone else for the Touraine. But one of the key problems was not solved.

  Since November the Southern Zone had been occupied by the Germans. Yet the myth was maintained, with the line of demarcation which cut France in two. Every mile of the border was patrolled night and day. Private cars and trains were searched, and young men were almost always arrested if they tried to cross over.

  On February 16 a German order had started its ruinous work: all the young men over twenty-one were to be sent to Germany for forced labor. Only certain categories of students and heads of families would be reprieved. But this threat, put into practice promptly, gave us our wings instead of clipping them. At all costs prevent a s
ingle leader of the Movement from being taken off to Germany. All at once, nearly eighty boys became professional underground operators. Fortunately DF had the funds, and for once the extreme youth of our forces was a help, no doubt about that. Most of our members were not yet twenty-one.

  At Lyon and Marseilles in the Southern Zone, DF had solid working cells. Our only problem was to open a channel of communication with them. It was imperative that the paper be distributed in the Southern Zone as it was in the North.

  Unfortunately, there was no possibility of carrying twenty thousand copies of an underground paper in suitcases twice a month, with one of our band in charge. Obviously, every suitcase on the trains from Paris to Lyon or from Paris to Toulouse was not opened every day, but at least half of them were. And a Denis, a François, a Gérard, with their proud young look, would be natural suspects for the dullest Nazi. Finally, people who have never done this work can’t imagine how much space is needed to carry twenty thousand newspapers.

  It was at this point that we remembered the girls who were with us. They were our solution, and there was no other. Georges, whose crude ideas about women you already know, argued that we would never find a girl, still less a number of girls, who could do such heroic deeds. For them, especially if they cast themselves as ingenues or women of easy virtue, the risks would be much less than for us. But Georges thought they would still be far greater than anything we could expect of people “unless they were as mad as we were.” Then Georges got a dressing down from the Chief — the only thing that could have brought him round. “You idiot,” said Philippe, “you will learn something from women every day.”

  Catherine set out for Lyon, Simone for Bordeaux. They went just at a signal we gave them, without asking for any explanation. When they came back, we had a hard time getting them to tell us anything about it. Both of them said nothing had happened. They wanted to know when the next delivery would take place. The answer was, two weeks later of course.