And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  The Minister at Vichy who had originated this document, Abel Bonnard, a thoroughly neurotic man, had undertaken to imitate the Nazi laws in the most servile fashion. From active service in society he eliminated not only the blind but also the one-armed and the lame — everyone who had some physical defect. He even went further. He laid down the law that all those with any kind of serious deformity would be barred from public service. Can you imagine it? Hunchbacks were forbidden in their turn. The decree even prescribed the maximum length of nose for future civil servants!

  How was I to defend myself? It would have been very hard for me. I had no union to resort to, not even any organization. In 1942 there were not more than ten of us blind in advanced studies in France. The only way out was through judgment of each case individually. That was the course I was advised to take, and I was successful. In January 1943, the Director of Higher Education, informed of the situation by some fifteen of my old teachers, had granted an exemption in my favor. He claimed that my record in school and in the University made me a special case. He authorized me to compete for the Normale Supérieure on an equal footing with my sighted classmates.

  So, on May 30, I presented myself for the first test in the competition, with only the anguish of the ordinary candidates — considerable in itself — and added to it the concern of a person who at all costs must forget for a week that he belonged to the Executive Committee of a Resistance Movement.

  My chances of being admitted to the school were among the best. I had finished third of forty-five in the regular examinations in my second year in the Upper First. I had completed the history composition and the composition in philosophy. I was full of courage when the blow fell.

  As I was going into the room where the third examination was to be held, an attendant handed me a letter — it was signed by the Minister, Abel Bonnard. In the style which is usual in this type of communication, it informed me that the Minister “had not confirmed the exception granted by the Administration of Higher Education on the 31st of January”; that, as a consequence, the Minister did not authorize me to present myself for the examination in literature for the Normale Supérieure, and “called upon me to break off the tests which I had just passed.” I think it would be fruitless to go into the grief and anger I suffered in the hours which followed.

  For me it was not an examination, not even a competition which was at stake. It was my whole future in the social system in my own country. What was I to do if the only professions I was made for — the intellectual professions — were closed to me? Even more serious, what the satrap at Vichy was placing in jeopardy was my victory over blindness, at least the part of it I had won in the world of the mind.

  It was made plain to me that this order from Abel Bonnard, delayed and arbitrary as it was, was illegal, and that I should appeal through the Council of State and bring suit. But how could I have done it that June in 1943? I was not a professional operator in the underground. I was still using my own name. I was not on the blacklists of the Gestapo or the Vichy Political Brigade — not yet. But my real situation was hardly better for that. I was one of the seven people chiefly responsible for one of the five or six most important Resistance movements. The most rudimentary common sense told me not to invite official attention.

  As you can imagine, the distribution of DF did not leave me much time for self-pity. Yet the blow had gone to the quick. For the first time in my life I was faced by an absurd situation. Up to now my blindness had always made sense. Now they were rejecting me for the first time. And it was not as a person — they hardly knew my name at Vichy — but as a category of the human race.

  The contrast was too flagrant. My blindness conquered or skillfully offset — this is not the place to choose between them — had, in the last two years, won me the admiration, and far more important than admiration, the confidence of hundreds of men. It was my blindness which had turned me from the boy surrounded by friends but centered on himself, which I was at sixteen, into a new man linked on all sides with thousands of other lives, committed to the cause and effectiveness of thousands of other people. It was the very same blindness which, all of a sudden, had cut me off from society or, to put it in the most moderate terms, classified me as unfit.

  Philippe and Georges had the same reaction. I must not give another thought to this accident, which after all was only a tiny episode in the war in which we were engaged. At the end of the war lay victory, and people would only laugh at Vichy’s decrees.

  But before we laughed, we still had to win the war, and this was not just a contest of arms, nor a clash of nations hungry for power. The whims of a French minister reminded me, in case I needed to be reminded, who was the real enemy. There was a whole world to be rejected. Where it was the maps showed only very dimly. At present, its capitals were in Berlin, Tokyo and Rome, but the centers of contagion were multiplying.

  In this world the only thing that counted was brute force — and not even force but the semblance of it. To have the right to live one had to prove oneself an Aryan without physical defect. The diseased in mind and the sick of soul had their place immediately, and were pushed into the front ranks. But woe to the one-legged, the hunchbacks, the Negroes and the Jews! In the biological laboratories, the latest inventions of modern science, they were preparing a convenient end for all of them: extermination in the gas chambers, sterilization, at best elimination by slower stages.

  A society was being developed in which moral and spiritual factors would finally be given their due, as the waste products of a dead civilization. With these happy times to look forward to, human stud farms had already been established all over Nazi Europe, where selected Aryan men mated, at fixed hours, with selected Aryan women to give birth to a new race.

  I did not take part with hands or eyes in DF’s Operation July 14. But I prepared for it in my head with a conviction and a precision that I don’t need to explain here and had no need to explain then to my comrades. Their plans were definitely settled only after they had been checked with mine, hour by hour, and from one subway station to the next.

  NO, OF COURSE NOT, Jean has not left us. If I have let you think him absent for some time, it is only because words describe some relationships so poorly. For instance, how was I to tell you that at those parties, half decent, half indecent like life itself, where Georges used to take me and where Jean was not invited, it was Jean who kept me straight with the girls, still respectful when the girls, befuddled by dancing and by their youth and mine, seemed on the point of giving themselves?

  How was I to explain that in the Executive Committee of DF, to which Jean did not belong, in six months I had never said a word or made a decision without consulting Jean? Not in words, of course, and neither Philippe nor perhaps even Georges could have guessed the consultation was taking place, but without it I should have been nothing but a poor fool.

  I no longer needed to question Jean to know the answers he would give, or talk to him to have him follow my train of thought. He was my friend, first and foremost among all the others. He was the mirror to which I returned to find the best side of myself. Absent or present, he was my witness.

  For Jean, at any rate, there could be no easy women and no Executive Committee. He was not a man of the world. The world was both too complex and too ugly for him. He used his strength to keep it at a distance, but not to the point of forgetting his obligations. He had joined the Resistance, and he had asked me to give him an assignment somewhere in the middle of the ladder. Since we had gone into DF, he had been coordinating the activities of several groups of beginners from the Colleges of Literature, Science and the Law. He was incapable of attempting anything he was not sure of carrying out.

  Together we went to class — he was also in the Upper First. Several times a day I found him standing in the doorway between the two rooms in my little apartment, not much more talkative than he used to be, except possibly when something important happened; getting taller and taller, steadier and steadier o
f voice, holding my hand without being able to let it go, in a grip which sometimes made me wonder how much of it was tenderness and how much fear. We were all frightened in those days. You mustn’t think otherwise. We were full of passion, but we were not mad. From time to time Jean saw death hovering in front of him. But, unlike the others, he talked to me about it.

  His tranquility at moments like these was almost unbelievable to me. He was serious in his explanations, but barely, just a little more attentive than usual, like a person leaning over something which is hard to see, and who only tells you what he perceives a little at a time.

  Jean saw his own death but not mine, and this theme kept repeating itself. He did not understand why, but he recognized that this period of history was on too vast a scale for him, too vast and moving too quickly. Something seemed to be crushing him. Might it not have been life itself, the life for which he was not made? It was not that the activities we were engaged in did not suit him. Nothing really suited him. If he had not been involved, it would still have been the same.

  On the last two occasions his premonitions became more pressing. “When I am gone,” he said, “you must not think about me anymore. That would be harmful. Besides, I will be with you even more than before. In you, though I can’t say how.”

  When they hear this, many people will think I should have forced Jean to be reasonable right then and there, made him drive out those evil dreams, have spoken harshly to him, as one can among close friends. But that would only be because these people were not there as I was, and had not heard him speak with such conviction.

  The very last time, it must have been in June 1943, Jean told me I was made to live, even to the point where anything could happen to me, I would still stay alive; but that he was not made for life. I knew at the moment that we were not talking at cross-purposes. There wasn’t time for that. The essential things had to be said. I replied to Jean that we were on the edge of an abyss. But I couldn’t go on, because the reality of the things he had just said was growing too fast inside me. It is true that Jean in those days was more and more intelligent, but he was also less and less adroit.

  It was at this point that he made a noble attempt at living. I was happy, believing him saved when he got engaged. Not to Aliette, for Aliette belonged to the past, but to a brave working companion, a lively little woman, someone I must admit I had not thought of for him, but whom he had chosen with determination, the way he did everything else; someone he loved and who loved him in return. Wasn’t it strange that Jean should be plunging headfirst into life ahead of me? When things like this happen, none of the signals count.

  Remarkable that that year I almost never said, “I myself think, I want, I believe.” There was always someone else there to believe with me, to think in my place. Usually it was Jean, but sometimes it was François, Denis, Simone, Philippe, Catherine, Frédéric. And for them it was the same thing. There was not one of them who didn’t recognize it, not only with pleasure, but with the sense that his whole being was in process of growth. This fraternity was the greatest virtue of the Resistance. But fraternity is a poor way of expressing it. It was really a sharing of the heart.

  There were about twenty of us, living intertwined with our hearts open to each other, one protecting the next man, the next man protecting him, in a traffic of common hopes so close and so continuous that in the end it made an opening in our skins and fused us all into a single person. Such a thing can no longer surprise or shock you. During the night before July 14, when Hélène, Philippe’s wife, gave birth to a son, the child was for all of us, our son also, born in a sacred spot.

  To know François, Georges or Denis, I didn’t need to keep on saying to myself, as people commonly do: “But where are they now?” Or, “What would they think in this case?” I carried them with me, complete in every part, even when I was reading a book or taking examinations for the Normale. And it was easier and easier, because they were growing lighter and lighter.

  Aside from Philippe, who had a family — what a load and how proudly he carried it — I had not a single friend who had anything left to lose. They had given up literally everything except life. As a result there was not a trace of frivolity left in them, none of those little sidelines which usually make people so insipid.

  Georges had not become a saint. He was still frantically running after skirts, the little beast. But he had grown sharp as a knife. His body was like a blade because he was so thin. His voice, naturally nasal, hewed out the sentences, you could see its tracks. He never wandered idly from one place to another. He followed his course straight to the target, and went through every obstacle along the way.

  Hadn’t he recently been faced with a German patrol after curfew without a reason for being out? He was an easy mark for arrest. Besides, that night he was armed with an authentic 7.65, “a big fat risk” as he described it. But as a knife he had done his job! He had gone through the patrol without looking to right or left or behind him, without slowing down or hurrying up, without reaching for his gun, without thinking about what he was doing — he swore to this next day — and the Germans, mystified, had let him through. Georges said in conclusion: “If only you go all out, you are untouchable. That’s as true as the existence of the good Lord.”

  As for Denis, it was hard to remember that July that he had ever been timid. He was in his hour of command, and among the five hundred workers of the Open Distribution — fifty of them were real toughs — there was not one who opposed his orders or his right to give them. I think I was the only one to know that Denis was not as strong as the others thought, at least not strong in that way.

  Denis made short visits to my house, just to unwind he said. And then the artless boy in him reappeared. He was full of superstition. He still believed that all men were good in spite of the evidence. He would tremble and sometimes even weep silently.

  François? He was the one who had changed the least. He was born flame, and flame he remained. Only he burned more brightly than before, that is all. Unlike Jean, he loved the realities of life, and had an all-embracing tolerance for them. He, who had never touched anything more than a girl’s wrist, was completely understanding of the party boys, the dissipated ones, the prostitutes and even the pimps, he insisted on that.

  On my word of honor, the air was different where my friends were. There you could smell joy. How can I say more? Even when they were sad and talking about their own death, the smell of their talk was good and gave you a lift.

  However it is waged, war is a dirty business. But oh, if only in peacetime men could find a way of being more like the friends I made in time of war.

  [ 13 ]

  BETRAYAL AND ARREST

  THAT NIGHT — IT WAS JULY 19 — Philippe and Georges had held a long conference at my house. The matters we discussed included the steps to be taken to increase the circulation of DF, how to arrange for the feat of the fourteenth to be only the first of a series, and how to go about turning me into an underground agent, full-time.

  The risks that my work at the Boulevard Port-Royal brought on my family, not to mention myself, had reached the proportions of an alert. On the other hand, DF could not do without my services. I was to continue to supervise its distribution but in a more carefully protected anonymity. I would go to live in one of the P.C. of the Movement in Paris.

  When he left, Georges took with him the twenty tear gas pens I had been holding in reserve for the last five days. He had also taken a stock of counterfeit identity cards to turn over to Frédéric, who was going off to Besançon at seven o’clock the next morning.

  That night was one of the happiest of my life. A storm was rumbling over Paris and I couldn’t get to sleep till nearly four o’clock. But the sleep I lost was not because of the storm, it was because of the friendship of Philippe and Georges. I had known it intimately for months, but I had never known it to reach such a point. Friendship was salvation, in this fragile world the only thing left that was not fragile. I promise you one c
an be drunk on friendship as well as on love.

  From the depths of my happy sleep about five in the morning I heard my father’s voice: “Jacques, the German police is calling for you.” Arrest! Here it was.

  “Just a minute, please,” while I jumped out of bed and dressed with trembling hands.

  Around the world for the last twenty years, there have been so many men and women arrested by so many police agents for so many reasons, and so few of them have survived, that I feel I should not make much of my personal experience. So let me give only the plain facts.

  My father’s voice sounded pretty much as it used to when he was talking to his small son. He wanted so much to protect me, but of course he could do nothing. Strangely enough, it was more my job to protect him, at least to keep them from arresting him or my mother or my little brother. That was the first thing to be done, but how to go about it?

  There were six Germans, two officers and four soldiers, and these imbeciles were armed. Perhaps no one had told them that I was blind. They were not brutal. They gave me time to get ready. They let me take a package of cigarettes and my lighter. They searched my two small rooms methodically, if you can call it that, since their system consisted in scattering five or six thousand sheets of Braille which they obviously could make nothing of. In any case what they were looking for wasn’t there. It was in my head, and at the time my head was in a confusion from which the most diabolical policeman could not have extracted anything at all.

  The question I asked myself was monstrous. Who had denounced me? First, see to it that Mother and Father were not arrested, then find out who the betrayer was. Already there was a plan. Granted, a plan, but there was not a single idea in its place in my head, not one lucid fiber in my whole body. When you are caught in a trap you cut a poor figure in your own eyes. Not liking yourself, you would willingly injure yourself.