And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  Fortunately one of the officers who was questioning me didn’t know how to go about it. He had a paper with names on it in his hand. His French was bad and he got all the names jumbled. To gain time I was trying to play the terrified little boy and mixed everything up. The SS officer got nowhere but it didn’t seem to bother him. He ended by taking me by the arm in a fatherly way and leading me down the stairs. Thank God, they were taking only me. They had let me say good-bye to my parents.

  Now on the pavement in the car which was already moving, as I leaned against those heavy immovable German bodies, it was much less difficult. Things were getting interesting again. So there was a future after all. If only one could arrive later, later still.

  The car stopped in the middle of a large courtyard. And from that time on for hours on end, without any explanation, I was taken from office to office and floor to floor by ten surly but silent Germans, who handled me as though I were breakable. The only thing they asked me, all of them and often twice over, was whether I was really the Blind One. I answered, “Yes, I am the Blind One,” and that seemed to make things easier for them.

  For that matter on that day it was appallingly true. I was stone blind. Because of my creeping anguish about what was going to happen, I hardly saw anything at all. For hours, nothing had been going on while they were walking me around and showing me off. How could I tell? They sat me down in a parlor on a soft bench, and told me to eat a thick pea soup I didn’t want. Finally, a man fell on me like a rock, waving his fist in front of my eyes and cursing, and pushed me into a room where I could hear the sound of a typewriter.

  So far it was nothing, nothing but the questionnaire about identity. They asked stupid things, whether my father’s parents were Jewish, or his grandparents. They seemed delighted to learn that it wasn’t so. I asked why I was arrested. Everyone laughed, from the orderly to the typist. But all the same I was right to ask the question, because the man who spoke French was giving the underground names of Frédéric, Denis, Catherine, Simone, Gérard and ten others just as real. He wanted to know if I knew why they had all been arrested. He wound up with these words, “Where are Georges and Philippe? They are the only ones we are still looking for.”

  I felt as though I were breathing in gas. My nerve centers stopped functioning. And then all of a sudden I was set free. Literally, I was no longer afraid. Electric lightbulbs went on in every corner of my head. I saw the man from the Gestapo and the secretary. I had to clench my teeth to keep from bursting out laughing. If I stayed like this, they could keep on forever and never find out anything.

  At random I made up three or four names out of whole cloth. I asked if they had been arrested, if they had really caught all the people who were at that surprise party at Saint-Germain-en-Laye two weeks before. There never was such a party, but to my amazement I saw that my questions got them all mixed up.

  But this was only a bright interval. They took me back to the soft parlor where I had not eaten the soup. They left me there a long time. In succession about ten people were let into the room. Every time one of them came in, I said, “Who are you?” But none of them answered. They must have known that we were being watched. There must have been a jailer somewhere. My eyes, I would have given so much to have my eyes. If only they could be loaned to me just for a week!

  At night — it was night for I had just heard nine o’clock strike — they left me in a washroom. There were a basin, a chair and a transom high under the ceiling. I could hear them sliding the bolts. I was by myself for twelve hours.

  The most distressing thing in such circumstances is that one keeps on thinking in spite of oneself, and not thinking straight. I have been over the subject with hundreds of men, of every character, from every social class and of every age. On this point they all agree.

  Thought runs away from you, like a car abandoned by its brakes in the middle of a hill. It no longer bothers about you. You can stay in it or jump out. It is a machine and doesn’t care at all. Thinking is always a machine, especially in people of intelligence. And I put this question to those who still doubt it: “Have you ever spent a night all alone before being interrogated by political police?”

  Your thoughts slip through your fingers; you reflect in a vacuum. Meanwhile your body goes off in another direction by itself. It is nothing but a miserable shell with slackened muscles. And when the muscles stiffen it is no better, for then they quiver. Something hurts all the time, either dryness in your throat, buzzing in your ears, rumbling in your stomach or tightening of the lungs. And at all costs, don’t try saying to yourself, “I am a man of character, it can’t happen to me!” It happens to everybody. And as for character, that is something else again.

  Obviously, I had learned the truth about the arrest of fourteen of the chiefs of DF. Philippe and Georges had not been taken. But these arrests in themselves were very likely to mean fifteen deaths in the coming days or weeks. My own death among them I couldn’t bring myself to think about. It was one of the few things which the machine had cast out when it got away from me on the slope.

  But what about Denis, Gérard and Catherine? It was surely not by accident that they had made such a catch. It was mass betrayal and so fantastic that it didn’t seem real.

  I said a prayer, two prayers, and surely more. Words flowed. Then, by chance, I hit my elbow hard on the wall. It hurt a little, and then did me a lot of good. I cried aloud, “I am alive, I am alive.”

  One small piece of advice. In a spot like this don’t go too far afield for help. Either it is right near you, in your heart, or it is nowhere. It is not a question of character, it is a question of reality. If you try to be strong, you will be weak. If you try to understand, you will go crazy.

  No, reality is not your character which, for its part, is only a by-product — I can’t define it, a collection of elements. Reality is Here and Now. It is the life you are living in the moment. Don’t be afraid to lose your soul there, for God is in it.

  Make all the gestures you like. Wash your hands if there is a place to wash them, stretch out on the ground, jump up and down, make a face, even shed tears if they help, or laugh, sing, curse. If you are a scholar — there is a gimmick for every category — do what I did that night. Reconstruct, out loud, Kant’s arguments in the first chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is hard work and absorbing. But don’t believe any of it. Don’t even believe in yourself. Only God exists.

  This truth, and it holds good always, becomes a miraculous healing remedy at such a time. Besides, I ask you, who else is there that you can count on? Not men, surely. What men? The SS? Sadists or madmen, or at best enemies patriotically persuaded that it is their duty to dispose of you. If God’s pity does not exist, then there is nothing left.

  But to experience this pity you do not need an act of faith. You don’t even need to have been brought up in an organized church. From the moment when you start looking for this pity, you lay hold of it. It lives in the fact that you breathe and have blood pulsing in your temples. If you pay strict attention, the divine pity grows and enfolds you. You are no longer the same person, believe me. And you can say to the Lord: “Thy will be done.” This you can say, and saying it can do you nothing but good.

  There is forgiveness for every misery. And as misery grows, forgiveness grows along with it. I had learned many vital things during the night of July 20, 1943.

  AND WHAT ABOUT JEAN? Why hadn’t he been arrested? They hadn’t mentioned his name just now, but if they knew me, they knew him. It seemed inevitable, and yet perhaps it wasn’t.

  And François? The day before yesterday, François had started back to Brittany. Surely he had escaped them, but not so surely. Among the fourteen names they had named in my presence were those of four chiefs of our groups in the Nord. They must have made arrests at Lille, in the provinces, as they had in Paris. In that case why not Elio?

  When you are a prisoner you know nothing, are sure of nothing. That’s just what prison is. You are shorn of conf
idence, they cut you off from it at one blow. Then you are born into a hideous world in which nothing holds together, where the only remaining law is human. And all of a sudden you realize that man is the greatest of all the dangers in the universe.

  The next day about nine o’clock they brought me coffee, but they didn’t give me time to drink it. They pushed me by the shoulders down the corridor to an office. There was an SS Major there — everyone called him that — and a secretary.

  Immediately the major made a long speech to the secretary in German. Obviously he was convinced that I didn’t understand it, but I did, word for word. But how right I had been the day before to tell them I didn’t know German. In a minute, while the secretary was translating, I should have time to collect my thoughts. The major told me I had been condemned to death for subversive acts against the occupying authorities. I had heard perfectly, but I didn’t believe it.

  And now the secretary was repeating it in French. I believed her even less than I did him. Had I lost my mind in the night? Had they made me drink a drug which wipes out imagination? “They tell you they are going to shoot you. Believe them! They are telling you why.” Their reason for killing me, they said, was that they could prove that for six months I had been responsible for distributing DF all over the country. What could be truer?

  But there was nothing to be done about it, I still didn’t believe them. It was the first thing I said to the secretary in French when she had finished translating. I said it in a voice that surprised me for it was very calm. “You have not condemned me to death.”

  The Major must have expected every reaction except this one because, instead of shouting or laughing, he seemed to be thinking it over. At last he ordered the secretary to take the record and read it to me from one end to the other.

  That is how the impossible came about. But even today I can’t say what miraculous intervention accounted for it. The bottomless stupidity of an SS major? Really? At all events heaven was taking my affairs into its own hands. The Gestapo was laying down its arms one after another in front of me. But see for yourselves.

  For five hours by the clock the secretary read aloud, hesitating over the words but never stopping. There were about fifty pages, obviously written in French and admirably drafted. A faultless document of denunciation.

  From the first of May on, my activities in the Resistance were recorded day by day, on occasion hour by hour, even to my own words — at least every act and every decision connected with the distribution of DF. For strange as it may seem, my membership in the Executive Committee was not even mentioned.

  I had been betrayed so meticulously, and this was revealed to me so fast, detail after detail, that I didn’t even have time to get angry, nor time to understand or suffer. The only thing that counted was to fix in my memory all that they knew.

  But mine was not the only record in the dossier. Unfortunately Georges, Frédéric, Denis, Gérard, Catherine, François, Elio, and twenty others were there too…. I could no longer count them. And Jean whose name kept coming up, Jean whose relations with me were described more precisely than I had ever heard anyone describe them.

  Still not a sign of the Executive Committee. Philippe’s name was mentioned twice, with a description of his appearance which was very like him. Nothing more. I had no time to suffer, I was hunting for the betrayer, the author of the dossier. I had to find him. I focused my attention almost to the bursting point. Nevertheless the reading was drawing to a close. The evidence they had against us condemned us without any possibility of reprieve. Still, even more than before the document was read, I knew I was winning. In dropping the document on the trail they had made me master of the game, at least one game. And they could count on me to play it. For five hours my brain had been manufacturing lies, twenty to the minute.

  Then it was the officer’s turn to speak. Where did the man get his patience? He asked in German whether I wanted to add anything. In German I answered that I did. The odd thing was that I had thought of everything else. I had not consciously decided on revealing my knowledge of their language. But that still was nothing. Here I was in their language saying things so dangerous that they frightened me almost as soon as I had uttered them.

  I explained that I was knocked out. Since I knew they knew everything, I could no longer lie and was about to tell the whole truth. There was nothing their informer had not seen. But several times, I pointed out, he had been wrong in his interpretation of the facts. I would confine myself to correcting his mistakes. As to proof that I was telling the truth, they had it. I knew German. Even that I could no longer hide.

  They were cowardly words I spoke. I made them come out as though I were faltering. I increased the trembling of my hands as much as I could. But my heart was full of courage. On my honor, on my life, I had resolved to deceive them. Blind as I was, I couldn’t escape, couldn’t even see to it that I was killed in flight. But even if I had no eyes, I had a head. I would use it, even if it should burst. I would fight with it till I lost it.

  Believe it or not, now it was I who was questioning the major. My voice asked, “Why don’t you tell me who betrayed us?” The major got up, furiously angry. But I got up too, shouting, “It is Elio, isn’t it? I know he is the one.”

  The Major sat down again. But I was no longer interested in his reply. Besides, he did not reply. It was Elio and I knew it. I had remembered the black bar, the kind of omen I had not wanted to rely on that first time Elio had come to see me. And the first time was on May 1, the opening date of the record.

  In my head I was going over the whole record of denunciation in reverse. The evidence fascinated me. What there was in it was what Elio had seen and heard. All the things the record did not contain were the ones Elio had not known. His final ruse had been to include himself in the denunciation, to record his own activities in the Resistance as fully as ours. Even more fully. How had I missed this the first time? When it revolved around Elio the record included even notations of his expenses.

  The major was grinning. He seemed to think the last episode was pure farce. The fact that I managed to guess who was the traitor, and the sight of my frightened face, made it up to him for several hours of boredom.

  He squeezed my neck into his great fist, and led me slowly down five flights into the courtyard. He made me sit next to another German in the front seat of a car. It was all over for the day. An hour later I was in the suburbs south of Paris at the admitting office of the Fresnes prison.

  The rest of the story is hardly worth telling. It moves too slowly and is too commonplace. From July 22 to September 8 I was taken thirty-eight times from Fresnes to the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo in the Rue des Saussaies. They came for me about seven o’clock in the morning in my cell, and brought me back there at seven in the evening. The rest of the time I was being questioned or waiting to be questioned by five SS men who worked in relays.

  One day one of the five took it into his head to beat me up. With all his strength he threw me against one of the walls of the room, picked me up and threw me again. I lost my temper and shouted, “You are a coward. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t defend myself.” Then the brute laughed. They didn’t touch me again.

  Was there anything those people respected? It certainly wasn’t intelligence or courage. Was it something more indispensable, more at the core of things? It was a fact that when I managed to forget their presence, when I forgot everything except what I found in the depths of my being, in the innermost sanctum of my inner world, in the place which, thanks to blindness, I had learned to frequent, and where there is absolutely nothing but pure light — when this happened the SS did not wait for my answers; they changed the subject. Then, naturally, they didn’t know what they were doing, and I knew it hardly any better. No, they did not respect courage. Courage is a human attribute, and therefore made to be broken.

  One morning at the end of July, as they were about to take me from Fresnes to the Rue des Saussaies, they had locked me up in one
of the compartments of the prison van as usual. But the van didn’t start up. They seemed to be waiting for someone. At last the door of my compartment opened again, and the body of a man fell in a heap against mine. For two men to be crowded into that small space, only one posture was possible, two men embracing each other, face to face.

  “Holy Virgin, Mother of God,” the man muttered, “it can’t be you, little one.” The man who was rubbing his prickly beard against my face and who never stopped praying was Robert. The Robert we thought had already died; the Robert to whom we owed Philippe and Défense de la France. The two of us had an hour on the way to Paris, to tell each other everything. They were torturing him systematically at the Gestapo. One of his ears was torn. His voice whistled through the few teeth he had left. Sweat poured down his arms and off his hands, as if he had just come out of the water.

  He told me that but for his steady concentration on Christ, he would willingly have allowed himself to be killed. He told me that since his arrest the Boches had not caught a soul in his organization because he had not given them a single name. They were going to shoot him but he couldn’t say when. All he had to hope for was that it wouldn’t be too late. “One might speak without even knowing it. That’s the worst of it,” he said. Robert too had faith. He had it a thousand times more than I. Then tell me, why was he not protected?

  THE PERIOD OF INVESTIGATION OVER, it was prison for six months, a space four feet long and three feet wide, with walls like a medieval fortress, door three fingers thick with a peephole through which the jailers watched day and night, and a sealed window.

  Still, you shouldn’t think of Fresnes as nothing but a prison in the summer of 1943. It was a church underground. There were seven thousand prisoners there and nearly all of them from the Resistance movements. There were no guilty men and there was no remorse.