And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  On the walls of the cells inscriptions had been cut into the plaster with the point of a nail: March 17, 1937, three o’clock in the morning, the last hour of Dede the Black. Pray for his soul. Or this one: Forgive me, God, forgive me, Mother, with a cross after it. So in this same place there had been men without hope. But that was long ago, in another world. Blood was pulsing in our hearts, call it courage or liberty. It sang with a voice that was louder than fear.

  When night came, it was not fear tapping against the wall of our cells with those precise little blows, to transmit messages from one prisoner to the next. It was not fear either which made us slowly loosen a windowpane and shout the watchword through the opening from one level to the next. Nothing could stop us, not threat of the dungeon, nor threat of the blows received there. At the end of a few hours I had learned that it was not so hard to be brave when so many brave men were so near that all you needed was one more small leap of the heart and the turning of the imagination in the right direction.

  To know yourself one of seven thousand men striving to sustain patience and hope, yearning for liberty and life and their homes once more, creates for you a second soul and a second body: your own has only to dwell therein.

  We had felt this before at the Gestapo. In the final weeks of the interrogations they were swamped with the flow of prisoners, and had thrown us pell-mell into prison vans, up and down stairways and into waiting rooms. Finding Gérard once more like this, and Frédéric, Denis, Catherine, Simone and twenty others, coming in contact with their voices and their hands, and hearing my own name on their lips, I had gained much more than solace. I had gained an exaltation which neither the Germans nor I myself could hold in check. You hardly suffer when you are not suffering alone. I was beginning to find that out.

  They had not passed final sentence on us. They had closed the file of the DF case, one might almost say out of exhaustion. It is true that many people were still being executed, but no one was ever condemned. There was no time for it. I was just like my seven thousand comrades behind the walls. I didn’t know where I was going to be, nor for how long.

  In the meantime, I was alive. Even that was hard, because this kind of living was not at all like what you used to call life outside. You had to give up your individuality. It would have been in your way, like clothes when you are swimming. Never forget that the enemy has every right over you: the right to kill or not to kill you, to dress or undress you, to befoul you. The only thing to do is to think about it as little as possible; to think of your comrades who are enduring the same thing. I had to remember that I, for one, had finished for the time being with my beautiful new identity as a blind young intellectual. Now I was the prisoner in cell 49, in the second division. I was in solitary confinement, and on the door outside there was a comical inscription: “Watch out! Dangerous prisoner.” Me, dangerous!

  The hardest thing was not remembering I was in prison, but remembering why. Twenty times a day I lost track of the connection. Everything was happening as if my actions of the past two years — not just my acts, but even my thoughts and my dreams — had turned to stone and were burying me alive. My fate was no longer that great indescribable substance in the future or in the stars, but walls, chipped mess tins, shouting, keys endlessly knocking against the steel of guns. My fate had become an object. I could hear it and touch it.

  Solitary confinement I hated and it made me flabby. How have men managed to stay in solitary, sometimes for years on end, away from the voices of others, from the flesh and blood of their own kind? Humanity is a precious thing. Just to have one of my fellow creatures near me I would willingly have associated with the worst rogue.

  I had only one way of finding peace once more in this solitude: by closing my eyes. That surprises you because of course you think my eyes are closed. Unfortunately, that isn’t so. I saw walls and only walls. I longed to bore a hole in them, to go down into myself all the way to bedrock, to the solid place inside where time and space no longer exist, where prison slips away and vanishes into thin air, as they say mirages do. As a matter of fact prison is still there, but then it is I who contain it.

  Finally, one morning, two jailers came to get me. They made me climb four flights of stairs. They shoved me into another cell. There I found three other men. The desire to cry filled my mouth with the taste of brine.

  This longing to cry was still with me hours later but for a different reason. The three men didn’t want to have anything to do with me, at least two of them didn’t: the furniture salesman from Toulon and the road inspector from Normandy. As for the third, he said nothing to anyone. He just lay back on his pallet, collapsed like a bundle of clothes.

  I had told them right away who I was and all about it. I thought that was the natural thing to do since we were going to be together day and night. I must have done it too fast and the wrong way around. They didn’t return the compliment.

  The road inspector, a man thirty years old, the bossy type, with a loud voice, told me immediately he was “a big wheel in the Resistance,” and pledged to silence. That was a stupid thing to say. I had no intention of telling him my secrets or asking him about his. The furniture salesman was a little old grayish man who laughed easily and was more approachable with his Provençal way of talking. But he hardly dared speak without the permission of the road inspector.

  My coming had upset them and they made me feel it. Having been together in that cell for two months they had made it into a cozy confinement, a comfortable spot to be in. I was not welcome with my free and easy way, my hot youthfulness which overflowed and which I did not know how to hold down. For whole days I was wretched. “What should I say to them? There are certainly things not to be discussed, but which ones?” The Provençal and the Norman were having private conversations which lasted a long time but were almost incomprehensible, with all kinds of allusions to events and people only they knew about, the kind of things married couples say to each other.

  I was slow to catch on. It seemed really unbelievable. These two men had a grudge against me because I was only nineteen, because I was doing advanced studies and because I was blind. The road inspector ended by saying to me in an aggressive and confused tone of voice: “The Resistance is no place for a blind man.” I answered that it was the place for honest men, like him or me, blind or not blind, young or old. But he didn’t want to talk about it.

  So I had only the third one left, the big flabby one lying on his mattress. All day long he only left it for half an hour to take care of his bodily needs. Then he fell back, flat on his back with his arms outstretched, and quiet as a down quilt — except once in a while when a small whistling noise came out of his lips, and seemed to convey something full of irony.

  At last, on the second day, he spoke up to ask me some simple and affectionate questions about myself and to give me a warning: “Pay no attention to those two fellows. They are no account” — just this in a bright clipped voice in the presence of the two others who didn’t even notice.

  So the four of us had to live there in a space of twelve square yards, without heat, without friendliness, almost without speaking, in full view of the bucket standing wide open in the corner. My ears were pressed against the inner rumblings of these strange bodies, so close to them I sometimes didn’t know whether I existed as a separate being. So near and yet so far. I had expected everything but this kind of misery.

  I would not be content with this defeat. These were men, no more, no less than I. They didn’t even seem particularly spiteful. Perhaps they were just unhappy. They pierced my ears with the sound of their woes. But if I tried to help them — that would have made me forget my own unhappiness — they sent me packing. God, how clumsy man can be!

  It became a trial for me to see those two so close. Literally I could think of nothing else. When, by chance, they talked about their wives in short sentences badly turned, they did it in such a way that I felt as if it were I and not they who was caressing them or sleeping with them. O
ddly enough, to free myself of the muck, I had to think of the third one, the big lazy one on his mattress. He took nothing from me; it was more as if he were giving me something. In short, the two who were talking I didn’t understand, while the one who said nothing I understood right away.

  Two weeks later, going on from a guess to a certainty, I realized that the Norman and the Provençal were petty bourgeois patriots and the other one refuse, as the two of them liked to say again and again: half tramp, half housebreaker, a great man for chasing girls, with a foul mouth and thoroughly disreputable. My ideas of society were in for a rough correction.

  The habit grew on me. By the end of September I was an old hand at turning phrases without thinking about them, at never asking questions, even indirect ones, at stringing together endless idiotic jokes as one strings a set of pearls; even an expert at complaining, an art that was well received. If the Norman was crying over his lot, you had to cry over your own longer and louder if you possibly could. That made you a member of the family.

  For sure, that was not what they had taught me about men at the University. They had even taught me just the opposite. But why? All that learning in my head was doing me no good. I was an empty wineskin, empty but transparent, no doubt because of my age. Everything went through me, and I saw it clearly, too clearly.

  From a point so close at hand you can imagine how easy it was to resort to my inner vision, to depend upon the sound of voices. I spent hours at it. In time it became my only occupation.

  By the way, when you are in prison, you must think of anything but the world outside. That is forbidden, materially, because of the walls, but above all spiritually. What is outside wounds you. It is dreadful to think that other people are going on living while you are no longer alive. Already you begin to tell yourself that they are growing old away from you, and that you will never see them again as they were. The idea is foolish, especially when you have not spent two months in prison, but it is inescapable and destroys you. You must not let it in.

  In prison, more than ever before, it is within yourself that you must live. If there is a person you cannot do without, not possibly — for instance a girl somewhere outside the walls — do as I did then. Look at her several times a day for a long time. But don’t try to picture her wherever she is at the moment, out there where there is free air everywhere and open doors. You won’t manage it and it will hurt you. Instead, look at her inside yourself. Cut her off from everything that is space. Focus on her all the light you hold within yourself. Don’t be afraid of using it up. Love, thought and life hold so much of this light you don’t even know what to do with it. In this way you will see your mother, your sweetheart or your children perfectly. And for a long time you will not even realize you are in prison. Believe me, that is what the inner life can do.

  [ 14 ]

  THE ROAD TO BUCHENWALD

  WHERE WERE MY FRIENDS? All at Fresnes like me. I couldn’t shake off the foolish notion that I would have suffered less if I had known exactly where they were. In the cell above me, the cell under me? Was I going to see them again someday? Did Denis, Frédéric and Gérard have cellmates as ordinary as mine? And if so, how were they behaving, hot-blooded and demanding as they were? Were we moving toward the same fate? The Gestapo had said nothing. Oh, if only we could share the same sentence! Live together or, if not, die together. But not apart! All of them were thinking as I was at that very moment, I was convinced of it.

  Early in November I was called for medical inspection in a cell on the ground floor. When a sad cry of joy greeted me, I stammered, “Is it you, François?” What? François there too? François, whom I had thought was one of the few to have escaped the raid of July 20, because that day he was in Brittany, and no one, dear God, no one, could pick up his trail.

  I listened to his story. He had returned to Paris from Brittany July 27, coming into the Gare Montparnasse. On the platform Elio was waiting for him, not quite normal that, because of the strict rules of the Movement, but still possible. Then Elio led him to a small bistro nearby. He described the huge catch of the week before. He told him that the Executive Committee had charged him, Elio, with the task of rounding up all the forces that remained of the decimated Movement. At that point he handed over a 6.35 caliber pistol, passing it to François under the table, and François, distracted by the tragic news, had not had the presence of mind to refuse it.

  Two minutes later, Elio snapped his fingers as if he were calling the waiter. Immediately, two men in plain clothes threw themselves on François, and jamming his arms behind his back, put on handcuffs. François had come very close to dying, for the Gestapo had tortured him, he said, because of the gun. They certainly had tortured him. He had a dislocated shoulder. His voice had grown horribly nasal. But what strength he had! He was like a burning bush.

  The medical examination took place, apparently to no purpose. François thought they would send him to Germany for forced labor. “But you,” he said, “they are going to release you.” He had no way of knowing that, and I for one didn’t believe it. I didn’t want it. I wanted my freedom of course. But if I was the only one to receive it, it was a rotten fruit. It was unthinkable that François or Jean should go on to suffering and I, at the same time, to happiness.

  One evening after the guard had been changed, a jailer, a stocky old man, and one we had spotted for his timidity and gentleness, no doubt a peasant from the Territorials, came into our cell. He shut the door behind him, a thing that had never happened before. Then he handed me a scrap of paper which Jean had signed. One of my cellmates read it to me: “I am in the third section. They have done me no harm. I have high hopes for you. I love you more than myself. Jean.” I dictated a word of reply which the jailer took. It was over. I had had my news. And it was the last.

  “I have high hopes for you.” Did Jean, like François, mean they were going to set me free? The three characters in my cell thought it was a sure thing. Again the road inspector said: “What in hell can they do with a blind man?”

  It was no good my saying to myself that all three of them were talking like that to please me, or because they were ignorant, or because, like everybody else, they couldn’t keep from talking even when they had nothing to say — it was incredible how talkative we had grown as time passed — still the idea of my liberation obsessed me and the idea of my blindness along with it. Blindness again, but this time in a strange dress, since perhaps my blindness was going to protect me. At the Gestapo they had had such a hard time believing in my guilt. A cripple must be harmless in spite of all appearances. Or else he must be another man’s tool. They had looked for the other man, but they hadn’t found him.

  Weeks passed, and a delicious sense of relief came with them, the relief that habit brings, I suppose. I was no longer bothered by the presence of the other three. It is true that the road inspector had left us, set free suddenly one day at noon after a single interrogation. Then it was the turn of the furniture salesman from Toulon. But in his case we didn’t know where he was going. Others had taken their place: an old peasant from the Auvergne, with heavy speech and the smell of the soil, like a fish out of water in that prison; then the proprietor of a small restaurant in Burgundy; then a young officer of the regular army.

  Here at last was a man, lively, gay, open, warm. He reconciled me to the human race. Only I had changed a great deal even before he came. I was no longer the spoiled, precocious boy. I no longer expected everybody to be like me. I had found a refuge for my hopes inside myself, to keep them from being blown out by the breath of other men.

  Keeping up one’s illusions is always harder than one thinks. On January 15 in the evening, in a great lyrical outburst, I had pointed out to my officer pal how and why it was inevitable for the Germans to set me free. He, as a rule so cautious and so suspicious, seemed convinced. I had not felt such fever in my head or heart since the night before I was arrested.

  The next morning, very early, an SS lieutenant opened the door to our
cell. He consulted a list. He was in a hurry. He called my name. I had ten minutes to get ready. Either it was freedom or its opposite. But suddenly, while I was picking up my small package of clothes, the outcome became unimportant. I was already dreaming, but I couldn’t tell you what I was dreaming about, perhaps about the return of the SS man in three minutes, even in one. I was breathing in my destiny greedily.

  We went downstairs. I asked the lieutenant, “Where are you taking me?” In passable French he explained that I was lucky, because they were taking me to Germany, and Germany was a great big generous country. The mechanism of hope in our hearts must have a thousand springs, almost all of them unknown to us, because when I heard this news about Germany, the most dramatic they could have given me except for the announcement of my own death, I felt a kind of passionate pleasure. It was bitter and sudden, cutting as a wound, but pleasure for all that. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  The danger which had been hanging over me for three years, since the day when I joined the Resistance, suddenly stopped being a danger to become the minute ahead of me, my tomorrow. At least this time I knew where I was to go. They had assigned me my place. The transformation was instantaneous. The hope of being free, which an hour earlier had raised my temperature, had become the courage not to be free, not yet and, if need be, never.

  I had just spent a hundred and eighty days in a cell. My body was anemic. My legs didn’t hold me up straight. The outside air scratched the membranes of my nose. My shrunken lungs blocked the entrance of air. Everything smelled to me like flint or raw steel, had the smell of the knife. My breathing intoxicated me as if it were wine. Being free could not possibly have made me more drunk.

  God be praised! The others were there and they too were going to Germany. Denis, Gérard, Frédéric, all of them except the girls, who had stayed in the women’s quarters, and François, whose name was not called, and Jean. Jean, the one they clearly did not want us to see. I said a prayer, with all the strength I had, begging that his absence should have no special meaning.