And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  The hours, the days that followed, I still see them today as though they were a bacchanal. The Germans made a careful census. They counted and recounted us ten times over. The first night they made us spend in one cell, all eight of us. We didn’t have a minute’s sleep. We had found each other again. We overflowed with confidences exchanged. Our anguish and our joy cried aloud without knowing how. Every subject was somehow religious, with the taste of another world. During the night in the cell our hands reached out to each other. We kept saying, “You are there and I am too. They are going to take us away together.” Nothing seemed hard anymore. Once more we were men.

  Drunk on friendship and the cold light of a January morning, we climbed into a bus. We drove across Paris. At the Gare du Nord a train was waiting for us to take us fifty miles north of the capital, to Compiègne on the edge of the forest, to a camp which served as a clearing house.

  Our bodies unfolded, then sank back again because the air was too harsh as we came in contact with it all of a sudden. The camp at Compiègne-Royallieu was not unfriendly, only unfamiliar. It had been a ground for maneuvers in the French army, a place where quarters had been put up and where some ten thousand men ran from one spot to another as fast as they could, all day long without any visible goal.

  Being blind I didn’t know what to do in this whirlpool of men. I went from one to the other. I don’t know why, but they showed me everything and introduced me to everybody. My friends made a chain and never let me go for a minute. I seemed to be a lucky piece for them, a kind of fetish. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t possibly do anybody any harm.

  There were lawyers there, peasants, doctors, radio operators, people in trade, teachers, hawkers, former ministers, fishermen, railroad engineers, conspirators, football champions, professors at the Collège de France, newsboys. All of Resistance France, big and little, all mixed up together.

  I was taken from one dormitory to the next. I was hardly allowed to wash myself alone. There was always someone to scrub me. But why should they all be so giving? The rumor was going around that we were going to stay there a few days, and then there would be “the great summons.” It always began, they said, with a search, a great big search, with two thousand men having their hiding places and their bodily openings examined to be sure they set off without arms.

  The search took place in hoarfrost and sunlight. All of us who were friends pressed against each other to shut out any possibility of being sent off apart from the rest. Every ten days or so about two thousand men took off. That was how it was at Compiègne, a cage to be loaded. Every ten days the scales tipped, and two thousand men slipped down toward Germany.

  Only no one knew anything beyond that. Names were going the rounds without our knowing where they came from and without their telling us anything: Neuen Gammen, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dora, Oranienburg, Nachsweiler. They were German names which sent a chill all through us for no particular reason.

  Before the end of the week it was our turn. They told us it was our last night before the big trip. Of course we stayed up. How can you sleep, when hymns keep resounding in your head, and anguish belabors your body, when revolving searchlights make the shadows flicker like a merry-go-round, and when the darkness they puncture is also your future!

  Denis, Frédéric, Gérard and I spent the night standing up. We had decided to look at each other as long as we could. We had decided to know each other as if it were for the last time, or for the very first. We were persuaded we must store up warmth as fast as we could, the warmth which might well be taken from us.

  The silent column of two thousand Frenchmen walked through the town of Compiègne under the snowy sky at dawn. Hundreds of eyes stared at us from the windows. Nothing could be heard but the calls of the jailers in the convoy.

  The column crossed the bridge over the Oise, and on the platform outside the station a train was waiting. About twenty cattle cars, the familiar French cars, “forty men, eight horses.” We were shoved inside. In our car there were ninety-five of us, standing of course. There wouldn’t have been room to sit down. The doors slid shut and were sealed. The train of cars was shaken by the locomotive.

  Then there was the usual ceremony of leave-taking. Two thousand men sang the “Marseillaise” just to be sure of being French, and for auld lang syne. There has to be a song of universal friendship when fear shuts down.

  We had been traveling for three days and two nights. The last time we had had anything to drink was on the empty platform at Trier. Then it was a burning salty soup slopped around in an earthenware pot. We were facing the muzzles of machine guns and were ordered to run along the tracks. The soup splashed over the edge of the pot, and what was left of it we swallowed on the run.

  We had crossed the Rhine at Coblenz as it was getting dark on the second day. We knew it because there were still men in our car who could pull themselves up by the wall to the height of the metal ventilator and read the names of the stations we were passing through. It had snowed in the night, and the men in the corners of the carriage had been licking the cold moisture which seeped through the cracks between the metal plates.

  No one could sit down except on someone else’s knees, but this was not a position one could hold for long. Right in the middle of the car the wrestling champion was lying stretched out flat on his back all by himself. At first he used his fists to keep his place, but for hours he had been groaning like a beaten child, from thirst. His fists had gone mad and were making the whole carriage bloody. Two men who had fainted had fallen across his body.

  On the second day some of the men suddenly remembered that I was blind. They were lost in the tangle of bodies in the middle of the night and called out to me to help them. Then I began groping my way through the mass of flesh, moving as delicately as I knew how after twelve years of practice. I put one foot down in the space between two heads, the other between two thighs, and managed to reach the corner the cries were coming from without hurting anybody. An old doctor from Bourges who was shaking with fever, the one I had led to the latrine, mumbled: “I could swear you were made for emergencies like this.”

  For forty-eight hours I had been crawling around without stopping, and it helped to relieve my pain. What was really bad was the thirst, and then our legs because of the swelling that climbed up to our knees. When I stuck my finger into the calf of my leg, it sank in the length of the whole finger.

  Denis was supporting me with his prayers. He had a special prayer for every case. He prayed for me, saying I did not need to work at prayers, but only for the boys with pains in their stomachs.

  We had no idea where we were. The last name deciphered was Marburg-an-der-Lahn. But now there was no one left with strength to climb up to the ventilators. We were traveling east, that was all, toward Poland. Somehow we were convinced of it.

  In the car next to us they were worse off than we were, because the first night — it was still in France while the train was puffing up the long grade toward Bar-le-Duc — five men had managed to cut through the metal plates with a knife, and stretching out full length on their sides had thrown themselves out of the car in the direction of the embankment. The SS guards who were on watch everywhere had stopped the train. Machine guns fired, dogs howled, and we heard cries of pain. Then the SS guards opened the carriage from which the prisoners had escaped, shot three men at random, and took away the clothes of all the rest. These men were naked. We were not, not yet.

  My body had finally turned into a soft feverish pulp, but all the time my head was growing clearer. I understood life and I understood Germany.

  The train must have stopped some time back. We couldn’t be sure, there was too much wailing in the car. Four men had gone berserk, the wrestling champion and three others. They had upset the bucket and were yelling and biting the people next to them. I don’t know just when it was that we heard a voice through the wall of the car asking us in French if we were Frenchmen. It must have been someone outside, perhaps in a station, a priso
ner who was working there. The voice droned on, saying we had reached our destination that morning in the station at Weimar, and that soon they were going to take us ten miles farther, that it was only there that everything would begin. But what? Something to drink?

  In my head words floated around like small balloons: Weimar, Goethe, the Elector Charles Augustus, Frau Von Stein, Bettina Brentano. I said fatuously to Denis that we were lucky to have the chance to see Weimar. Denis was not listening — he was praying.

  The train started up again but not for long. There was a steep grade. Then the doors slid open. We had arrived. Some of us called out, “Trinken! Bitte, trinken!” The answer was a hail of blows raining down on flesh and blood in the car, blows of clubs and rifle butts. The men standing too near the door fell out.

  We had to form a line and walk fast. All around us there were dogs biting the ones who hung back. It was almost impossible to move because of our swollen legs. We felt as if we were walking on knives. I was angry with myself for not being stronger, but I was not really miserable. My body was, but not I myself.

  The SS guards were charging into our lines by fits and starts. Lamouche (he was a youngster eighteen years old, from Nantes, who loved me and wanted to protect me) had his wrist broken from the blow of a rifle butt. If it hadn’t been for him I would have gotten it full in the forehead. A few minutes later we suddenly heard a military band drawn up on either side of a monumental entrance. The music it made sounded like dance tunes. The inscription over the gate read, Konzentrationslager Buchenwald.

  I passed through this gateway going in the opposite direction fifteen months later, on April 18, 1945. But here I come to a halt. I can’t say how, but it is no longer I who am conducting my life. It is God, and I haven’t always understood how he went about it.

  I think it would he more honest to warn you that I am not going to take you through Buchenwald, not all the way. No one has ever been able to do it. A Frenchman like me, who got there at the same time, David Rousset, has written two books about Buchenwald. An anti-Nazi German, Eugen Kogon, has written his own version. I can testify that these books come very close to reality. Still, I can’t say that they are “true.”

  There is no truth about the inhuman, any more than there is truth about death; at any rate not on our side, among us as mortal men. Such truth could only exist for our Lord Jesus Christ, absorbed and preserved by him in the name of his Father and ours.

  Of the 2,000 Frenchmen who went into Buchenwald with me at the end of January 1944, about thirty survived. According to the count made after the war, during the fifteen months of my stay, in the camp itself and in the commandos which were its direct dependencies, 380,000 men died: Russians, Poles, Germans, Frenchmen, Czechs, Belgians, Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Romanians. There were even Americans, thirty-four of them, all officers, brothers-in-arms who had been parachuted into the Resistance in Western Europe. There were very few Jews, for Jews only went to Buchenwald through administrative error. They were sent to Lublin, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Theresienstadt, for quick extermination by scientific methods. Our extermination was only to take place after we had been exploited. The process was much slower.

  The survivors of deportation have never told all they saw except to a few friends — each of them can count them on his fingers — and to a few women, their wives above all. But there is one record you are entitled to, the record of one handicapped man, a blind man, and how he managed to live through it. About this I shall try to be as precise and detailed as I can.

  A few hours after we arrived at the camp, we were shunted through the offices. A Nazi concentration camp is highly organized, full of red tape, aimed at persecution and death, but extremely complex, hierarchical and artful to the nth degree. The ultimate artfulness consisted in leaving the SS, who were the real masters, out of the everyday routines. There were 17,000 of them to supervise our camp but we prisoners hardly ever saw them. When they came in, it was in groups, heavily armed, for mass hangings or shootings.

  In January 1944, there were 60,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. Six months later we were 100,000. Like all the rest I went through the different offices. For the last time I had to identify myself. Immediately after that you were given a number. Mine was 41978. Of course the offices were manned by prisoners, our comrades. One of them, a Pole, learning that I was blind, did not falter for a minute; he merely recorded the fact. But when he found out I was a student at the University of Paris, he slipped in this piece of advice in a muted voice in German: “Never say that again. Once they know you are an intellectual they will kill you. Name a trade, never mind what it is.” My answer came out — I don’t know who dictated it: “Profession: interpreter of French, German and Russian.” Then my fellow prisoner in the office muttered, “Good luck,” and seemed relieved.

  That’s how I acquired an official profession, entered on the books the first day and recognized as of general use. Without that protection I would not have lasted a week. It was true I knew German, but at the time I didn’t know a word of Russian. My notion to mention that language could have been expensive. Luckily I wasn’t put to the test for two months, and by then I could make a pretense of understanding Russian, as long as they kept to simple things.

  All through February they kept us in quarantine in crowded barracks removed from the active center of the camp. It was hard to bear because of the cold. In the dead center of Germany, near the edge of Saxony, and on the top of that high hill, fifteen hundred feet above the plain, the thermometer fluctuated between five and twenty degrees below zero.

  They had dressed us in rags. My shirt had only one button, my jacket had holes in ten places. I had open wooden clogs on my feet, and no socks. The cold literally winnowed out my comrades. Nearly two hundred of the two thousand died of it before the end of February, particularly the boys between twenty and twenty-five who looked strong. Eating so little, being so cold and so frightened killed them off.

  I was much less bothered by my body, which was of medium height, on the small side, and which since childhood I had trained to live on the defensive. Like everyone else, the cold hurt me very much. But Denis, Gérard, Frédéric, all friends from DF, were with me. I didn’t have a single failure of courage. Together we made an island of human warmth. From one day to the next we managed to put off the hour of despair, though it had already fallen upon many of the others. When it did they died right away, sometimes in less than twelve hours.

  I must be frank. The hardest thing was not the cold, not even that. It was the men themselves, our comrades and other prisoners, all the ones sharing our miseries. Suffering had turned some into beasts. But they at least were not malicious. They could be calmed with a sign or a word, in the toughest cases with a blow. Worse than the beasts were the possessed. For years the SS had so calculated the terror that either it killed or it bewitched. Hundreds of men at Buchenwald were bewitched. The harm done them was so great that it had entered into them body and soul. And now it possessed them. They were no longer victims. They were doing injury in their turn, and doing it methodically.

  The man in charge of our quarantine barracks was a German, an anti-Nazi who had been there for six years. Rumor had it that once he had been a hero. Now, every day, he killed two or three of us with his own hands, barehanded or with a knife. He struck out in the crowd at random. It was a satisfaction he could no longer live without. One morning when it was snowing hard, we discovered that he had disappeared. When the snow was swept off the steps of the barracks, they found his body with a large knife wound in the back.

  At the end of February I thought I was lost. Frédéric, Denis and Gérard had been called for commando service outside. That meant they were going to other secondary camps, and that I was to stay at Buchenwald alone. They left. I stayed. That day the cold was so bitter I thought I wasn’t going to be able to stand it.

  [ 15 ]

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

  I CAME VERY CLOSE TO DYING. But how can I m
ake you believe it alive as I am today? I shall tell it badly, but since I have promised, I am going to tell my story.

  In March I had lost all my friends. They had all gone away. A small child was reborn in me, looking everywhere for his mother and not finding her. I was very much afraid of the others and even of myself since I didn’t know how to defend myself. One day out of two, people were stealing my bread and my soup. I got so weak that when I touched cold water my fingers burned as if they were on fire. All month long a blizzard which had no beginning and no end had been buffeting the Buchenwald hill.

  Being blind, I still avoided one of the greatest miseries, the labor commandos. Every morning at six o’clock all the men who were fit left the camp to the blare of the orchestra, an efficient orchestra and functional, the liturgy of forced labor in caricature. The whole day these men moved rocks and sand in the quarries, dug into the frozen ground to put down pipes, carried rails for the tracks, always in range of submachine guns and SS Kapos who were blind with rage. The prisoners came in at five o’clock at night, but never all of them. The yards were littered with the day’s dead.

  They were dying whatever they might be doing: pulled down by the weight of a rock on the slippery paths in the quarries; felled by blows or bullets in the night; executed with ceremony before the eyes of 100,000 fellow prisoners, under floodlights clouded by a snowstorm, to the strains of a funeral march, to set an example on the square where the roll was called; or hanged more obscurely in the barn they called the movie house. Others were dying of bronchial pneumonia, of dysentery or typhus. Every day some were electrocuted on the charged wires that surrounded the enclosure. But many were dying, quite simply, of fear. Fear is the real name of despair.