And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  I was spared the labor commandos because I couldn’t see. But for the unfit like me, they had another system, the Invalids’ Block. Since they were no longer sure of winning the war, mercy had become official with the Nazis. A year earlier being unfit for physical work in the service of the Greater German Reich would have condemned you to death in three days.

  The Invalids’ Block was a barracks like the others. The only difference was that they had crowded in 1,500 men instead of 300 — 300 was the average for the other blocks — and they had cut the food ration in half. At the Invalids’ you had the one-legged, the one-armed, the trepanned, the deaf, the deaf-mute, the blind, the legless — even they were there, I knew three of them — the aphasia, the ataxic, the epileptic, the gangrenous, the scrofulous, the tubercular, the cancerous, the syphilitic, the old men over seventy, the boys under sixteen, the kleptomaniacs, the tramps, the perverts, and last of all the flock of madmen. They were the only ones who didn’t seem unhappy.

  No one at the Invalids’ was whole, since that was the condition of entrance. As a result people were dying there at a pace which made it impossible to make any count of the block. It was a greater surprise to fall over the living than the dead. And it was from the living that danger came.

  The stench was so terrible that only the smell of the crematory, which sent up smoke around the clock, managed to cover it up on days when the wind drove the smoke our way. For days and nights on end, I didn’t walk around, I crawled. I made an opening for myself in the mass of flesh. My hands traveled from the stump of a leg to a dead body, from a body to a wound. I could no longer hear anything for the groaning all around me.

  Toward the end of the month all of a sudden it became too much for me and I grew sick, very sick. I think it was pleurisy. They said several doctors, prisoners like me and friends of mine, came to listen to my chest. It seems they gave me up. What else could they do? There was no medicine at all at Buchenwald, not even aspirin.

  Very soon dysentery was added to pleurisy, then an infection in both ears which made me completely deaf for two weeks, then erysipelas, turning my face into a swollen pulp, with complications which threatened to bring on blood poisoning. More than fifty fellow prisoners told me all this later. I don’t remember any of it myself. I had taken advantage of the first days of sickness to leave Buchenwald.

  Two young boys I was very fond of, a Frenchman with one leg, and a Russian with one arm, told me that one morning in April they carried me to the hospital on a stretcher. The hospital was not a place where they took care of people, but simply a place to lay them down until they died or got well. My friends, Pavel and Louis, didn’t understand what happened. Later they kept telling me that I was a “case.” A year afterwards Louis was still amazed: “The day we carried you, you had a fever of 104 or more, but you were not delirious. You looked quite serene, and every now and then you would tell us not to put ourselves out on your account.” I would gladly have explained it to Louis and Pavel, but the whole affair was beyond words and still is.

  Sickness had rescued me from fear, it had even rescued me from death. Let me say to you simply that without it I never would have survived. From the first moments of sickness I had gone off into another world, quite consciously. I was not delirious. Louis was right, I still had the look of tranquility, more so than ever. That was the miracle.

  I watched the stages of my own illness quite clearly. I saw the organs of my body blocked up or losing control one after the other, first my lungs, then my intestines, then my ears, all my muscles, and last of all my heart, which was functioning badly and filled me with a vast, unusual sound. I knew exactly what it was, this thing I was watching: my body in the act of leaving this world, not wanting to leave it right away, not even wanting to leave it at all. I could tell by the pain my body was causing me, twisting and turning in every direction like snakes that have been cut in pieces.

  Have I said that death was already there? If I have I was wrong. Sickness and pain, yes, but not death. Quite the opposite, life, and that was the unbelievable thing that had taken possession of me. I had never lived so fully before.

  Life had become a substance within me. It broke into my cage, pushed by a force a thousand times stronger than I. It was certainly not made of flesh and blood, not even of ideas. It came toward me like a shimmering wave, like the caress of light. I could see it beyond my eyes and my forehead and above my head. It touched me and filled me to overflowing. I let myself float upon it.

  There were names which I mumbled from the depths of my astonishment. No doubt my lips did not speak them, but they had their own song: “Providence, the Guardian Angel, Jesus Christ, God.” I didn’t try to turn it over in my mind. It was not just the time for metaphysics. I drew my strength from the spring. I kept on drinking and drinking still more. I was not going to leave that celestial stream. For that matter it was not strange to me, having come to me right after my old accident when I found I was blind. Here was the same thing all over again, the Life which sustained the life in me.

  The Lord took pity on the poor mortal who was so helpless before him. It is true I was quite unable to help myself. All of us are incapable of helping ourselves. Now I knew it, and knew that it was true of the SS among the first. That was something to make one smile.

  But there was one thing left which I could do: not refuse God’s help, the breath he was blowing upon me. That was the one battle I had to fight, hard and wonderful all at once: not to let my body be taken by the fear. For fear kills, and joy maintains life.

  Slowly I came back from the dead, and when, one morning, one of my neighbors — I found out later he was an atheist and thought he was doing the right thing — shouted in my ear that I didn’t have a chance in the world of getting through it, so I had better prepare myself, he got my answer full in the face, a burst of laughter. He didn’t understand that laugh, but he never forgot it.

  On May 8, I left the hospital on my two feet. I was nothing but skin and bones, but I had recovered. The fact was I was so happy that now Buchenwald seemed to me a place which if not welcome was at least possible. If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope.

  It was the truth. I still had eleven months ahead of me in the camp. But today I have not a single evil memory of those three hundred and thirty days of extreme wretchedness. I was carried by a hand. I was covered by a wing. One doesn’t call such living emotions by their names. I hardly needed to look out for myself, and such concern would have seemed to me ridiculous. I knew it was dangerous and it was forbidden. I was free now to help the others; not always, not much, but in my own way I could help.

  I could try to show other people how to go about holding on to life. I could turn toward them the flow of light and joy which had grown so abundant in me. From that time on they stopped stealing my bread or my soup. It never happened again. Often my comrades would wake me up in the night and take me to comfort someone, sometimes a long way off in another block.

  Almost everyone forgot I was a student. I became “the blind Frenchman.” For many, I was just “the man who didn’t die.” Hundreds of people confided in me. The men were determined to talk to me. They spoke to me in French, in Russian, in German, in Polish. I did the best I could to understand them all. That is how I lived, how I survived. The rest I cannot describe.

  THE IMAGE OF JEAN NEVER LEFT ME. Through all my illness it stayed with me constantly, watching over me. When, too weak to face the world outside, I was living entirely inside myself, his image was still there, my one remaining picture of the world without. For whole days and nights I had held Jean’s hand in my thoughts, but in my mind it had shielded me more than his hand could have done in the flesh. How can I explain this strange phenomenon? All the longing for the life which Jean had not lived had flowed over into me, for, though I have put off saying the words, Jean was dead.

  There was no question about it. They had told me the night before I became sick, in March. Jean had died at the gates of Buchenw
ald. The circumstances have been almost entirely blotted out of my memory. All I remember is that I was exhausted, wandering around the camp, when a sort of large thin bird fell on my neck. Suddenly his arms were around me, his bones like thin sticks of wood about to pierce the skin. It was François. I didn’t know François was at Buchenwald. He had not come there with the rest of us. He wept and so did I. We had no other way of expressing our affection. And, as always in that place, our tears were for joy and grief at the same time.

  Right after that he told me a story so shocking that I made him repeat it. The first time I hadn’t heard it. That day back in January when we were taken to Compiègne, they had also been called — François, Jean and three others from Défense de la France. At first the Germans treated them well. They put them in cars built for regular passengers. They had traveled all night but that was all. Politely, they were told to get out. They were then near Sarrebruck at Neue Bremm.

  But Neue Bremm was an invention of the devil. The administration of the SS called it a Straflager, a camp specializing in punishment, a waiting room for the concentration camps on the big scale, a place where they broke men in a week or two, rapidly and methodically, until the will to live left them just as smoke leaves burning wood. They only let them sleep two hours a night. They only gave them something to drink once in twenty-four hours. They showered them five times a day with torrents of icy water. They made them crouch down and stay in that position under threat of being fired on. Still crouching, they had to hop around a pond filled with water, some days for six hours, other days for eight hours on end. The ones who fell into the pond were pulled out and beaten. It was the same kind of horror as at Buchenwald, but all concentrated in the space of a few days. Buchenwald in an abridged version. And François and Jean had stayed at Neue Bremm for three weeks.

  At last one February night, when they were all on the point of dying of injuries and exhaustion, the Germans had once more sat them down in a railway carriage, without telling them anything, of course. They didn’t know where they were going. The carriage was comfortable and heated, and they fed them. But they were kept going for twenty-three days. For no reason, as far as they could see, they had gone from Sarrebruck to Munich, from Munich to Vienna, from Vienna to Prague, from Prague to Nuremberg, from Nuremberg to Leipzig, from yards to stations and back to yards. At the junction of Zwickau they stayed five days and nights, still with no reason given.

  François and Jean stuck together, and the Germans didn’t separate them. François said it made the whole thing possible. But Jean’s breathing was very bad and he couldn’t sit up. He just lay stretched out on one of the benches. Two or three times a day he spoke a few affectionate words, about François, about me or his fiancée. He was without hope, but didn’t seem to be suffering much.

  On the twenty-third night, about six o’clock, he died in the railway carriage, as François said, “Gently, like a child going off to sleep.” Two hours later the train came to a stop in the Buchenwald station. Jean had not made it all the way. François had found me in camp the very next day. Jean’s death he had seen with his own eyes the night before.

  Right after that I took Jean with me in my illness, to a place where, for weeks, I didn’t know exactly where death or life were. When I came out of the hospital and saw François again, he did not have the strength to talk to me again about Jean’s dying, nor did I to him. You see, just keeping alive what was left to us of life was a task which took all we had.

  François’s future worried me, certainly more than my own, for I knew he was going off on a labor commando. He was called two weeks later. But, most of all, François was much too brave, and when you are deported, that kind of bravery never spares you for long. You die of it. He had gone through Neue Bremm, I can’t think how, but with everything he had. And then this Franco-Pole, this Pole from France, whose ancestors had grown hardened to suffering over centuries, had planted anguish in the middle of his heart, like an arrow in the center of its target. It quivered there.

  He suffered, of course, like the others, but instead of complaining, he sang the praises of suffering. Never in his exalted life had I heard his voice more intense or seen his movements more rapid. On his way to work he carried his shovel or his stones, but always, too, those of another who couldn’t carry them himself. Back from work at night he took care of the wounded, ministered to the dying, and for two hours sang all the songs he knew. François did not have an ounce of grief in his heart, not an inch of softness in his body. His skin had turned dry and rough like leather.

  It made no sense to tell him to save his strength. He kept saying: “What if I die? But the boys don’t know how to manage by themselves.” Then François went off and Georges arrived. It was in the middle of May. That made all of us without exception. It would never come to an end.

  Georges had escaped the raid of July 20. We had found that out at the Gestapo. The SS had been furious. May 13 as I was coming out of the block, suddenly I heard a cry and felt the body of a man embracing mine. I knew right away it was Georges, I can’t tell you how.

  I had not heard his voice yet, but it was he. Unlike François two months earlier he did not weep, he laughed like a madman. For several minutes I had the hardest time understanding what he had to say. He laughed too much, he choked over his words, he was confused.

  It was a fact, he said, they had not caught him on July 20. No indeed. Georges had worked double time until January 31: “For you and for me, you understand?” On that day there was another piece of treachery and Georges had been taken. I was learning remarkable things. DF was not dead, it had even grown. How right we had been, Georges and I, to work as a team in the Resistance. Everything I knew he knew. He had put together the fragments of the newspaper’s circulation, and had even increased it. In January the issue was 250,000, but it was not like the heroic feat of July 14, for now it was a regular affair twice a month, a machine in good running order. And DF had an underground fighting force north of Paris between L’Isle-Adam and Compiègne, with two thousand men under arms, waiting for the landing of the Allies.

  Georges’s own story, horrifying and by now so commonplace, was the story of torture. The day he was arrested he was carrying the keys of eleven underground branches in the region. They had tortured him eleven times. How had he managed to tell them nothing, how had he lived through it? I didn’t understand, and I saw that he didn’t know the answer. There are boys born to courage, perhaps just as others are born to weakness. But unfortunately my Georges was a damaged man. Strange, it was not so with François, but it was with Georges. There was defiance in everything he did and said, and terror as well.

  To cap the climax, as soon as the period of interrogation was over, they sent him to Compiègne. And from there through an administrative error his convoy had been taken to Auschwitz. When they arrived, someone on the staff who was more conscientious than the others noticed that the two thousand Frenchmen they had brought there that day were not Jews. So for the time being they put them in a barracks, and a week later shipped them off to Buchenwald. But Georges had had time to see several thousand Jewish men, women and children lined up in a column as they were about to go into gas chambers masquerading as shower rooms. He could still see that sight, and in him it had killed both love and hope.

  We had a few great days together. Compared to Georges I had suffered very little. I was almost intact. I tried a kind of artificial respiration on him. At all costs he had to have joy breathed back into him. Otherwise he was bound to go under. Strange to say, it was not physical strength he lacked, but strength of a different kind, the kind I had by the grace of God. The point was for him to make use of my strength right away. I said to Georges: “Help yourself, take all you can.” And he did. He had grown terribly irritable. Sometimes he even hit people for no reason. But from me there was nothing he would not take, because I was his “brother.”

  One morning about eight o’clock — it was June 6, 1944 — Georges and I were together when
a Dutchman whom we knew only by sight blocked our way and shouted in German: “The Allies have landed in Normandy.” How this news, only four hours old and accurate, managed to reach Buchenwald so fast is still one of the countless mysteries of the deportation. So perhaps, after all, one day we were going to be set free. That was the last happiness Georges and I shared.

  A week later they called Georges for the commando. I am sure of it because I was there when the column was being formed. It was only ten yards away from me, and between us was the barbed wire. I remember his voice when they whistled for them to go off. From a distance he cried out to me: “Good-bye, Jacques, I won’t be seeing you again.” That was something no one had said yet, not Denis, or Gérard or Frédéric or François. And right away I had the answer in my mind: “If he said it, it must be true.”

  Jean, François, Georges, all of them, one after the other, while I could do nothing and was nothing. Only the chief, Philippe, was free, back there in France.

  TO FORGET WAS THE LAW. We had to forget all the missing, the comrades in danger, our families, the living and the dead. Even Jean must be forgotten, and not just to keep off suffering — in any case suffering had settled in with us as if we were a country under occupation — but rather to hold on to the strength to live. Memories are too tender, too close to fear. They consume energy. We had to live in the present; each moment had to be absorbed for all that was in it, to satisfy the hunger for life.

  To bring this about, when you get your bread ration, don’t hoard it. Eat it right away, greedily, mouthful after mouthful as if each crumb were all the food in the world. When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy.

  Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope. The amazing thing is that no anguish held out against this treatment for very long. Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed. Work and work hard.