And There Was Light

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by Jacques Lusseyran


  In September 1944, a rumor was spreading. The SS corps had been ordered not to leave a man alive in the concentration camps in case of defeat. The charges of dynamite were ready, and whatever explosions and fires might not accomplish, machine guns would finish off. Soon it was not just a rumor, it was a directive which even the SS were not trying to hide.

  At Buchenwald, as in all the rest of the camps, we were caught in a trap. Seven concentric circles of electrified barbed wire cut us off from the world. Nothing less than a divine accident could save us. No fragment of the future belonged to us. We didn’t even have the right to look ahead. Besides, we didn’t have the strength.

  During the winter of 1944–1945 the food ration had been cut down to less than a quarter of a pound of bread, and less than a half pound of thin soup a day. Whatever we had in the way of energy we consumed on the spot, for it was the only thing we had left. Our nervous vitality was so reduced that it could no longer nourish our dreams. Hope is a luxury — a thing one doesn’t ordinarily realize — because as a rule there is a superabundance of the life force.

  In March 1945, when the Allies crossed the Rhine, a strange indifference blanketed Buchenwald. The news was impressive, but to us not sufficient to diminish or increase our courage. Leaden bodies and muted hearts were the only things to be found those days, and the ones like me who hadn’t given up life held it pressed close to them. It was not a thing they were expending or talking about.

  From this time on, every night long flights of planes we couldn’t see passed over the Buchenwald hill. The whole sky resounded like a metallic shell. Giant firebrands rose from the surrounding plains — factories blown up, cities destroyed. One night the fire was in the distance toward the east — this time the flames burned for twenty-four hours — they said it was the synthetic gas factories at Merseburg.

  SS control over the camp had been somewhat relaxed, but when it came back it came back in furious force. March was the time for the most ghastly public hangings. At last, on April 9, there was no longer any doubt about it, those concentrated bombardments over Weimar and near the camp, that cannonade to the west in the suburbs of Erfurt, some fourteen miles from us, could only mean that our forces had arrived.

  The news fell on us as though it had been dropped into a well that was too deep. We could see it falling and then lost sight of it. Our bodies were terribly weak, and then on the same day the food ration stopped altogether. On the tenth an order was suddenly passed along. We were given a choice, but just what did that mean?

  The SS command offered an alternative to the Buchenwald prisoners. They could either stay in camp at their own risk and in great danger, or they could leave within two hours on the roads to the east, escorted by SS guards. That was the hardest blow of all. How could we choose? No one was capable of it. There was no reasoning power, no human reckoning to go by. Which way lay safety? Which way life? What was the SS offering?

  I saw panic all around me. The ultimate absurdity, the false freedom to choose their destiny, held men by the throats more tightly than any threat. Some said, “They will exterminate the ones who stay. They are giving a chance to the ones who leave.” But the opposite was just as likely.

  At this point I made my decision to stay. More than that, I dragged myself across my block and across the ones next to it. I called to everyone to stay, cried out that stay they must. I remember hitting a comrade brutally to keep him from taking off. Why? I didn’t know any more than the others. Nothing had been revealed to me. Still, I was determined not to go, I knew I must not go. Instead of arguing, I spoke the words without any plan: “You don’t run away. You stick to the ship.” What ship? God save us. In the course of the afternoon, of the one hundred thousand men at Buchenwald, eighty thousand left. We, the twenty thousand who stayed, had nothing to say. We didn’t have the courage. On the morning of the eleventh hunger was such agony that we were chewing the grass in the paths to fool our famished stomachs. The fight was raging six miles off, at the foot of our hill. We could barely hear it.

  Toward noon I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to have news. I suddenly recalled the existence of the loudspeakers. There was one in each block connected to the General Headquarters of the SS, and it was through this channel that they always gave their orders.

  I dragged myself toward the private room reserved for the prisoner who was in charge of our barracks. That was where the loudspeaker was located. Nobody else was around. All the men were outside, trying to follow the sounds of the battle.

  I knew that out of this loudspeaker would come life or death — one or the other. The instrument was obstinately silent. At one-thirty, I heard the familiar SS voice, very deliberate, ordering the SS troops to proceed with the plan for exterminating all surviving prisoners within the half hour.

  What hand was holding my senses in check at that moment, what voice was addressing me? I have no idea. But I do remember not being frightened. I don’t remember believing the SS, and I decided not to inform my companions.

  Twenty minutes later, a fourteen-year-old Russian boy, supple as a monkey, who had climbed up on the roof of the block, fell into the middle of the crowd from a height of twelve feet. He was shouting, “The Americans. Here come the Americans.”

  They picked him up. He had hurt himself badly when he fell. Some people were running, others were crying out. A French comrade took me by the arm and dragged me outside. He was looking and kept looking toward the entrance of the camp. He cursed and blessed between his teeth. He looked again and it was there, quite real — an American flag, an English flag, a French flag were flying from the control tower.

  The days after that were days of stupefaction. We were drunk but with an evil drunkenness. We still had thirty-six hours to go without food, for the SS had spread poison over the stores in the camp, and so we had to wait. One doesn’t pass over all at once from the idea of death to the idea of life. We listened to what they were saying to us, but we asked for a little time to believe in it.

  There was a very strong American army, the Third Army, under a bold, supremely bold general, Patton. Patton knew what Buchenwald was and what dangers it held. He knew that a three-hour wait meant 20,000 dead. Against every rule of caution in strategy, he had mounted an armored attack, an enveloping attack on the hill. At the last minute, the SS troops were cut off from the camp, forced to flee or surrender. The underground receiving set, in the hands of the prisoners in the cellars of the medical block, told the Americans what to do.

  But where was the joy of freedom, or the joy of living? The camp was under an anesthetic, and it would take hours and hours to lay hold on life. Finally, all of a sudden, it burst upon you, blinding your eyes, stronger than your senses, stronger than reason. It came in great waves, every wave hurting as it came in. Then the tension relaxed, and everyone fell into a stupor as small boys would if you gave them a strong drink. It wasn’t always a pretty sight, for in happiness men reveal themselves as much as in misfortune, Besides, in the first week people were dying in great numbers. Some died of starvation. Others died from eating too much too fast. Some were thunderstruck by the mere idea of being saved. It was like an attack which carried them off in a few hours.

  ON APRIL 13, THE CAMP RADIO — its free radio — announced the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His was the first name of a real man that we had heard — Roosevelt, one of our liberators — and it was he who had died and not we. When the news came I was carrying my pail in a water detail with about fifty other men. Most of the pipes had burst. I remember it well. The whole team put the pails down on the ground, and everyone knelt, French and Russians together. For the first time in a year, the death of a man had meaning.

  Life came back to most of us, mixed up, incoherent, tempestuous, ironical, difficult, like life itself. I was proud of the comrades who had survived. It may have been foolish, but I was proud of them.

  Seventeen hundred officers and soldiers of the SS, taken prisoner by the American army, had been placed in
a block of the camp at our disposition. It is certainly worth reporting that there was not a single act of vengeance, not one SS man killed by a prisoner, not a blow struck, not an insult. Nobody even went to look at them.

  On April 16 we learned through official channels that the 80,000 prisoners who had gone off on the roads on the tenth had been machine-gunned en masse by the SS, at a place sixty miles southeast of Buchenwald. They said first there was not a single survivor. We learned later that this was wrong; ten were still alive.

  On April 18, just a week after the liberation, as I was coming in from a water detail, a voice suddenly burst out fifteen feet away from me, warm as sunlight, impossible to believe, but crying, “Jacques.” It was Philippe’s voice. It was Philippe himself. He was holding me against him. He was there, Philippe the chief, Défense de la France, France personified. I was not dreaming. Philippe, that daredevil, a captain now in the army of the liberation, had crossed France and Germany in three days and three nights, throwing caution to the winds, without a military pass, a real Resistance fighter, a real man of the Maquis, to call for his own men, at least those who were in Buchenwald, those of them who were still alive.

  Philippe was life itself. It was the triumphant equation. He was the last man I had seen before I went to prison. He was the first man I saw when I came out. I was alive, and two others from Défense de la France were also living. Philippe gathered the three of us together. A French car was waiting for us, a car belonging to DF, for DF was no longer underground; it had become France-Soir, the most important daily newspaper in Paris. When we got to Paris, the chauffeur, a boy who had never been in prison, drove us around the Place d’Appel in his car, to pay tribute.

  EPILOGUE

  THERE ARE STILL SOME FACTS TO REPORT. François died on March 31, twelve days before the liberation of Buchenwald, somewhere near Leipzig, in circumstances unknown. Georges died in the first days of April, it seems of exhaustion, aboard an armored car, near Halle an der Saale. Denis died in Czechoslovakia on April 9, killed by an SS bullet on the roadside. Twenty-four other members of DF, arrested along with me on July 20, 1943, did not return. You certainly have the right to know about them.

  HERE MY STORY ENDS, as it must, for the man I am now, husband, father, university professor, writer, has no intention of telling you about himself. He wouldn’t know how, and he would only burden you. If he has recorded the first twenty years of his life at such length, it is because he believes they no longer belong to him as an individual but are an open book, for anyone to read who cares to. His dearest wish was to show, if only in part, what these years held of life, light and joy by the grace of God.

  And now, in conclusion, why has this Frenchman from France written his book in the United States to present to his American friends today? Because today he is America’s guest. Loving the country and wanting to show his gratitude, he could find no better way of expressing it than in these two truths, intimately known to him and reaching beyond all boundaries.

  The first of these is that joy does not come from outside, for whatever happens to us it is within. The second truth is that light does not come to us from without. Light is in us, even if we have no eyes.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JACQUES LUSSEYRAN (September 19, 1924, to July 27, 1971) was a blind author, professor, and French Resistance leader. Born in Paris, he was blinded in a school accident at the age of eight. At age seventeen, less than a year after the German invasion of France, Lusseyran formed a Resistance group called the Volunteers of Liberty with fifty-two other boys. Because of his ability to read people as a blind person, he was put in charge of recruitment, and the group grew to over six hundred young men. The group later merged with another Resistance group called Défense de la France, which published an underground newspaper that eventually achieved a circulation of 250,000. After the war, it became one of France’s most respected daily newspapers, France Soir.

  In July 1943, Lusseyran was arrested, along with twenty-five other leaders of Défense de la France, and spent nearly fifteen months in the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp. When the U.S. Third Army arrived at Buchenwald in April 1945, Lusseyran was one of roughly thirty survivors of a transport of two thousand French citizens.

  After the war, despite his service as part of the underground and his brilliant schoolwork, Lusseyran was denied admission to the École Normale Supérieure, an elite university for training French academics, because of a decree passed by the Vichy government barring “invalids” from public employment. Although for years he was prevented from becoming a professor, he repeatedly presented his case and was eventually able to teach in France. Later he moved to the United States, where he first lectured at Hollins College and then became a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He was a professor at the University of Hawaii in 1971 when, at age forty-seven, he was killed in a car accident with his wife, Marie, not far from Juvardeil in France, where he had been happy as a boy.

  Also Available…

  The abridged digital audiobook of

  read by playwright and actor

  ANDRE GREGORY

  ISBN 978-1-60868-288-1

  4 hours, 30 minutes

  Available for download from your favorite online retailer

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