And There Was Light

1. Clear Water of Childhood
2. Revelation of Light
3. The Cure for Blindness
4. Running Mates and Teachers
5. My Friend Jean
6. The Visual Bind
7. The Troubled Earth
8. My Country, My War
9. The Faceless Disaster
10. The Plunge into Courage
11. The Brotherhood of Resistance
12. Our Own Defense of France
13. Betrayal and Arrest
14. The Road to Buchenwald
15. The Living and the Dead
16. My New World
Epilogue
Addendum

“A magical book, the kind that becomes a classic.”
— Baltimore Sun

“One of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever encountered...[Lusseyran’s] experience is thrilling, horrible, honest, spiritually profound, and utterly full of joy.”
— Ethan Hawke, in the Village Voice

“One of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It is why books are published at all.”
— Mark Nepo, author of Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

“Lusseyran writes like an angel, like a mystic. His response to losing his sight at an early age is so surprising that it will change the way anyone thinks about blindness.”
— Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark

“Lusseyran allows us to glimpse both heaven and hell on Earth through the eyes of a man who has lived through both. His description of what it is like to ‘see’ as a blind man is fascinating and inspiring; his account of Buchenwald, where he was condemned to the living hell of the ‘Invalids’ Barracks,’ is one of the most anguishing fragments of Holocaust testimony that I have ever encountered.”
— Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

“A stunning revelation of human courage and love arising in the midst of implacable human evil. Under it all runs a deep current of mystical truth and hope.”
— Jacob Needleman, author of An Unknown World

“An exciting, inspirational account of a life without sight.”
— Library Journal

“What normally would seem a tragic plunge into darkness becomes a thrilling journey into light.”
— Peter Brook, director of the International Centre for Theatre Research, Paris

“This book is his testament to the joy which exists in all of us, a joy which no conditions — not even the worst — can kill.”
— Roshi Philip Kapleau, author of The Three Pillars of Zen

Jacques Lusseyran (1924–1971) became a professor in the United States at Case Western Reserve University after World War II. He died in a car accident in France.

Prologue

When you said to me: “Tell me the story of your life,” I was not eager to begin. But when you added, “What I care most about is learning your reasons for loving life,” then I became eager, for that was a real subject.

All the more since I have maintained this love of life through everything: through infirmity, the terrors of war, and even in Nazi prisons. Never did it fail me, not in misfortune nor in good times, which may seem much easier but is not.

Now, it is no longer a child who is going to tell this story and that is regrettable. It is a man. Worse yet, it is the university professor I have become. I will have to guard myself very carefully from trying to expound and demonstrate those two illusions. I will have to return to the simplicity of a child and in addition reach back to France, leaving in thought this America where I live reassured and protected, to find again the Paris which held for me so many frightening experiences and so many happy ones.