[3]
By
Published: 2002
Category: Memoir [4]
His favorite color was green --- the color, he later learned, of hope.
And hope is what pours over you on every page of Jacques Lusseyran’s memoir. It’s unavoidable. It’s the DNA of the book. You don’t want to feel hopeful? I won’t say: “Then don’t read this book.” I will say: “Then you won’t be able to read this book."
For Jacques, early childhood was heaven. He ran. He played. God was “just there,” as he says --- “Behind my parents there was someone, and my father and mother were simply the people responsible for passing along the gift.”
Then he had an accident in school. The shaft of his glasses stabbed his right eye and tore away the tissue. The left eye had sympathetic damage. The happy-go-lucky Paris schoolboy woke up, his eyes bandaged.
He was eight years old.
He was totally blind.
And he was completely happy.
Despair, he realized, was simply a matter of “looking the wrong way.” In fact, he could see --- “radiance [was] emanating from a place I saw nothing about.” He could see light, after all. It only faded when he was afraid.
The world was still beautiful --- indeed, more beautiful. Waves were “arranged in steps.” Voices could be caresses. Metaphor was everywhere: “Before I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else….” So blindness was an obstacle, but it was also like a drug --- it made other senses intoxicatingly intense.
High school. Academics. Friends. Girls. Happy days. But we know what was coming: the Nazi occupation. Jacques was a patriot. At 17, he decided to organize his friends into a resistance unit. Wisely, they appointed him head of recruiting --- his hearing made him a great judge of character. Later he and his friends started an underground newspaper; it would become France-Soir, the most important daily newspaper in Paris.
His luck ran out. After spending 180 days in a cell in France, he was transferred to Buchenwald. Two thousand other Frenchmen were sent with him. Fifteen months later, when the Nazis were defeated, only thirty of them were still alive.
Lusseyran writes that he has “not a single evil memory” of his 330 days in the camps: “I was carried by a hand. I was covered by a wing.”
Goodness at this level makes commentary superfluous.