And There Was Light

Author

Jacques Lusseyran

Back Cover

“When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.”

Our Thoughts

This book was given as gift years ago when I was just beginning my journey of learning the French language. It traveled with me on my very first trip to France where I quickly forgot to read it, using my ticket to Musée d’Orsay as a bookmark on page 9. Fast forward many years later, I finally picked up this memoir.

The cadence and writing style of the memoir was nice. It made for a pleasant read which is not always the case with autobiographies. The way in which Lusseyran describes life and his experience as a blind child was beautifully written. However, the book is more well-known for his participation in the French resistance. Lusseyran provides an intimate look into how his band of friends became a resistance organisation and how they grew and expanded, joining forces with others resistance pockets throughout France. The straightforwardness of his account made the book worth reading for me. It was not a glorified tale of heroes during wartime but encompassed the mundane as well as the heroics. His focus was not on his time spent in the camps during the war but always the connection he felt with others. While it took me years to finally pick up off my bookshelf, I’m happy I did.

Genre:

Memoir