Whenever I made the A string sound by itself with the bow, such a burst of light appeared before my eyes and lasted so long that often I had to stop playing.”īecause of his blindness, Lusseyran was a victim of Nazism-a high-ranking collaborator in the Vichy government, toadying to the Fascist cult of physical perfection, decreed that a blind child, no matter how gifted and accomplished, was unfit to study in the schools of France. Lusseyran studied the cello but did not become a musician, he explains, because a single note prompted a distracting concert of “pictures, curves, lines, shapes, landscapes, and most of all colors. The handicap of his blindness was expressed in odd and unexpected ways.
He acquired a mastery of literature, history, and music and he acquired, too, an easy familiarity with the streets of Paris and the byways of rural France, running through meadows and hiking along narrow mountain paths with one hand on the shoulder of a trusted and beloved friend. As a child, his parents were caring and courageous enough to keep him out of the institutions for the blind he was blessed with the love of parents, of intimate friends, and of caring teachers. Of course, Lusseyran was a remarkably gifted man with the soul of a poet and a profound capacity for love, faith and courage. But there is no such night, for at every waking hour and even in my dreams I lived in a stream of light,” Lusseyran explain1932402722and how should I not have it in the presence of the marvel which kept renewing itself? Inside me every sound, every scent, and every shape was forever changing into light, and light itself changing into color to make a kaleidoscope of my blindness.” “Sighted people always talk about the night of blindness, and that seems to them quite natural. Lusseyran, a faithful Christian with an impressive grounding in the French rationalist tradition, does not bother to distinguish between the powers of perception that can be explained by a heightened sense of touch, smell or hearing, and those that are a gift from God. I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separated in my experience.” “I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about. Yet how was I to believe them when I saw?” he writes. But the intuitive young child almost immediately discovered anew a different sense of sight, an inner light that illuminated the world around him and bestowed on him the ability to see without the use of his eyes: “They told me that to be blind meant not to see. A tragic schoolroom accident rendered him completely blind at age 8. 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.
Lusseyran allows us to glimpse both heaven and hell on Earth through the eyes of a man who has lived through both. “And There Was Light” is the little-known but thoroughly luminous autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, a blind man who discovered the gift of inner sight after losing his vision in a childhood accident-and then put his gift to use in the struggle against Nazism.
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