And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II

by Jacques Lusseyran Narrated by Andre Gregory

Overview

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. (This digital audiobook was created from the only remaining analog source and contains a slight tape hiss.)

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

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

“No one has written about what it takes to see — and how to do the looking — more poignantly than Jacques Lusseyran in his stirring memoir And There Was Light.”
— Maria Popova, The Marginalian

“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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171926557
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	02/01/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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