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

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

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

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

by Jacques Lusseyran

Paperback(Third Edition)

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Overview

The book that helped inspire Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See

An updated edition of this classic World War II memoir, chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century, with a new photo insert and restored passages from the original French edition

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781608682690
Publisher: New World Library
Publication date: 03/18/2014
Edition description: Third Edition
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 132,568
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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

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.

Table of Contents

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
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