Jacques Lusseyran

From the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Facebook:

After he was blinded in a childhood accident at the age of eight, Jacques Lusseyran constructed a vivid inner world. “Life,” he wrote, “did not fall on my face as cool as rain or into my hands as round as fruit, but was a wave rising inside me.” He developed a strong memory and a passion for languages.

Jacques was 15 years old when German forces invaded his native France in May 1940 and, by the age of 17, he and a group of friends had founded a resistance group. Jacques was put in charge of recruitment due to his ability to hear what he called, “moral music.” Through perceptive listening, he could identify deceit or sincerity in a potential recruit’s tone of voice.  

In July 1943, Jacques and several other resistance leaders were arrested by the Gestapo. He was eventually transported to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was assigned to the so-called Invalids’ Block. Despite the wretched conditions of the camp, Jacques made the best of his situation. He put his memory and language skills to work by translating and deciphering war updates for his fellow prisoners.

He later wrote, “I became ‘the blind Frenchman.’ For many, I was just ‘the man who didn’t die.’ Hundreds of people confided in me. The men were determined to talk to me. They spoke to me in French, in Russian, in German, in Polish. I did the best I could to understand them all. That is how I lived, how I survived. The rest I cannot describe.”

In April 1945, he was liberated; 30 of his group of 2000 inmates survived. After the war, Lusseyran taught French literature in the United States and wrote books, including the autobiographical “And There Was Light”, which chronicles the first 20 years of his life. He died together with his third wife Marie in a car accident in France on July 27, 1971.

^ I’m including this for World Braille Day today.  ^