Jacques Lusseyran – författare

Can we continue to embrace life, even through the hardest times? Jacques Lusseyran, a French underground resistance leader during the Second World War, is one of those rare, inspirational people whose joy for life endures more than the story of everything he overcame. Jacques lost his sight in an accident when he was eight years old. At sixteen, he formed a resistance group in Nazi-occupied France, using his heightened senses to select the best recruits. Eventually Jacques was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. After a fifteen-month incarceration, Jacques was one of thirty to survive from an initial transport of two thousand resistance fighters. The book that helped inspire All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, And There Was Light is the compelling and moving autobiography of a man who lost his sight and overcame incarceration and betrayal. But above that, it’s the story of Jacques' remarkable love for life.

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.

Despite being blinded as a child, Jacques Lusseyran went on to help form a key unit of the French Resistance — and survive the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp. He wrote about these experiences in his inspiring memoir And There Was Light. In this remarkable collection of essays, Lusseyran writes of how blindness enabled him to discover aspects of the world that he would not otherwise have known. In “Poetry in Buchenwald,” he describes the unexpected nourishment he and his fellow prisoners found in poetry. In “What One Sees Without Eyes” he describes a divine inner light available to all. Just as Lusseyran transcended his most difficult experiences, his writings give triumphant voice to the human ability to see beyond sight and act with unexpected heroism.

Die berühmt gewordene Lebensgeschichte eines als Kind Erblindeten, der seine Behinderung mit Phantasie und Disziplin überwindet, eines Mannes, dessen Leben als Widerstandskämpfer, Literaturprofessor und Schriftsteller von einer sensiblen Zuversicht getragen war, die ihn befähigte, auf unvergleichliche Weise zu »sehen«.