In a happy land, children never stop being children.
—JACQUES LUSSEYRAN
The green-turned brass bell outside the school building rang decisively, and the seven- and eight-year-old boys, ignoring their instructor’s admonitions, ran pell-mell toward the classroom door. Little Jacques Lusseyran, wearing eyeglasses for his myopia, forced his way toward the middle of the group of pumping legs and waving arms, only to suddenly stumble when one of his classmates nudged him out of the way. Unable to catch himself in time, his right temple hit the edge of the teacher’s desk, and while crashing to the floor, he felt one of the arms of his glasses puncture his right eyeball, almost removing it. Bandaged and frightened, the little boy was immediately carried to his nearby home.
While attempting to calm his screaming, his parents heard from a visiting ophthalmologist that the boy’s right eye would have to be removed. His mother and father consoled seven-year-old Jacques, telling him that he would get along just fine in life with one eye. But within twelve hours, his “good” eye (whose retina had been torn in the accident) sympathetically went sightless and was removed as well. Within two days, a boy who had loved so much the visual world was without sight, able to perceive only a fuzzy whiteness. Yet soon young Jacques would prove to be brilliantly resilient. “Blinded on May 3 [1932], by the end of the month I was walking again, clinging to the hand of my father or mother, of course, but still walking and without any difficulty. In June, I begin learning to read in Braille.”1
So began the remarkable story of a child’s courageous adjustment to what most would consider a permanent, mind-numbing tragedy. How do you run, freely and with abandon, as a child and a teenager when you are blind? And yet Jacques Lusseyran ran fearlessly, along paths, in woods, and over unpredictable terrain thanks to the ever-present support of a close friend. Jean Besnié never took his blind friend’s arm, but on occasion, Lusseyran would grab Jean’s arm or shoulder; Jean, who had grown up in the same Parisian neighborhood as Jacques, knew to give his companion his own space, his own tempo, but unobtrusively, and compassionately. This combination of a secure friendship and a carefully learned independence would produce an imaginative and courageous young man who would never take the Occupation of his nation for granted.
When it was time for Lusseyran to enter a collège (middle school), and later the lycée, his parents made, for the era, a quite courageous choice. Paris had—and still has—a prestigious and world-renowned school for the blind, and its social and physical scientists have for more than two centuries been in the forefront of treating the unsighted. It was natural then, when Jacques lost his sight, that he would go to the esteemed Institut national des jeunes aveugles on the Boulevard des Invalides in Paris’s distinguished seventh arrondissement. But a quick visit to the school with his mother resulted in her decision, partially at his request, that he not be sequestered among the “handicapped” but be given instead the regular education of any young, intelligent boy. This decision was providential, for it is almost certain that his later resistance activities would have been impossible in such a specialized school, one that saw regimented adjustment to the sighted world for its students as its most important mission.
Lusseyran’s memoir And There Was Light has three interlocking tiers: growing up as an adolescent in a damaged nation, coping with blindness, and becoming the leader of a successful resistance group. He recounts these imbricated narratives with attention to detail, but in a style filled with wonder at how he balanced on a high wire while blind. Later, in a collection of essays, Against the Pollution of the I, Lusseyran developed at length his theories on the psychological dimensions of blindness, arguing that the ego is a selfish and greedy manipulator of the very senses that we trust without question. Firmly—and incorrectly—holding to the idea that our identity depends on the fables these working senses create for us, we believe ourselves permanently diminished when one or more of those senses are lost. In his introduction to these essays, Christopher Bamford, a researcher in Western spiritualism, explains that “Lusseyran . . . began to understand that there was a world beyond the ordinary auditory sense, where everything had its own sound.”2 Here was the young man’s first resistance: he refused to allow the absence of sight to identify him, morally or physically.*
He never made excuses to his companions for his handicap. His exquisite attention to the natural world, sightless as it may have been, was evident, even fascinating, to them. This heightened reliance on “hearing” and “seeing” the world more acutely than his peers almost certainly attracted those looking for answers in a world at war, where their parents were apprehensively off balance. Lusseyran believed, and argued, that blind persons have to face imaginatively the challenge of not being sighted, and that they soon learn to recognize certain “pressures” that the sighted do not. They possess a tactile hypersensitivity that allows them to “read” signals from objects—buildings, furniture, spaces—that others ignore and also to perceive an infinite number of signals that the human body emits to those whose perceptions have not been subverted by the powerful, but superficial, sense of sight. It is perhaps a universal wish of all young people to possess a “sixth sense” to help them as they endure the transition to adulthood. Jacques Lusseyran believed that his blindness effectively provided him with a set of intuitions and sensitivities barely felt by those not “diminished” by blindness. For an example, he recounts that moving to Paris from the countryside, where his parents had taken him immediately after his accident, had not been easy:
The [city] street was a labyrinth of noises. Each sound, repeated many times by the walls of the houses, the awnings of the stores, the grills over the sewers, the dense mass of the trucks, the scaffolding and the lampposts, created false images.3
Yet by developing a new sentient arsenal and learning to interpret the world confidently with his four remaining senses, he could determine the “true” images. (He even asserts that he could “smell” moral order and interpret “moral voices”—capabilities that would serve him well during his leadership of young résistants.) Counterintuitively, this talent to see beyond appearances was especially useful in a metropolitan environment, where the noise that urbanites produce might be expected to confuse and frustrate the blind. But in Paris, and especially where normal interactions had been disrupted, Lusseyran discovered, for example, that walls “produce a sound”:
Is it really a sound that I perceive in placing my attention on the wall? I’m not completely certain. But it is, if you wish, a shaking, something very light, but something repeated endlessly. I would say that it repeats as long as the wall stays behind me, exerting some force on my body. 4
He had no inkling that this new form of cognition would become crucial in his later activities.
Rather than encourage him to move deeper into the silent world of blindness, the military debacle of May–June 1940 and the subsequent Occupation would ignite in him the ability to focus an even more uncanny attention on the changes affecting those around him. To “see,” Lusseyran had needed to develop a new, enhanced sense of “touch”; what better incentive and aid to have when living in a world where nothing was as it should be?
Those in occupied territories who migrated to the clandestine world—that is, who performed acts that demanded subterfuge, disguise, and secrecy—speak of the “extra” sense they soon developed that allowed them to move through an increasingly suspicious environment. While they did not examine it as thoroughly as Lusseyran did—he was on his way to becoming one of the most important mid-twentieth-century proponents of anthroposophy, the belief that the spiritual domain can be objectively and rationally understood—members of the underground were well aware of the unfamiliar nature of living an extended clandestine life.* Whether from paranoia, fear, anticipation, or simply palpable excitement, resistance fighters described such a hypersensitivity almost as if it were a sine qua non of the clandestine life. But Lusseyran analyzed this phenomenon physiologically and logically; he almost certainly would have discussed his conclusions with his closest friends, who realized that they were in the presence of an extraordinarily talented person, a leader. Lusseyran recounts that his friends, when “lost” in the labyrinth of Parisian streets, would turn to him, the “blind guy,” to find their way home. His blindness was increasingly accepted by his friends as a “special power,” one that set him apart and that encouraged them to follow him. When he joined up with these classmates in the Jardin du Luxembourg en route to their high school, the group would follow Jacques, never passing him or going before him. The band would grow, and the sound of the chattering laughter that accompanied them would soon reach the ears of the school’s attendant, who would say: “Well, well, so it’s the Lusseyran parade.”5 This respectful, admiring procession would form the core of the Volontaires de la Liberté, one of the most respected early resistance groups of Occupied Paris.
Jacques went to the best lycées, intimidating the unimaginative administrators with his prodigious memory and his brilliant use of Braille as an aid in reading; a noisy Braille typewriter become a sonorous sign of the extraordinary young man in their midst. He was always at the top of his classes. Though often intellectually bored, he knew that he had to do what others did, only better, if he was to rise to a profession as a scholar and teacher, a goal that seemed to come to him naturally. He also learned the kinds of friends he could rely on. He was able quickly to decide how to ignore those who were scornful of him or who pitied his situation. “My real friends always belonged to that special race of children, the seekers, the tireless ones, the ones we will call enthusiasts as young men.”6 His comfortable ability to read this “race” of adolescents would also contribute immeasurably to his later success as a leader.
Leaving aside for a moment Lusseyran’s “impairment,” we return to the question: why did such young men, often with full freedom to make any choice, decide to risk their careers, their reputations, their families, and themselves in order to show their frustration with the Occupation? In Lusseyran’s case, he knew Germany and Hitler more deeply than his fellows. He had decided in his early teens to study German, primarily because his father’s business caused him to travel there frequently, and Jacques became fascinated with the voice and promises of Germany’s new leader. (One area where his blindness did not separate him from sighted people was listening to the radio.) The sudden explosion of the wireless as a rather inexpensive addition to a household, and Hitler’s use of the radio waves, brought the threat of war and revolution even closer to those huddled around it during the traumatic years of the ascent of Mussolini in Italy, the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, and the vicious Spanish Civil War. Lusseyran spent hours a day perfecting his German (a skill that would probably save his life later). Tuned to Stuttgart radio, he learned what fascism meant and thus grasped earlier than his cohort that the Germans were running circles around European diplomacy in the 1930s. When he learned over the airwaves in 1938 of the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, he was almost overwhelmed: “My thirteen-year-old imagination wants to stand up to the shock, but it is too great, coming all at once. History hurls itself on me, wearing the face of the murderers.”7
As the news became more dire, the pusillanimity of his nation’s political leadership catalyzed a larger realization:
Most grown-ups seemed to be either imbeciles or cowards. They never stopped telling us children that we must prepare for life, in other words, for the kind of life they were leading, because it was the only good and right one, of that they were certain. No, thank you. To live in the fumes of poison gas on the roads in Abyssinia, at Guernica, on the Ebro front [in Spain], in Vienna, at Nuremberg, in Munich, the Sudetenland and then Prague. What a prospect!
I was no longer a child. . . . What attracted me and terrified me on the German radio was the fact that it was in the process of destroying my childhood.8
And then the Germans were in Paris. Lusseyran recounts how subtle yet insidious the Occupation was at first. His friends told him about the omnipresence of Germans in uniform and the prevalence of German street and directional signs. Life seemed to go on as before—except, of course, for Jews and anti-Nazi German immigrants.
If I didn’t know yet precisely what the Occupation was, that was because it was too important, and, after all, almost invisible. The Nazis had perfected a new way of inserting themselves into the body of Europe. They held themselves in rigid order, at attention quite correctly, at least in France. They stole from us, looted us, . . . but they didn’t talk about it, or hardly ever. They never made threats. They were satisfied with signing requisitions.9
This initial hesitation to respond to the Occupier makes sense: most people avoid a confrontation until they understand the ethical reason for doing so. These early months were defined on all sides by nothing if not by uncertainty. And for youngsters desperate to know what was going on but not privy to the fast-changing effects of a military occupation, it must have been dispiriting.
Like his classmates, Jacques was, for a short time, depressed, anxious, and befuddled by the turn of events. And his mental state was not assuaged by the plaintive excuses and bromides of his parents and teachers, themselves in a state of shock over recent events. He mused that “during the first months of the Occupation, I experienced something like a second blindness.”10 This was a stunning metaphor for the effect that the defeat of France and the German Occupation had on most of the nation’s citizens. Lusseyran then recounted, matter-of-factly and modestly, as if he were joining his school’s Latin club, how he decided to found a resistance group among his cohort. Given the debates that were swirling around schools, in clubs, and at home, it seemed purposeful to do something that would maintain French integrity. The teenager began to conceive of a template for a clandestine organization that would last as long as the Occupation.
Most of the professoriate of the middle and high schools of France were known to be quite progressive, even socialist. A large percentage were still pacifists, and not a few were communist; they had served in the trenches of World War I and thus against Germany’s persistent warmongering. A good number of these teachers would join in resistance activities early in the Occupation. Yet others were Vichy patriots who continued to believe that Pétain had done the right thing in saving France from the devastation of all-out war. They despised the Germans, but were even more worried about the communists. And there were those instructors who insisted on instilling in their pupils a different patriotism, one that reminded them of the legacy of the French Revolution and of the nation’s struggle to be a guarantor of human rights.
“Almost all the boys my age [sixteen] were worried. Those who weren’t were fools, and we dropped them,” Lusseyran recalled.11 Indeed, his lycée, like all of them, had students who were not as bothered about the German presence as others. Some were viscerally pro-Pétain and even admired the German army. They and their parents had been among those most vocally against France’s brief reign of socialism in the mid-1930s; perhaps a good dose of rigorous attention from a new government to a foundering nation, especially one so decisively defeated, was just what was needed for a brighter future. (Suffice it to say that the fate of France’s Jews was not of much concern to those espousing this view.) Arguments and even fights erupted daily in the schools of France early in the war. More often than not, a student’s sympathies were well known by all of his classmates.
The historian and political philosopher Annie Kriegel writes in her memoir:
School was not an island apart from the real world. Tensions, political opposition and conflict [could easily] become violent between professors and administrations, among professors themselves, between professors and students, among students. And the climate of course was even more tense in boys’ schools than in the girls’.12
When Kriegel’s school reopened in September 1940, most of the teachers who were communists, Freemasons, or Jews had been fired and replaced with new, younger instructors (not necessarily supporters of the Vichy regime, but certainly not Jewish or communist). As a result of the purge, boys had female instructors in their classes for the first time since their earliest years. Soon the students began to notice a nervousness among those teachers who had remained, for teachers were not trusted by L’État Français. The German Occupation Authority was not overly concerned with the education of youngsters and left that aspect of daily life to the reactionary Vichy government. Of course, some German bureaucrats paid attention to the curricula and to the texts that dealt with recent history, but in general it was the Vichy regime that obsessed—but to little avail—about the preparation of the next generation of Frenchmen (not Frenchwomen, for girls were expected to become good mothers and housekeepers). No matter the number of young Pétainistes or even pro-German students in a school (“It was a period when some crossed the [school’s] threshold raising their fists, while others raised their arms”), the teaching cohort remained generally pacifist, neutral, or quietly pro-Republican.13
Soon after the partition of France, orders had been sent down from the Ministry of Education to cease instruction in the post-1918 history of the nation. But Lusseyran’s favorite history teacher would close the door and continue class after hours for those who wanted to stay (and all but two in the class always did) to hear about the 1920s and the 1930s and how Germany had fallen for a charlatan. He would talk about Mein Kampf and Goebbels and even the racial characteristics of Nazi ideology. At one point, he shouted at his students: “Young gentlemen, this is not a war of nations. There will be no more wars of that sort. Get that into your heads! The world is one. That may be uncomfortable, but it is a fact. And every nationalist is behind the times, just an old stick-in-the-mud.”14 Most likely a secret communist, this teacher and his comrades would eventually also be fired by the Vichy government. Yet their effect on these highly moralistic youngsters, whether quiet or less so, was impressive and lasting.
Two of the nation’s most prestigious lycées, Louis-le-Grand and Henri-IV, stand on the hill in the Latin Quarter above the Sorbonne, sited around the Panthéon, the burial place of France’s great thinkers and leaders. Rivals then as now, they were the training ground for the nation’s intellectual elite.* It was in the courtyards and libraries of these two schools, and in the cafés between them, that Jacques first began to discuss the moral imperative that he believed his generation should follow. In his knowledgeable and perceptive novel about Lusseyran, Le Voyant (The Seer), Jérôme Garcin captures the adolescents who were on the cusp of changing their lives forever: “Strange little adults, their upper lips coiffed with peach fuzz, and fingers still marked with the ink of the classroom, who still had not known the bittersweet taste of a woman’s delicious skin.”15 Events began to more noticeably touch these youngsters as they learned from their parents, and their own experience, how the Occupiers were slowly but inexorably making daily life a grinding affair. It was difficult to ignore the fact that Germans were now living comfortably in Paris, and elsewhere in France, while most of the French were not.
* * *
By the spring of 1941, the Nazis had been in Paris for ten months. The first school year under foreign military occupation was about to end, and one could sense an increasing impatience among middle and high school boys and girls as the enormity of the war intruded into their young lives. (Lusseyran noted that “our uneasiness was more intense than the uneasiness of people fully grown.”16) Boys were offended at the sight of German signs, of the bright red, white, and black swastika flag hanging from official buildings, at notices of “Wir sprechen Deutsch” outside the best shops and restaurants, at German police directing traffic. And from family, visiting adults, and their professors they heard daily about the desperate situation of their beloved France. The uneasiness, frustration, and anger of their parents—an amalgam of helplessness—further sowed confusion among uncertain adolescents.
Interactions with the Occupier were often no more than signals given, on both sides, of a banal disrespect. For example, confident adolescents in these first tentative months of German control were annoyed when stopped and asked for their Papieren. One youngster even floored the accelerator of her car after a German guard asked for ID, speeding away with her parents in the backseat. Why should I show ID in my own country? Who do these Boches think they are? The young German soldier was left behind with his mouth open. And to add insult to injury, those sentries at identity checkpoints were often not much older than the youngsters they were trying to control.
Public transportation was curtailed. Gatherings of more than a few friends were deemed suspicious; ID checks and curfews were stepped up. And word slowly spread of arrests of Jews and of other youth who had joined an incipient resistance by making fun of German soldiers or even more dangerously, cutting electric wires or smashing windows. All of this news was passed through whispers and later by way of leaflets, clandestinely printed and distributed. These events became as important a subject for adolescent conversation as dating or parties.
In May 1941, a small group of adolescent boys, aged fifteen to eighteen, met in the apartment where Jacques lived with his parents, situated only a subway stop away from Montparnasse, the center of American expatriate intellectual and social life in the 1930s. It was not far from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand across from the Sorbonne, Jacques’s high school. The door to the apartment house was located between a drugstore and a candy shop, and the building was comfortably sited in the heart of bourgeois Paris, across the street from one of the city’s best-known maternity hospitals. On the fourth floor of this building was the Lusseyran dwelling. Jacques’s parents had given him two rooms at the back of the residence where he might study in peace—and where the noise of his constantly used Braille typewriter would be muted. The privacy of Jacques’s rooms made them an ideal location for a bunch of boys who wanted to plot. (The naive obliviousness of these youngsters to the possibility that such meetings might attract the attention of the German or French police still amazes, but in this case their luck held.)*
At their first meeting in Jacques’s apartment, they spoke seriously about creating an organization that might put their ideas for resisting the Occupation into action. To his surprise, his friends told Jacques that they all expected him to be the leader, and they were willing to follow his instructions. Lusseyran was at first stunned: Why me? Why a blind boy? The answers were what we now know to have been expected: his character had been made clear through his lucid response to sightlessness in middle and high school. His good humor, intelligence, and loyalty were all factors in his comrades’ faith in him.
Once the subject was broached, it took passionate form, but it quickly became clear to Lusseyran and his most trusted accomplices that there were important steps that preceded direct confrontation with an increasingly suspicious enemy, both the Germans and their allies, the French police. The boys needed to recruit and organize, then contain the undirected energy of their eager cadre. They needed to coordinate activities. One close friend immediately asked several important questions: “What kind of people do you want to get in touch with? How many? When will you need money and how much? Where are you going to put the headquarters of your movement? What sort of discipline are you thinking of using to keep the activities of the members under control? When are you going to tell London about your existence?” * 17 Lusseyran later recalled how quickly he and his friends moved from an idea to a plan of action; he also suddenly realized that he was not at all trained to be a leader of an energetic bunch of intelligent youngsters taking on the mission of confronting the continent’s most successful military forces. “I had thought of everything but the danger.”18
Years after that moment, Lusseyran wrote that “blindness is a state of perception which . . . is capable of increasing many faculties sorely needed in every intellectual and organizational activity.”19 His prodigious memory (and thus lack of a need to write anything down), talent for making logical connections among disparate bits of information, and ability to pay close attention to even the smallest detail, as well as, frankly, the common perception of him as deficient because of his blindness—all of these advantages made him an ideal resistance leader. Never once, he reminds us, in the two years that he led the group did anyone question his decisions or insinuate that they could not trust the instincts of a blind man.
Still, he hesitated. A second meeting was called, this time in the family apartment of Jean Besnié, his best friend. Each member of the initial group had been tasked with identifying a few interested youngsters. More than fifty eager high school students and some university students had heard about the meeting and showed up. As they sat on the floor, listening to Jacques’s presentation, there was growing excitement at the unfolding of a cool adventure. But Jacques was not smiling—this is not a game, he warned. They were about to embark, he explained, on a serious project, one for which they had no experience. They had no one to consult for advice, especially not their parents, teachers, or priests. They had no printing presses, no more than pocket money, no arms (and this group would never become armed), and no experience. Up to now, skipping the occasional class or having someone else do their homework had been their most serious offense, and those transgressions certainly were not punishable by imprisonment, deportation, or death. All of that would now change.
The roomful of boys became somber, but no one raised timorous questions, and all agreed to search for and find even more classmates who might become part of this grand project. Jacques’s role as their leader continued to be unquestioned. In his memoir, he interrupts this narrative of the founding of the Volontaires de la Liberté to relate a detail that seems completely off-subject: he asked Besnié to take dancing classes with him. He explained that this was not an idle decision, that he needed to train his body to handle the new feelings of being “grown-up” enough to lead a passionate revolt against violent adults. “The seething of my mind, transmitted to my body, gave me a strength which I would be at a loss to call by name. . . . There was in me such a train of forces preparing themselves for deeds that all roads had to be cleared at once to allow them to pass.”20 After his lessons, he felt that dancing with girls the energetic waltz, the rhumba, the foxtrot, and, especially, the forbidden “swing” gave an erotic edge to the dangers he had yet to fully comprehend. As he writes, dance helped chase the “devils” away—his own, and his new enemy.
* * *
Le jazz. If there was a cultural meme in France in the 1930s that competed with American films by Busby Berkeley, it was the music of Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman. Tradition has it that the first notes of American jazz were heard in 1917 in the Atlantic port of Brest, played by the Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment from New York City. The regiment carried with it a forty-four-piece jazz band led by James Reese Europe (appropriately enough). As soon as they disembarked, they played. A reporter described the reaction of war-weary Frenchmen: “The first thing that Jim Europe’s outfit did when it got ashore wasn’t to eat. It wanted France to know that it was present, so it blew some plain ordinary jazz over the town. . . . As soon as Europe had got to work, that part of France could see that hope was not entirely dead.”21
This gift to the twentieth century from New Orleans and Chicago took Europe by storm. Whenever a cultural phenomenon appears too quickly, then is instantly adopted by “vulnerable” youth, moral, political, and cultural establishments tend to criticize it, to frighten the larger public about its odious influences, even to ban it. Jazz—as would rock and roll in the United States in the 1950s and hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s—was continuously put through such prudish “moral analysis.” Its rhythms and origins were deemed foreign, even “savage”; its musicians were unfamiliar, meaning black. Jazz was noisy and urban, metropolitan and invasive; in other words, it entered into all social strata. But its audience was especially the young, who discovered a sexy rhythm that spoke to their desire to differentiate themselves from the staid world of their parents.* Jazz was certainly not French (though some Vichy critics tried in the 1940s to argue that it came directly from the popular songs of French peasants!). Jazz singers and players were often multinational—black, Jewish, or Gypsy (the common term for the Roma; the greatest of all Romani-French jazz guitarists was Django Reinhardt, who drew German audiences to the Saint-Germain quarter of Paris during the Occupation). Adolescents snapped to it when jazz was played on the radio, in films (after sound movies became common), and on the phonograph; the bands that played at the bals they frequented with friends often sneaked jazz into their repertoires.
Soon the word “swing” came to be used as a general, though often misapplied, synonym for jazz. Beyond being a new term, it was also a code word that identified such bands as temporary outsiders (Je suis swing), to the point that some bold gentile youngsters would later on, in solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters, wear yellow stars with “swing” instead of “Juif” printed on them. And swing also definitely caused ethical guardians to fret. The music and the dancing encouraged young bodies to touch, embrace, and sweat. Girls were dancing with as much vigor as their male counterparts, clothing was looser, and touching was often intimate.
Predictably, when the fascist nations began forbidding swing and jazz as degenerate, “unmanning,” dark, and ethnic, it only drew adolescents closer to the line that separated their cultural desires from authorities, be they parents or the government.* The attempts by patriarchal governments to direct adolescent passion into athletics, gymnastics, or quasi-military activities were only partially successful. Youth wanted to party to their own rhythms, be they musical or beliefs in progress. Being “swing” was a seemingly innocuous way of ignoring the imposition of moral codes and political strictures, a form of “resistance” that preceded the official moralism of the Vichy government. Younger French would later use swing to recognize the hypocrisy of their conquerors, who never banned jazz in France during the Occupation and who themselves, as German youngsters, had loved it.
As the journalist Mike Zwerin writes, somewhat ecstatically, in his analysis of swing under the Nazis:
Jazz [and its derived dance variation, “swing”] was . . . a system of latitudes, . . . of integral bonds between an individual and a group. As such it became perhaps the best metaphor for liberty that any culture has ever come up with. . . . It became the quintessential allegory for the pluralism of opportunities within which anyone who knows how to use an instrument and contribute to a common sound can make a statement about what he believes is beautiful and true.22
The historian Jeffrey Jackson explains the explosion of jazz in France between the wars as an effect of “mobility,” or what we call today “globalization.” National identity, some conservatives feared, was being overwhelmed by “foreign” influence—for example, l’art nègre. Traditional French customs and manners had been infected by the Americans and immigrants from French colonies. Encouraged by the engines of mass consumption—advertising, for instance—the masses were introduced to the world of leisure theretofore closed to them by the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy.23 This rebellion at seventy-eight revolutions per minute was not hidden away in dance halls and living rooms.
In the late 1930s, another social and cultural phenomenon suddenly appeared in large metropolitan areas of France that only a few years later would become an important meme for both sides in the resistance struggle during the Occupation. It was a behavioral and vestiary style known as zazou. The term was derived, supposedly, from scat syllables used by American jazz singers in the 1920s, and it described a small, but visible, sliver of the adolescent demographic in the late 1930s and early 1940s. For the most part, the Zazous were children of the wealthy, for being zazou was not cheap—you could not hold a job if you acted like a precious dandy; you needed money to spend hours every day in cafés and dance clubs; and you had to be able to afford the outlandish style of dress and coiffure that both genders affected. The Zazous were nonviolent agitators: not overtly critical of politics, they were loud, funny, and crazy-acting. Johnny Hess, a major figure in French jazz during the 1930s and 1940s and the composer of two immensely popular songs, “Je suis swing” (1938) and “Ils sont zazous” (1942), popularized both the concept and the name. He remembers:
I was definitely zazou. . . . The Zazous came from nowhere. I must have said the word one day in an act. Zazous, swing, these were spontaneous reactions, a way to piss off the Occupier [even though Zazous had strutted before the war too]. I wore my hair a bit long, sunglasses. The collaborationist press insulted us, which amused us no end. . . . It was a provocation, of course. . . . Everything I did was a provocation. . . . I even sang in cabarets where you’d find Germans—not in uniform, in mufti. I understand German perfectly, since I was born in German-speaking Switzerland. Between songs, I’d hear them say “We should lock that guy up, that weirdo.”24
The Zazous were not among the most daring of those who resisted the Germans and their collaborators, but they were countercultural, and they were quite brave at times, first in standing up against the right-wing punks who would bully them in the late 1930s, and later against the Vichy and German moral police, who felt that they were, in some way, making fun of the myth of purity and virility so cherished by the Reich and L’État Français. The girls dressed with hints of masculinity, the boys with hints of femininity, and such playfulness with gender categories drove conservatives of various stripes to anger, if not violence. These young rebels wore loud colors and pegged pants and used their pompadour haircuts to offend. The young men also carried large umbrellas, called Chamberlains, after the feckless British prime minister. They loved swing music and were seen dancing everywhere it was played. And while they affected a disdain, a je m’en foutisme (don’t-give-a-damn attitude), rather than anger, the Zazous nonetheless stood as quite visible critics of a restrictive and arrogant system.
Jacques Lusseyran’s experiment with dance, though brief, placed him well within the mildly rebellious atmosphere that defines all teenagers and proved once again that what sighted kids could do, he could do too.
* * *
Wisely, Lusseyran’s tight group decided to meet somewhere besides their parents’ apartments. They found, as others would over the next three years, a dilapidated building, this particular one on the southern borders of Paris; filled with transients and foreigners, it was watched over by a complacent concierge. The comings and goings of itinerant tenants would serve as cover for the occasional presence of a bunch of teenagers. Next, they became precise in recruitment; inviting just anyone to join was a sure path to exposure. Already word of the presence of this “new group” had gotten around too casually, so the original team started over, this time through a system of interviewing that would have no equal during the Resistance. Interested adolescents, even those who had been at the first meetings, had to “go see the blind guy.” His co-conspirators had agreed that Jacques would be the only recruiter, the one person who could say yes or no to a postulant. This was a completely counterintuitive vote of confidence in their blind friend: did not one need to see in order to recognize danger, to be able to look directly at those so eager to become warriors for liberty? But at the time, the choice was quick and unanimous; no other peer was as trusted and as respected as Jacques.
His friends eventually claimed that he had “the sense of human beings.”25 In his later publications, Lusseyran detailed how this sense was manifest to him, if not at first to others. To begin, he had learned to forget that he was blind, but his interlocutors could not, which gave him initially a strategic advantage. Next, we recall that he felt he had a tactile connection to the world that was not solely limited to the sense of touch, but that extended to the energy that emanated from persons or objects. “When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions.”26 He called this his “immediate cognition,” and he considered it his most powerful interpretative tool to understand a world closed to the sighted.27
The rules of recruitment of young résistants were quickly established by the “Central Committee” of Volontaires de la Liberté. Without Jacques’s say-so, no one could join their group. Not only did this decision give him confidence, but it also helped him to accept without guilt the fact that he could not participate in clandestine acts as other members did, such as following someone, distributing newspapers, carrying arms, or passing notes in the street or on the metro. His usefulness was intellectual and perceptive, and no one criticized him for his inability to act physically against the Occupier.
Here is how it worked: Jacques (whose name was unknown to most of the later postulants) would answer a coded knock at his apartment’s door; he would welcome the young man (still no women), ask his name, then lead him down a somber hallway, into his darkened room, spartanly furnished, with two facing chairs in its center.* At first, Jacques’s blindness was discomfiting for the postulant, an advantage for his interlocutor. Lusseyran would ask his interviewee to take a seat facing him, and then would begin an innocuous conversation, about anything except the purpose of the interview: school, courses, the weather, or the interviewee’s family. There would be no direct questions such as, “How do you feel about the Vichy government?” or, “Are your parents communists?”
The stranger would be anxious to talk about joining the resistance group, to assure his interviewer of his discretion and commitment, but Jacques would patiently wait until he had a sense of his interlocutor’s bodily movements, tone of voice, and command of the moment. How did the visitor phrase his sentences? Was he nervous? If so, could he be made to relax? Did he shake his leg or rub his hands on his trousers? Was there the odor of sweat? None of these indicators immediately chilled an applicant’s chances, but his ability to relax, to speak with unpretentious confidence, and to explain his own moral values would weigh heavily in the final decision.
After this initial questioning, Jacques would pose a few subtle questions about how the Occupation might be affecting his candidate, how his family might respond to his becoming a member of a clandestine group. He might ask about the interviewee’s friends, or his favorite professors, or the books he read. Eventually, Jacques would end the interview. The young recruit would be led again through the long hall to the door, where, as it slowly closed, he would be thanked for having come and admonished about letting anyone know of this meeting. The young would-be résistant, of course, would have hoped for a brevet of acceptance, but no commitment had been made, no future meeting set.
At first, younger boys—ages seventeen to nineteen—and then older ones, mostly university students, began to show up to meet Jacques Lusseyran. “They were scholars from the colleges of letters, science, medicine, pharmacy, law, the schools of advanced agronomy, chemistry, physics. The Movement was growing at the pace of a living cell.”28 After each interview, Jacques would discuss the potential recruit with his closest advisers (the Central Committee). What he had gleaned from the interview was not solely biographical or philosophical or political information, but what he would have called “moral” information. He was brilliantly astute at probing, sightlessly, the signs a person gives when trying to hide secrets, or to impress, or to shade the truth, even to lie. Lusseyran tells us that he interviewed about six hundred youngsters during his two years as leader of the group. This is an almost inconceivable number, but it is entirely credible. The number of adolescents who sought to aggressively resist, whether out of personal commitment, in emulation of their peers, or for unknown intimate reasons, grew steadily, and volunteers wanted to join Lusseyran’s increasingly respected organization. This was Jacques’s major responsibility, and he was brilliant at it.
His ability to remember even the smallest detail was phenomenal; he carried hundreds of names, phone numbers, and addresses in his head, another advantage for those now obsessed with secrecy. His honesty, his integrity (true integrity: the wholeness of his actions, words, and sentiments was manifest), and his intelligence reassured the frequently nervous youngsters whom he led. And when he said “no,” “no” it stood. Occasionally, a would-be volunteer was accepted on probation, then watched carefully by others until he had proved his bona fides. Jacques would make only one mistake in these hundreds of interviews—but it would be a deadly one.
The Volontaires considered their primary job “to get the news out” (as they put it). What news? All that the Occupation Authority did not see fit to print. “The French people were completely ignorant of the war, and because of this they had only instincts to rely on,” Lusseyran concluded.29 They understood that the confusion and despair caused by the Great Defeat was quickly turning to apathy, a most advantageous quality for the Occupier working to loot and thereby neutralize France. The youngsters’ mission to reenergize a depressed nation gained force, slowly at first, but persistently. They would collect rumors, send coded messages to group leaders, and reprint what they had heard—illegally—on London and Swiss radio programs. Calling others to action, and to reaction, they encouraged their readers to hold out for a better future, not only for France but for Europe too. They questioned the premises of the armistice that Pétain had signed, showed how the Vichy government was but a hand-servant to the Nazis, and sang the praises of those who were carrying on the fight throughout the world, especially in its colonies.
It is hard to know how effective such nonviolent action could have been, but those who have studied in detail the French Resistance during the Occupation argue that such “moral” resistance resonated among the populace. Violent resistance, which the Volontaires eschewed, had its place, but it often had disastrous repercussions for those who happened to live in the areas or neighborhoods where the actions took place. There was sympathy, however, for a group of nonviolent, fast-running boys. The communist historian Albert Ouzoulias is precise in describing how often ordinary citizens helped the rapscallions who were driving the authorities to distraction: “With cool courage, the shopkeepers, artisans, and concierges of the neighborhood help the patriots. Curtains have been pulled, apartment house entrances closed. Then our running comrades, followed by German soldiers, miraculously find doors open, then immediately close behind them.”30
As Lusseyran explains, each step his group took to “resist” created a tactical problem: it was much more difficult to coordinate effective resistance than they had imagined. Soon, citizens in large cities and small towns began to look forward to grabbing one of the dozens of “newspapers” that were seeding a burgeoning confidence in the future. Yet putting together just two pages, recto and verso of one sheet, required punctilious, punctual, and continuous labor. It called for coordination, information-gathering, and more technical skills than some of these boys had. Where could they find ronéotypes (mimeograph machines), ink, and paper, especially paper? Where could they print so that the noise could not be heard? How were they to maintain regular editions and distribution? How exactly should they distribute the newsletters? And most important, where would they find the funds to continue these activities? Materials were available in the black market, but that was an expensive place to shop. Being a new group composed of students, they received no money from established resistance networks. For this need, the boys soon began taking up collections as surreptitiously as they had passed out tracts or plastered the walls with small bits of paper calling Frenchmen to resist.
Lusseyran’s ambitions went beyond printing Le Tigre, the first name of the paper, which would later be called Défense de la France.* He wanted to establish a complex intelligence movement, one that not only printed the “news” but helped all those who were resisting, no matter the manner—those who hid downed Allied pilots and transported them across borders; those who worked in sensitive places and received information that London and de Gaulle desperately needed. Who better than an adolescent to do this type of work?*
Young as we were, we could easily go everywhere, pretend to be playing games, or making foolish talk, wander around whistling with our hands in our pockets, outside factories, near barracks or German convoys, hang about kitchens and on sidewalks, climb over walls. Everything would be on our side, even help from the girls [when they could be recruited].31
The success of the printing and distribution of their newspaper, as well as their other clandestine activities, soon took its toll on young Jacques. As commander of the Volontaires, he had no one to turn to for advice on how to continue at the pace that his movement was growing, no one to confide in about his own anxieties. He found a professor or two who would give him a pat on the back, or some suggestions, but what he needed was another combattant, someone who knew the special nature of relentless resistance.
Through one of his closest colleagues, Lusseyran met Philippe Viannay, an “adult” of twenty-six years who had begun another movement in Paris and the north of France, called Défense de la France. Jacques and his acolytes knew this group’s newspaper well; in fact, they had helped distribute it along with their own. They had been impressed that this journal was printed, not mimeographed, on paper of first-rate quality and now had a circulation of about twenty thousand. Viannay told Jacques that not only did his group have printing presses and several places to print, but they had arms too, including machine guns (hidden in tunnels and sewers under Paris), specialists and machines that could print forged identity papers, and a radio transmitter—a direct channel to de Gaulle and the Free French in London. They also had young, though experienced, agents working in Paris, north of Paris, and in Burgundy. For Jacques, the difference between his Volontaires and Viannay’s group was that between a Boy Scout troop and a paramilitary organization. He immediately trusted Viannay (who would become one of postwar France’s most influential journalists) and decided to urge his own troops to join Défense de la France. Most agreed, and Jacques became a member of its executive committee, which had three female members as well.
Soon the combined networks were printing and then distributing thousands and thousands of copies of their newspaper in apartment buildings, on café terraces, in metros, on buses, outside church services—wherever they could pass quickly through or mingle in large crowds. The editorial board, concomitant with the executive committee, insisted that the paper and the network be as apolitical as possible—that is, that it not support a single ideological group—and thus avoid the struggle to have dominance over other resistance groups or their outcomes. Many members were still unsure as to how France should be governed once the Germans had left and L’État Français was abolished; members included communists, socialists, rightists, even monarchists, those who were anti–de Gaulle, and those who supported him. Neither Viannay nor Lusseyran wanted their energies to be wasted on intramural bickering, or worse.*
Défense de la France grew rapidly, and after the Germans occupied the whole of the country, pursuant to the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, it could count cells in the former “Free” Zone as well. Women and girls became increasingly important to the movement’s clandestine activities. How pervasive was made clear on July 14, 1942—Bastille Day, the French national holiday. The Germans had forbidden parades or any show of French patriotism in the Occupied Zone, with little success. Lusseyran describes what happened with unembarrassed pride:
Forty squads of ten members each passed out [a total of] seventy thousand copies of the paper between eight o’clock in the morning and five in the afternoon on the subway cars, publicly, calmly, from one passenger to the next, and smiling as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Soldiers and officers of the German army, not to mention spies in plain clothes who could not be identified, turned astonished eyes on the object that had just been handed to them.32
It was an unmitigated success: no violence, no arrests, and no one denouncing any of the four hundred youngsters who participated. Jacques and the executive committee of the network were elated. It was the high-water mark of Défense de la France (and its assimilated Volontaires de la Liberté) while Lusseyran was still one of its leaders.
* * *
Meanwhile, as he worked clandestinely, Lusseyran’s personal life continued. He was still living with his parents, not hiding in an abandoned apartment; he was still going to classes. He was, after all, an excellent student, and he continued preparing for the major examinations that would allow him to go to the best schools in France (the grandes écoles), especially the École normale supérieure in Paris, where all the country’s most accomplished and respected professors of the humanities and social sciences had been students. Lusseyran had an excellent chance of passing the entrance exam with honors; he had finished near the top of his prépa (preparation) courses, the most rigorous of pre-university curricula. He knew that his blindness might cause him problems, especially since the Vichy government had published a law that forbade handicapped, or “deformed,” persons from holding governmental positions. (The most remunerative and respected teaching positions in France were government-paid.) Nevertheless, he had letters from sixteen professors, who had sent them to the Education Ministry, and he had finally been awarded an exemption by that office.
But on the June morning when he showed up with his Braille typewriter for the examination, the proctors refused him a seat. He argued that the ministry had given him an exemption, but he was shown another letter from the minister himself that forbade his entrance. Lusseyran was furious. Although he could not say it, he wanted to: I’ve organized and led a large resistance group as a young blind man; I can certainly take an examination! Jacques suddenly realized that he was “handicapped,” at least in the eyes of the French government, and that no matter how much he tried to show that he was independent, there would always be those who found him deficient. He was not being forbidden to take the examinations because he was on some secret list or being followed by the Vichy police. It was because he had been blinded at the age of seven. These were not innocent judgments: “For me it was not an examination, not even a competition which was at stake. It was my whole future in the social system in my own country.”33 Yet Jacques had never indulged in self-pity; nor did he have time to reflect morosely on his academic situation. He still had a large organization to help run. The first rumors of a resurgent Russian military during the second year (1942) of the German invasion of the Soviet Union were reinvigorating even the most reluctant Frenchman, let alone the passionate young Volontaires.
At the beginning of his clandestine activities, Jacques had confided his involvement to his parents, assuring them that, if anything, his blindness would protect him from being harassed by the police. “They had courageously silenced their fears. They had given me their full support, but we were agreed that from now on I should not tell them anything. What good would it do to multiply the risks? They were putting their apartment at our disposal, and that already was dangerous enough.”34 But when more sophisticated plans had to be made as the enterprise began to expand, gatherings in the Lusseyran family apartment on the Boulevard du Port-Royal had become frequent. Jacques decided to find another place to meet, interview recruits, and develop strategy.*
Lusseyran selected one of the group’s hideouts in the Marais, a primarily working-class—and Jewish—neighborhood on the Right Bank, across the Seine from where he lived and attended school. However, on July 20, 1942, before he could make that move permanent, there was a knock at his parents’ door at five o’clock in the morning, the Gestapo’s favorite time to surprise their suspects. He had been betrayed. His father’s nervousness at the presence of police in his home was so obvious to Jacques that it calmed his own nerves and reminded him that his first task was to protect his parents. There were six Germans in the room, four soldiers and two plainclothesmen. Jacques sensed that they were surprised to find that he was blind; when they searched his room, they found nothing but hundreds of sheets of Braille. Fortunately, he had given a packet of false IDs and a cache of tear gas devices (fountain pens that could shoot gas) to Jean Besnié the night before, so nothing immediately incriminated him or his parents or younger brother, who was not implicated in Jacques’s clandestine activities.
Who had betrayed him? We now know that his Judas was Émile Marongin, code-named Élio by the Germans. Jacques had interviewed him quickly, as the new alliance of the Volontaires de la Liberté and Défense de la France was revving up. He told his friends that he had not liked Élio’s handshake or the tone of his voice, but he did not say no, and this would be devastating, for Élio was working for one of the most notorious French black-market groups in Paris—the Bonny-Lafont gang—close associates with the Gestapo, so close they were referred to as the “Gestapo française.” Primarily hustlers and black-marketers, the gang had been given much leeway by the Gestapo to arrest, torture, and turn over suspected “terrorists.” For this duty, they were generally left alone by the Germans while they pursued their other nefarious activities. Jacques Lusseyran’s mission as a leader of hundreds of young résistants was over.*
* * *
For six months, from July 1942 to January 1943, Jacques Lusseyran was held in France’s largest prison, Fresnes, where he was interrogated almost daily, or else taken into Paris to the Gestapo headquarters on Rue des Saussaies, down the street from the Élysée Palace. He never revealed whether or how much he was tortured, but he does reveal that he struggled mightily to keep from thinking about what might happen to him. The Germans did not learn for a long time that he was fluent in their language, and they were chary of interrogating a blind boy who might or might not be important. The confidence that he had built up as a bulwark against the sighted was threatened by the uncertainty of what was intended for him. Jacques explains his rambling thoughts: “I had been betrayed so meticulously, and this was revealed to me so fast, detail after detail, that I didn’t even have time to get angry, nor time to understand or suffer. The only thing that counted was to fix in my memory all that they knew.”35 That extraordinary memory would allow him to recall what they had asked during each interrogation, what he had answered, and what he had inferred from their inquiries. He needed to know how much they knew, so he assumed the role of the cowardly prisoner, eager to tell all. It must have proved nearly impossible to trip him up. Thirty-eight times—and who could remember that number better than “the blind guy”?—he made the trip to Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Relentlessly questioned, he never revealed a real name. At one point, Jacques recounts, his interrogators decided to use physical methods to get his attention.* An officer threw him against a wall, then picked him up and threw him again. “I lost my temper and shouted, ‘You are a coward! Even if I wanted to I couldn’t defend myself.’ The brute laughed, but they didn’t touch me again.”36
During his six months of incarceration in France, both his friends and strangers assured him that he would be freed. Certainly, the authorities would not transport him hundreds of miles only to watch him die in the separated camp hut where they placed handicapped and feeble-minded prisoners. One of his fellow prisoners, a road worker, said, “What in the hell could they do with a blind man?”37 He was young, another reason that he might be spared. But, they added, should he be sent to a camp, knowing German would allow him to gather news and learn of their plans. In an emergency, this knowledge might even save lives. Jacques took hope from these assurances; still, as other prisoners disappeared into the Nazi gulag, he could only wait patiently, and often alone, for his eventual release.
Then, after six months, and without explanation, he was sent with others to a transit camp near Compiègne, outside of Paris, where he was loaded onto one of the infamous cattle cars that moved victims relentlessly eastward. At first, Lusseyran was unsettled, bewildered to be surrounded by all these men whom he did not know. But soon enough, a few of his former team members, who had been arrested while he was incarcerated, found him and began again to take care of him. “My friends made a chain, and never let me go for a minute. I seemed to be a lucky piece for them, a kind of fetish. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t possibly do anybody any harm.”38 Beyond this circle, as he always did when surrounded by the unknown, he sensed humanity and patiently found solidarity with new comrades. After all, they too had challenged the Germans and the Vichy government; they too had held secrets and had passed information; they too had been separated from their friends, their families, and their homes. Lusseyran found himself admitted to a brotherhood of the captured, a fraternity of the courageous, despite the anxiety that haunted all of them about their futures. “There were lawyers there, peasants, doctors, radio operators, people in trade, teachers, hawkers, former ministers, fishermen, railroad engineers, conspirators, [soccer] champions, professors at the Collège de France, newsboys. All of Resistance France, big and little, all mixed up together.”39 Their clandestine and subversive activities had both built muscle and created an affection, even love, among strangers. This phenomenon would be tested in a new environment: Buchenwald.