Lusseyran. Jacques

The luminous autobiography of Jacques Lus­seyran, a teenage leader in the French Resistance. In 1941, Lusseyran recruited dozens, and eventually hundreds, to the Resistance. His group provided false papers, helped repatriate downed British airmen, and published and distributed the underground newsletter Défense de la France. In 1943, Lusseyran was caught and sent to Buchenwald. There he led a different sort of resistance movement—one against despair. Attending carefully to the official German newscasts, he listened between the lines to deduce the Allies’ progress and then walked from block to block in the concentration camp, delivering his version of the news. “It was not facts, names, or figures that all these men wanted. It was certainties, the kind of realities that went straight to the heart. Only a man standing before them could give them that. They needed his calm and his voice, and it was I who had become the voice.” What is most astonishing about his story is that, since the age of seven, Lusseyran had been completely blind.