From the Publisher:
Originally published in 1953, Jaques Lusseyran's fascinating autobiography, translated from the French by Elizabeth Cameron, is now available again in this recent reissue. This is the story of a blind man who played an important role in one of the 20th century's great historical events, i.e., the French resistance against the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.
From the book jacket:
It is a rare man who can maintain a love of life through the infirmity of blindness, the terrors of war and the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. Such a man was Jacques Lusseyran, a French underground resistance leader during the Second World War. This book is his compelling and moving autobiography.
Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight in an accident when he was eight years old. At the age of sixteen, he formed a resistance group with his schoolfriends in Nazioccupied France. Gradually the small resistance circle of boys widened, cell by cell. In a fascinating scene, the author tells of interviewing prospective underground recruits, "seeing" them by means of their voices and in this way weeding out early the weak and the traitorous.
Eventually Jacques and his comrades were betrayed to the Germans and interrogated by the Gestapo. After a fifteenmonth incarceration in Buchenwald, the author was one of thirty to survive from an initial shipment of two thousand.
Jacques Lusseyran later became a university professor in the United States. He died in a car accident in 1971.
