Case Study: Jacques Lusseyran

Jacques Lusseyran, a French student, lost his sight in an accident when he was eight. He learned to read Braille so that he could continue his school work. He wanted to go to university.

In 1940 Jacques was a teenager living in the Latin Quarter of Paris, this area was where writers and artists lived and worked and was usually noisy and full of life but it fell silent under Nazi occupation.

Jacques, who paid particular attention to sounds, noticed the changes as he continued with his studies. Visually impaired people had to take an extra exam to prove to others that they could cope with high level study. Jacques passed his exam and was accepted into a good French Lycee. He was a hardworking student and enjoyed taking classes in a variety of subjects. He also enjoyed being with his friends and listening to their news. One day a friend told Jacques that his biology tutor, Mr Weissberg, had been arrested and taken away by the Gestapo. Mr Weissberg was Jewish. Jacques heard that other Jewish friends and neighbours were being taken away and that some French police were acting like Nazis, burning books and committing acts of hatred.

The Lycee was closed for a month because these police did not approve of a student demonstration. Some students were shot.

Jacques did not like what he heard. He felt that students should Stand up to Hatred and become a voice of resistance. With two friends, he began to organise students from the Lycee and the University into a resistance group. They called themselves the Volunteers of Liberty. Students who wanted to join the group were told to “visit the blind man” but did not know his name. Jacques interviewed them in secret to decide whether they could be trusted. He was usually a good judge of character as he was aware of changes in vocal tone he could often tell whether someone was telling lies.

The group wrote a paper called “Le Tigres” and delivered it secretly to houses all over Paris. The Nazis and the French Government declared that the “Volunteers of Liberty” were terrorists and offered money to people prepared to betray them. The students had to be very careful, fellow students and even teachers could be Nazi collaborators ready to inform on them.

The Nazis believed that Disabled people should take no active part in society and they were barred from many activities. They murdered Disabled people under the T4 Euthanasia Programme. Jacques gained good grades at school but was not allowed to go to University because of his blindness. He was angry but did not want to draw attention to the Volunteers, so refused to appeal. Instead he put all his energy into resistance.

In 1943 an official French resistance leader contacted the Volunteers of Liberty. “Le Tigres” had been so successful that the student writers were invited to merge with the official resistance and help produce the resistance paper “Defense de la France”. They printed the truth about arrests, torture, disappearances and the slaughter of Jews in death camps and asked the French people to stand up to Nazi hatred. In his autobiography “And There Was Light” Jacques writes about the day a student volunteered to help the resistance. Jacques interviewed him but thought, from his tone of voice, that he was not telling a true story. However he was persuaded by other members of the group that the new student was loyal.

In July 1943 armed soldiers broke into the room where Jacques read and wrote Braille and arrested him. Whilst in custody he discovered the Nazis had notes on everything he had done from the day the new student joined the group.

Jacques refused to talk to the Nazis and was sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where he remained until liberation. After the war “Defense de la France” became “France Soir”, one of today’s leading French newspapers. Jacques could have worked on the new paper but instead, once Nazi discrimination laws were repealed, he went to university, studied hard and became a teacher.

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