Restorative Reminders
And There Was Light
- Anugrah
On a calm morning in May, somewhere in France, in a classroom quarrel, Jacques Lusseyran accidentally hits a desk corner. The blow’s massive enough to make him entirely blind. He is seven years old.
………..
It is now 1941. Jacques is seventeen. Adolf Hitler is invincible!
Dismayed by what Germany is doing, he forms a resistance group called the Volunteers of Liberty against Nazi Germany and started publishing newspapers that soon become the voice of the French freedom fighters.
It is 1943. Jacques is now taken into a concentration camp with 2000 other French prisoners. Kept in “a space four feet long and three feet wide, with walls like a medieval fortress, door three fingers thick with a peephole through which the jailers watch day and night, and a sealed window” he saw his cramped concentration prison camp as “a church underground” and carry on to rouse people to resist the wrong.
Jacques eventually was released at the end of WWII. Only thirty of them survived.
For this blind boy, the world was dim and dark but he was sure of the light he carried within. Enough to survive the unsurvivable. Later he wrote his memoir And There Was Light. He wrote, “Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace.”
When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.
– Jacques Lusseyran in his book And There Be Light
Newsletter Updates
Sign up for Delights of the Ordinary. Weekly letters send to your inbox as reminder to slow down that intersects life, art, culture and our practical 9-5 job space.
