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The book that helped inspire Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See An updated edition of this classic World War II memoir, chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century, with a new photo insert and restored passages from the original French edition When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.… (more)
User reviews
Most of us spend our days whining, and during the pandemic, we have whined louder. Yet, there are incredible people who have walked the face of the earth. Jacques Lusseyran is one of them.
He became
In 1938, World War II broke out, and France capitulated. Jacques Lusseyran became the leader of one of the main wings of the Resistance, and he was a young teenager! Then, in 1943, when someone betrayed him, he was marched off to prison and then the concentration camps in Buchwald. There, he became an inspiration to many prisoners. Again, when he was not yet out of his teens.
He was one of the thirty who survived the concentration camps. When you read the book, you understand how he refused to let his spirit die. At one point he says, I didn't have physical strength, but I had my head and was determined to use it.
He recommends how we must approach life in prison, and in the camps. Apply this to your life, and it will transform into something magical.
This book is inspiring. Read it.