A stage production depicting the life story of Jacques Lusseyran, a blind survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, featuring eurythmy, theater, and music
Jacques Lusseyran’s autobiography, *The Light Rediscovered*, recounts his life story up to his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Lumina Ensemble’s play of the same name explores this autobiography in a condensed form. Three stages of his life—childhood, his time in the Resistance, and his time in captivity—are brought to life through eurythmy, drama, and music.
Jacques Lusseyran was born in Paris in 1924. At the age of eight, he lost his sight in a sudden accident. And yet he feels surrounded by light and begins to discover an inner world that remains hidden from the external senses. This discovery brings him deep joy and confidence in life. Toward the end of his school years, World War II breaks out and France is largely occupied by the Nazis.
Deeply moved by these events, the seventeen-year-old Lusseyran organized a student resistance movement. For two years, he was able to lead a double life undetected with the “Volontaires de la Liberté,” until they were betrayed and arrested. Surrounded by murder, hatred, and fear, Lusseyran finds a source of strength in prison as soon as he turns inward. He and his friends are eventually deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Suffering and death become part of everyday life in the camp. Overcoming an illness that brought Lusseyran to the brink of death filled him with a new vitality. Until the camp’s liberation in the spring of 1945, Jacques Lusseyran’s unshakable faith in life enabled him and many of his fellow prisoners to survive the camp.
