February 2012: Book Review
Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
By Immaculee Ilibagiza
Book Review by Eileen Love
Imagine standing in a 3×4 bathroom for 90 days. Now imagine that in this tiny cramped space, there are five other women with you. The space, concealed behind a wardrobe, is the only sanctuary from the violence that threatens on the other side of the wall. Imagine holding your breath, nearly passing out from terror as only a few feet away, you hear the shouting of blood thirsty criminals wielding machetes, taunting that your parents have been slain and now it is your turn.
Welcome to Rwanda, 1994.
Left to Tell is the autobiographical account of a young Catholic woman, a 22 year old college student, who miraculously lived through the genocide that gripped Rwanda for four horrible months. Following the plane crash death in April of the country’s president, old tribal rivalries between the dominant Hutus and the minority Tutsis re-emerged. Hatreds burned hotter than the African sun and in the mind of the Hutus old scores begged to be settled. Where previously the tribal heritage of the townspeople seemed incidental, it now became the defining measure of who would live and who would die.
With the Hutu regime in power, Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered in the most brutal fashion imaginable. A kindly pastor from the Hutu side risked his life to offer Immaculee and five others a safe haven.
In desperate times, the faithful drop to their knees and that is what Immaculee did. The rosary was her saving grace: over and over during the tortuous months in hiding, Immaculee withdrew to a place in her heart and prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Exhausted, famished, and ridden with lice, the women endured daily horror. She speaks of holding the bible to her mouth as if she desired to literally consume the words.
She emerged from the ordeal with only the clothes on her back and her dead father’s rosary in her pocket. Her heart cried to God as she surveyed the carnage and with God’s help she found the strength to lay the dead to rest and move on to another life. Immaculee concluded that God spared her for a reason. Her job was to discover that and preach the gospel of love, peace, and forgiveness.
Eventually she took up residence in New York where she found a job at the United Nations. She fell in love with a man she calls her soul mate and they now have two children. Another prayer answered.
Her message today is one of forgiveness. For her, it did not come immediately and initially she prayed for God to do the forgiving that she felt incapable of. At one point after the genocide, Immaculee was given a chance to identify men she knew to be murderers, but she refused. She says in her book, “If Jesus was dying for everybody, he was dying even for the killers.” She held fast to the words of Christ on the Cross, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34). For any reader who struggles with forgiving a painful injustice, her words will hit the spot.
Because of the content, this is not the easiest read. But precisely because of the content, it is one you shouldn’t miss.