Left to Tell - A Rwandan Woman's Story, and the film: Hotel Rwanda

If you have seen the movie "Hotel Rwanda" you may have a good idea of what "Left to Tell", by Immaculée Ilibagiza, is about. If you have heard about the Rwandan massacre from news reports, you may be surprised, as I was, to find a personal account of a Tutsi woman who survived the massacre. This book tells the true story of Immaculée Ilibagiza. It is the story of her life in Rwanda beginning long before the conflict, a relatively comfortable life punctuated only occasionally by episodes of tension. She recounts incidents that point to the escalation of tensions, until finally she is forced to flee and finds shelter with seven other women in the bathroom of a Hutu pastor and family friend. At this point the incomprehensible inhuman slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus, many of whom were friends and neighbors, has become a reality.

For more than three months these eight women lived inside a single cramped bathroom. While they were hidden, they were not completely isolated - they heard the mobs outside calling out their names, and they heard much more that I will not relate.

Immaculée's story is a gripping personal account of her life in the midst of this impossible-to-imagine situation. It is also the story of her reliance on faith, on God, on prayer in the midst of terrifying circumstances, to sustain her. And this is the amazing thing about books, about being a reader - here, we find ourselves in the shoes of Immaculée - and seeing the scene as she sees it, we also walk through, with her, in faith and prayer.

In a similar way, one of the aspects of the movie, "Hotel Rwanda" that made it so powerful was its focus on the Paul, the hotel manager, who was able to save 1,200 lives by being, essentially, a very very good hotel manager. The film has been criticized for not depicting the genocide more completely, but (quoting from Roger Ebert's excellent review) "director Terry George and writer Keir Pearson have made exactly the correct decision. A film cannot be about a million murders, but it can be about how a few people respond."

And this is also what makes "Left to Tell" so interesting and so moving. The individuals in these two accounts of the Rwandan massacre do not feel courageous in the face of their terrible circumstances, but they make choices that require courage - and faith - and they defy the odds, each in their own way, by the way they respond.

Postscript: Convinced that she was spared for a reason ("Left to Tell"), Imaculee has written two additional books and has also established a charitable fund to help orphaned children in Rwanda and elsewhere on the African continent.