I’ve had the privilege of meeting a number of people in the past several years who taught me something profound about the nature of forgiveness, people who have given me reason for pause and careful self-reflection. People who have experienced incredible suffering yet choose to look the perpetrator in the eye and offer their forgiveness have a way of making those of us who have not had to suffer that way feel petty and small when we consider how many grievances and grudges we have permitted ourselves to carry over things that, in comparison, seem trivial, if not nonsensical. “To err,” Alexander Pope famously wrote, “is human; to forgive, divine.”
The genocide in Rwanda, however, was not simply human error. It was a genocide carried out by sheer butchery—chopping and slicing and hacking machetes, reducing hundreds of thousands of humans to bloody shreds. The stories of the survivors are chilling. Immaculee Illibagiza’s story is both viscerally moving and profoundly inspiring. I reached her by phone at her home in New York City.
JVM: Immaculée, can you tell our listeners a bit about the story you tell in your book Left to Tell?
II: In 1994 I was a student in college, and I was supposed to go home for Easter holidays. So, I went home for Easter holiday because I was in a boarding school. During the week, three days before I went back to school, the president of our country died, and from that minute on the government had planned to kill people of my tribe.
In the country we had two main tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, and I belong to the tribe of Tutsi, that was the tribe that was not in power. The other tribe, they want[ed] to terminate ours, so that we [couldn’t] challenge them for the power. … So this one time they just decided to kill everybody. I remember in my family, there were one girl and three boys. I had my mom and dad, who were both teachers, and on the second day of the whole thing that started they sent me to hide to [our] neighbor from the Hutu tribe who was not a target.
There were really many great people. Not even half of the Hutu tribe was killing, not even a quarter. I firmly believe so. It was the government that was killing in the name of the Hutu tribe. So my parents in [my hometown] where the neighbor was good, they sent me there, and my dad, he came to me one time, you know I come from a Catholic family, and he handed me the Rosary beads and he said “go.” I wanted to go back home and pick up my purse and look for a book I could take with me, and he was like “No, don’t look back. Go now.” I went with the covered hat on, the beads of the Rosary in my hand, and I looked at my parents and something was telling me, “Look well, you will never see them,” and I’m fighting inside: “Why should I not see them, oh this is just my mind.” Something again: “Look well, this is the last time.” That day I left, went to the neighbor. That was the last time I ever saw them.
JVM: The neighbor, as I understand it, was a pastor who hid you and a number of other women in a bathroom?
II: Yeah, he was of the Hutu tribe, a good person. He was a Protestant pastor, was a friend of my family. He put me to sit in a bathroom, three by four feet, with another seven women, and he told us not to talk, not to make any noise, not even to flush the water of the bathroom, unless somebody else is flushing the water in the big bathroom. He told his children that he lost the key of the bathroom. So that’s how we stayed and hid there, and we didn’t know each other, we didn’t need to know each other. You know what you go though at that time, all you really need to know is these are human beings who are facing the same challenge. Names and where you come from become so much less.
So we sat there, and we must say it will last two days, three days, it is just a time of trouble come our way. It lasted three months. Three months, and I wish I knew it would be for three months, you know, because you could say, “Oh, time is coming,” but every single day we were expecting to be killed, and every single day we thought, “Maybe it’s going to be the end of our lives, maybe it’s going to be a year, maybe it’s going to be ten years.” Our fear after not much long was that we didn’t figure the man was going to keep us that long, so it was three months of silence, three months of deep prayer, three months of growing. I feel like I grew up a hundred years.
JVM: Did you know what was going on outside?
II: Well I knew what was going on outside. One way, the people in the house were talking to each other, and they didn’t know we were there, and this man had a big family. He had ten children and grandchildren, and everybody came back home at the end of the day. They were sleeping outside in the courtyard, it was very good weather–it is throughout the year. Another way we knew what was going on was the radio. The one time I remember the man who was hiding us, he said to us, “I’ll ask my grandson if he can put a radio outside so we’ll know what’s going on.” He put three radios, different channels. I couldn’t believe what was going on. The leaders of the country were giving orders to go out, not on private radio, on a national radio, not hiding their names, saying who they were, smart people. They were calling everybody to kill anyone who looked like us, anybody, and one time a man he said, “Don’t forget the children, the child of a snake is a snake, so we must eliminate everybody.” So we knew what was going on because talking about it. I remember one time somebody actually described how they killed a boy, the age of my brother who had just finished his Master’s, and I was thinking it cannot be. It cannot be. You can’t know I knew, but then on the other side I had the strength to stop myself from crying because if I cry people then would hear me. So I don’t know how the strength surrounds me, how that strength [came] I don’t know.
JVM: You write in your book Left To Tell about how eventually you actually tracked down the man responsible for killing members of your family. What was that experience like?
II: Well it certainly was huge, as you can imagine. During the time I was in the bathroom I experienced so many things of God in my heart, and one of them [was] being able to forgive, because I had so much anger. The woe of being searched [out] and being killed. They came to the door of the bathroom. It really was there a desperate heart, but three months later I came out. I found out everybody in my family was killed. My mom. My dad. My brothers. My grandparents.
A million people were killed in a period of three months. So now I have such a heart to live, which was completely like a miracle. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to anymore. But someone came, for me my new mom, took me into a home. Soon after I found a job with the United Nations. And so from there I went back to my village to see if anyone even knew what was going on. Who took what from my home because they destroyed the house, and they told me the one who killed my family was actually in prison. I went to the prison. The head of the jail was a friend of my father, and I remember meeting the man who killed. I was sitting there. The head of the prison, he told me “When he comes you can do whatever you want with him. Kill him, kick him, do whatever.”
I had experienced such deep understanding about forgiveness and love, I felt like I don’t need to be like the world [that] was hurting me, I don’t need to compete with evil. I don’t need to be one who doesn’t love to be able to defend myself. So there was a really deep peace, but I wasn’t sure what was going to happen if I really see him with my face. So when I saw this man with my face–I remember, he used to be such a good guy, like I mean when I see him dressed nice, he had a great family, children my age. If he ever told me to do something I would do it out of respect, as a father. Now he was in prison. Coming from the corridor where he was sitting, his foot was swollen, he had lost weight, his hair was upside down, because they haven’t shaved in six months. It was just bad, and when he came I just started to cry. I couldn’t believe that this man could do this to himself, and that’s when I realized if he couldn’t love himself enough to protect him from that, how could he love me?
JVM: What was it like to forgive this man?
II: He was such a mess and right then, it’s about love. So when I saw him I cried and I touched him. I offered him forgiveness. It wasn’t like reconciliation; Let’s go out, because we didn’t talk. I didn’t know what was in his mind. Did he even change his mind after what he did? Can he still kill people? What was in my heart was, Just free him from you, from him thinking you are angry. Let him be. Think of him in the way of that more than thinking of “Oh my look at who I hurt. Who am I but a scared man?”
And when I told him I forgave him he blocked his face, he covered it, he couldn’t look at me anymore. Before when he came in the room he was like I don’t care, you know that kind of face. I went and I killed some here. I’m suffering, who cares. When I told him I forgave him he poured his heart in his face. I can see something came out of him, and the man, who was there, the head of the jail, was so angry. So I left quick. He was angry with me. He told me that “Do you remember what they did to us, do you even care?” I was like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” I just left. That’s all really I had to give him. So I left. A year later, a year, and meanwhile I wrote him. I shared this story with the world, because for me that was my weakness. I was so sure that it’s okay if I’m weak; at least I have peace with him. If I’m weak to forgive, that’s fine. A year later the man who was the head of the jail, he came to look for me. He starts telling me to thank me, because of that day that I forgave the man. I’m like “You thank me? I thought you were mad at me?” He’s like “No, I was confused, but everything changed my heart then. In five months this man, he’s a friend.”
Listen to the whole interview here.