Date: 16 August 2010
How do you carry on living when fifty members of your family have been murdered in a modern day genocide? This is the experience of the author, Mary K Blewitt, a Rwandan who escaped the genocide of 1994 because she was living in the UK at the time. Rwanda was cut off from the rest of the world for 100 days, while a million innocent men, women, children and babies were systematically hunted down and murdered. ‘You alone may live, so that you may die from sadness’ was a phrase many survivors of the Rwandan genocide were told by the killers after watching their entire families butchered in cold blood. Mary felt the need to go to her homeland when planes began returning, to talk with survivors and try to understand what had happened. She spent the next fifteen years raising funds and awareness to help survivors. They all wanted to talk to her, to tell their stories as witnesses to a modern tragedy that the rest of the world largely overlooked. She adopted an orphan in the process, located her brother’s body and buried him in one of the mass graves. She relates the cruel stories with an honesty and compassion that ensures they stay with you, along with a desire to do everything you can to make sure this ethnic hatred never happens again, anywhere. The charity she founded is still locating bodies and burying people. Survivors are left living next to the very neighbours who murdered their families, too traumatised and poor to leave and start again. Graphic descriptions of brutality do not make this light reading, but it offers an insight into the way human beings can react en masse. Mary is inspiring; so too are the survivors who are trying to live in Rwanda despite their experiences of the worst side of the human condition. A book not easily forgotten.
KB