Left To Tell is Anne Frank walking to freedom and Hotel Rwanda combined, a truly horrific and horrifically true story. Yet the book seems very unreal in a lot of ways because Immaculée lets us straight into her tormented soul, bright with devotion and torn apart by genocide. Will she survive? Will her faith?
Emphatically yes! Immaculée was among those left to tell the story of the Rwandan genocide, and she might tell you herself that she was left to tell for a reason, this reason. She was left to tell about the sickening period of hatred and death when Hutu neighbors turned on their Tutsi friends and slaughtered a million souls in cold blood. And she was especially left to tell us that not even these are good enough reasons to despair.
You or I might think that being forced to go into hiding for your life for 91 days in a tiny bathroom with first five and then seven other Tutsi women is reason enough to hate the killers and to blame God for sending them. But not Immaculée, not even when faced with situations like this on a daily basis:
“Hundreds of people surrounded the house … they whooped and hollered. They jumped about, waving spears, machetes, and knives in the air. They chanted a chilling song of genocide while doing a dance of death: ‘Kill them, kill them, kill them all; kill them big and kill them small! Kill the old and kill the young … a baby snake is still a snake, kill it, too, let none escape!’” (77)
Immaculée and her secret sisters had to be perfectly quiet at all times—not only were the killers in the street, but the brave Hutu pastor hadn’t even told his own family that he was hiding these most hated of humans. The women quickly developed their own sign language mostly dealing with rotating positions in the cramped bathroom. Bathing was unthinkable because it would be heard throughout the house, and even flushing was perilous unless exactly timed with another toilet.
The nation was gripped by a total failure of humanity—the corpses piled up and neighbors-turned-killers prowled the streets drunk with bloodlust and high on drugs. The viral hatred spread quickly, institutionalized via radio waves whipping the population into a killing frenzy:
“ … Pastor Murinzi turned on the radio in his bedroom [loudly so we could hear it in the bathroom]. The new president of Rwanda was speaking, and our ears perked up when we heard him say the name of our home province … ‘I want to personally congratulate the hardworking Hutus of Kibuye for their excellent work… More of our Tutsi enemies have been killed in Kibuye than in any other province…’ The president was so pleased with the ‘good work’… that he promised to send thousands of dollars to buy food and beer so that the killers could celebrate properly … ‘After … the enemies are dead, we will live in paradise. We will no longer have to compete for jobs with cockroaches.’” (98)
Violence had become a national pastime and Immaculée was bearing witness to a frightening new consciousness. “The world had seen the same thing happen many times before. After it happened in Nazi Germany, all the big, powerful countries swore, ‘Never again!’ But here we were, six harmless females huddled in darkness, marked for execution because we were born Tutsi. How had history managed to repeat itself?” (86)
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