Why did I survive? Immaculee Ilibagiza's soul-wrenching work about the 1992 Rwandan genocide is the author's answer to the question she asks herself and us throughout ... she was left to tell. And tell she does - in this heart-breaking, honest, naked, and portrait of a nightmare. Immaculee was one of seven Tutsis women hidden during the genocide in a small bathroom of a pastor's home. Time and again we come to realize that survival for these women was nothing short of a miracle. For Immaculee, her imprisonment within the bathroom cell only serves to empower her belief in God and the ultimate goodness and redemption of man. Her act of forgiveness when meeting face to face with the man who ordered her family to be butchered in the streets, is beyond words. Immaculee's closing words are haunting in their overpowering truth that the genocide which inflicted so much pain and suffering in Rwanda, was really a crime which inflicted suffering on us all. To read this book brings us much much closer to this truth and how we act against such crimes of humanity in the future.
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