A RWANDAN SURVIVOR'S TALE OF FORGIVENESS

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It is not a beach book. It is not funny like "Marley & Me" or intriguing like "Beach Road" or trendy like all the Whitey Bulger books now suddenly in print. It is, no doubt about it, totally incompatible with summer and sand and sea air laced with Coppertone and flimsy bathing suits and cups full of lemonade.

"Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" is exactly what you don't want to read on a summer day. Which is why it's not on any summer reading list that I've come across.

But here is why it should be.

Immaculee Ilibagiza, the author of "Left to Tell," had a good life growing up in western Rwanda. "I was born in Paradise," she begins her book. The third of four children, she was the only daughter of parents who were both teachers, devout Roman Catholics, and active in their community. She lived in a big house overlooking a lake. She was a good student, a good friend, and a good daughter.

In the spring of 1994, when she was 22 and home from college to spend Easter with her family, long-simmering prejudice that she and millions of others had long witnessed but ignored erupted suddenly into boiling rage.

Rwanda's Hutu president was killed, and the Hutus blamed the Tutsis for his death. Whipped into a frenzy by hate-filled radio, neighbor turned against neighbor and friend turned against friend.

In the next three months, 800,000 Tutsis would be killed by Hutus. Hutus were marching and stalking their friends and neighbors, killing them with whatever weapons they had.

Think Sarajevo, Serbs and Croats living together and getting along. And then genocide. Think Arab and Jew. Gentile and Jew. Russian and Chechen. North and South. Ireland and England.

Think the jihad that is going on right now.

Hate isn't new. But this hate, this genocide, was fought not just on the streets, but in backyards, in living rooms, and in bedrooms, up close and personal. And no one in the free world save one Canadian general did much to stop it.

Immaculee Ilibagiza hid in a tiny bathroom with seven other Tutsi women while the slaughter went on around them. They were not allowed to talk. They took turns sitting and sleeping. Their savior was a Hutu pastor. He brought them food when he could. They hid for 91 days.

Sometimes they could hear their hunters. "Kill them, kill them, kill them all; kill them big and kill them small!" Ilibagiza heard her best friend renounce her. She heard about the murder of her favorite brother. But she refused to believe that he was dead.

She prayed away her fear. She prayed when she was awake. She prayed when she was asleep. She prayed herself into trances. She gave herself to God. Maybe that's why this book isn't on any bestseller list.

Ilibagiza weighed 115 pounds when she began hiding. She weighed 65 pounds the day she and the other women crawled out of the bathroom. Her parents, two of her brothers, and most of her extended family were dead. Her house was gone; it had been torched. And everywhere, decaying bodies littered hillsides, yards, and roads.

No, this is not a beach book.

And yet?

Immaculee Ilibagiza forgave the killers. She says she has no hate for the people who ravaged her country and murdered her family and took her way of life. She lives in the US now. She is married. She has two children.

How do you forgive something this big? How do you bury your family and your innocence and your dreamed-about future? But how do you not forgive, because if you don't, the hate goes on, hurt for hurt, ad infinitum.

A Canadian critic has called Ilibagiza's book "patently phony." "What about the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis who were slain and whose terrified entreaties to God fell on deaf ears?" Naomi Lakritz wrote in the Calgary Herald.

Ask and you shall receive. Ilibagiza asked and the door to her hiding place remained hidden. She believes this. She believes that God saved her for a reason: "He left me to tell my story to others and show as many people as possible the healing power of his love and forgiveness."

She says she learned about forgiveness when she was in hiding, that "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" means that she had to do as God does and forgive.

"The love of a single heart can make a world of difference," she writes. "I believe that we can heal Rwanda and our world by healing one heart at a time."