Discovering God Amidst the Rwanda Holocaust

Rev. Robert E. Lauder, writing in The Long Island Catholic, tells us of Immaculee Ilibagiza, author of “Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwanda Holocaust.” Immaculee’s family — father, mother, and brother — were murdered. While the Hutus were trying to kill all the Tutsis, Immaculee, along with six other Tutsi women, hid in a bathroom that was in the house of a local pastor. Immaculee writes:

I couldn’t have made it without the rosary and knowing that the Blessed Mother was there to console me. The rosary was my food. There was a time when I felt that I couldn’t go on without doing something. And doing something was to pray. And praying with so much fear in the heart was impossible. My words at first were not words of prayer; they were more like, ‘send them to hell; do something to those animals’; but those are not prayers. And since I couldn’t say those words, I began to say the rosary. The good thing about the rosary is the words are made up already, so you say them and meditate after the words you are saying. So I said this from morning until night. I said 27 rosaries a day. I would say also 40 chaplets of Divine Mercy. So that was my food for the day, really. That’s something I did for two months and a half out of the three months I stayed in that bathroom.

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