“Left To Tell”: Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Witness to God’s Redemption

“Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust” by Immaculée Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin (2007, Hay House) 215 pp., $14.95.

Though the word holocaust is usually associated with a different distant tragedy, Immaculée Ilibagiza’s account of surviving the 1994 Rwandan genocide in “Left to Tell” is all the more relevant as the widespread bloodshed and societal madness that overtook her country in the blink of an eye happened only one generation ago.

The genocide was then largely ignored by other nations and is sometimes dismissed as history now, but “Left to Tell” teaches eternal lessons, standing as a rare witness to the worst and best of mankind and a testament to what can only be achieved through God’s grace.

Raised by charitable Catholic parents of the Tutsi tribe, Ilibagiza survived the genocide concealed in a Hutu tribe pastor’s tiny bathroom with seven other women for 91 days. With her father’s rosary and the pastor’s Bible, her prayer and faith life burgeoned while the government-sanctioned gangs of killers — many her former neighbors — rampaged outside, repeatedly raiding the pastor’s home for any Tutsis to kill.

The spirituality Ilibagiza gained was a hard-fought battle. During the first house raid, as the petrified women listened to the killers tearing down furniture and stabbing any potential hiding places, Ilibagiza prayed for God’s protection. However, instead of finding comfort, she immediately encountered Satan’s taunting voice. Her prayer then became a back-and-forth battle: the harder she pleaded on behalf of God’s goodness, the more Satan mocked her of her own unworthiness.

“No! God is love, I told the voice,” she writes. “I begged God to fill me with His light and strength, to cast out the dark energy [the voice of Satan] from my heart: I’m holding on to Your legs, God, and I do not doubt that You can save me. I will not let go of You until You have sent the killers away,” she prayed that day (79).

As the days went on, Ilibagiza continued to cling to God as the horrors outside persisted, but she realized the key Satan needed to triumph was present in her heart: she hated the killers. “I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me,” she writes. “Everything strong and good in me — my faith, hope, and courage — was vulnerable to the dark energy. If I lost my faith, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to survive. I could rely only on God to help me fight” (80).

Ilibagiza’s fearlessness in the face of evil — both human and demonic — and confidence in God’s goodness created the path in her heart for God to help her conquer her hatred. Difficult as it was, Ilibagiza made her spiritual mission one of recognizing the humanity of the killers and their need to be forgiven. She persisted until it became a reality, shortly after the holocaust passed.

“Those who did horrible things are still Your children, so let me help them, and help me to forgive them,” she prayed the day she buried her family. “The people who’d hurt my family had hurt themselves even more, and they deserved my pity. ... I knew that my heart and mind would always be tempted to feel anger — to find blame and hate. But I resolved that when the negative feelings came upon me, I wouldn’t wait for them to grow or fester. ... I would turn to God and let His love and forgiveness protect and save me,” she writes (197).

At this moment, she found that “the anger that had gripped me like a returning malignancy was gone,” she writes, describing how she suddenly could breathe deeply after the long suffocation of hatred. “Yes, I was sad — deeply sad — but my sadness felt good. I let it embrace me and found that it was clean, with no tinge of bitterness and hatred” (197). Freed from her anger, she found herself receiving the gift of God’s lasting peace.

Later, Ilibagiza visited in prison the man responsible for her mother and older brother’s deaths and forgave him. A curious thing then happened: those who witnessed this moment and heard her story, though at first shocked, began desiring the same freedom and peace she had found. Thus, her new life — telling her story, bringing others to God’s forgiveness — began.

“Left to Tell” may detail a specific time and place in history, but Ilibagiza leads her readers on a journey everyone walks. She shows that forgiving even the worst of atrocities is not only possible with God, but she lives to tell the world that in participating in God’s forgiveness, we receive the most rewarding gift possible: to participate in the same forgiveness Christ offers all of us.