Immaculee Ilibagiza -- Light and Salt

Last Friday, we had the wonderful opportunity to listen to Immaculee Ilibagiza, author of LEFT TO TELL, a miraculous story of hope and forgiveness during the Rwandan holocaust of 1994. I'd read the book a few years ago when a good friend recommended it to me, and then Max read it in his Theology class. We both agreed that it's grace from God that allows a person to forgive such heinous crimes. Briefly, in 1994, when the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down, within the hour, Hutus began killing Tutsis. It had been well-orchestrated. The world did not intervene to stop this massacre--I remember hearing the news and could not understand why nobody would stop the killing--and by the time they did, three months later, 1 million people lay hacked, shot, or burned to death. It was neighbor against neighbor. People forgot their friendships. Immaculee says hatred masked any and all love and the truth. She prayed what Jesus prayed on the Cross, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."

This short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzuK_NXyE8U gives a good summary and this slightly longer one shows how and where Immaculee, along with other women, survived:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7Od6V6Z3ug  and this short article explains the conflicts between the two so-called tribes. And our local newspaper did a wonderful write-up of the event.

Briefly, Immaculee's parents were prominent teachers in their community, devout Catholics. People came to them for advice but they only had their faith. She said that her father told her to go to a Protestant preacher's house. He was Hutu and would keep her safe. He put her in a tiny bathroom (3 ft x 4 ft) off his bedroom. She said, "I can't stay here. It's too small." But no matter. Things can always get worse. He returned with five more women. And later still, with two more. They had to be absolutely quiet and they stayed like that, sitting, standing, sleeping on top of one another for 91 days! The preacher would bring a plate of food whenever he could and the eight women would share the meal.

After a week, she was fed up with the fear and anger and sorrow in her heart. The preacher kept a radio in the bedroom so that they could hear the news. Private radio stations were used to propagate hate. They were giving away prizes for the most number of Tutsis killed.

She had the presence of mind to ask for a Bible from her protector. He gave her one and she already had her father's rosary. Prayer brought peace. She prayed many rosaries each day. I loved how she explained it--the rosary is simply meditating upon the life of Jesus with His mother Mary in a very organized manner. And Mary really teaches her to pray--to pray with her heart. She'd being with "Our Father" and get stuck.  "Are we really all His children? No, no, no. Not the evil people who are trying to kill us. Alas, they too are God's children and He loves them." That simple "our" helped her to see her would-be killers as her brothers. In our Lord's Prayer, we ask to be forgiven as we have forgiven those who've trespassed against us. This is the verse that she could not pray. So she skipped it. However, Our Lord is very patient and eventually Immaculee was able to ask for the desire to forgive and later was able to forgive those who killed all her family (except for one brother who was out of the country at the time).

She told a very interesting story about Our Lady of Kibeho. It is the only Marian apparition that has been approved on the continent of Africa and the message from our Lady is not just for Rwanda or Africa but for the whole world. She appeared to three young girls and encouraged them to pray from the heart, take the faith seriously, and to love one another. She showed them visions of what would happen--the massacre--if the people did not turn to God. Immaculee remembers this from the time she was a child, how the girls shook from the terrible visions they had. This was twelve years before the massacre.

This is the same message of Fatima--return to God. But we don't listen. Immaculee is trying to change that. She is light and salt with her message of hope and forgiveness, without which there can be no peace. Parce, parce, Domine! 

A Fifty-Year Silence

A Fifty-Year Silence:Love, War, and a Ruined House in France by Miranda Richmond Mouillot was an unusual memoir. Slow-moving and rambling, it is not a book that you eat, but rather savor, like memory itself. The author’s beautiful voice carries the book even though the central mystery – why her grandparents separated after the war and didn’t speak to each other – isn’t even really a mystery. Miranda is the grand-daughter of Holocaust survivors and she recalls her childhood, how uncertain she was about her home, her family, as if they could be ripped from her any moment. She is close to her grandmother, Anna, who was my favorite person in this book. Her joy and optimism even in the bleakest of moments is something to behold. Miranda's grandfather, Armand, is someone she gets to know later, in her teens when at the encouragement of Anna, she spends a year with him in Geneva. He’s a cantankerous and fastidious old man, and one has to wonder how the two even fell in love given their different personalities.

I’ve always been interested in Jewish holocaust stories and this is the only the second book I’ve read about people who managed not to get deported to the death centers. Miranda has been taught to carry the weight of remembering, being the only grandchild. So I took the journey with her as she dove into archives and tried to tease out the stories from her grandparents. I especially enjoyed the series of miracles that saved both Anna and Armand from death. And one can see how these terrible circumstances bind people together, because to love one another is all one has sometimes. But after the war, they led very separate lives, a pregnant Anna, working as a physician, and Armand working as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Miranda concludes that what he learned at those trials couldn’t coincide with a world in which there was love. It was trauma he had no words for. There is no fairy-tale ending (oh, how I wanted one) but there was closure. The very house that Armand and Anna bought, brought Miranda’s husband into her life.

The writing is superb! I did find the self-absorption of the author a bit tedious, but she was trying to discover herself and she’s honest about it. I imagine this book will become a family treasure and I hope she has a big family so that the weight of stories isn’t so heavy.

Thanks to Blogging for Books for providing a review copy. I am also posting it on Amazon. 

The Safest Lie by Angela Cerrito

Ever since I was 10 years old and I read the Diary of Anne Frank, I’ve not been able to stay away from Holocaust stories. I always prefer a survival story but I also realize that for every one of these, countless others have died.

I learned about Angela’s book many years ago when she won an SCBWI grant to conduct research in Poland on Irena Sendler. Her story is woven into the fictional story of a young Jewish girl, Anna Bauman, who is smuggled out of the ghetto with a fake identity. She learns to behave like a good little Catholic girl, never forgetting that she is Jewish.

THE SAFEST LIE is a fast-paced book (just look at that suspenseful cover), covering four years of Anna’s life, from the time Jolanta (alias of Irena Sendler) meets with Anna’s parents to the various safe houses and convent that Anna goes to, until she settles with a foster family who love her unreservedly. But danger lurks everywhere and it is a miracle her true identity is not discovered. The ending is heart-rending. Once the war is over, the children are returned to their families. Most do not survive the ghetto because they've been taken to death camps. For the children who were babies when they were smuggled out, all they know is the Catholic faith, so it is a shock to learn they are Jewish. Angela Cerrito is a powerful writer who bears witness to the trials of these children and the many people who took great risks to save them. Thank you so much for writing this book, Angela.  

This is the second book I’ve read that addresses the retention of religious identity during an adoption (the first was Rory's Promise). In the case of these Jewish children, it was impossible to place the children with Jewish families since they were all in the ghetto. So they had to learn how to behave like Catholics. Anna, being older – she is nine in the beginning of the book – remembers her parents and particularly her grandmother’s Yiddish sayings. She embraces the Catholic faith and at the end, knows how easy it would be for her to forget the faith of her people, but she doesn’t. She hangs on.

We also wonder about the morality of lying and it is clear that lying to protect the innocent is perfectly permissible. The Vatican issued thousands of fake baptismal records to save as many children as they could.

I can’t help but think about the Planned Parenthood exposé, which was obtained because the folks conducting the interviews pretended to be from a research company. However, since many babies’ and mothers’ lives will be saved, this lying is for the greater good.

It should come as no surprise that the arguments for the Holocaust, slavery, systematic genocide and abortion have much in common. It's evil couched in terms that make it sound like progress. They don't call the devil the father of lies for nothing. Ye shall be like gods, he said. And we bought it.

"We all want progress," says C. S. Lewis. "But if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."

I'll stop rambling now. Read and share THE SAFEST LIE with your children. A mature 8-year-old can handle this but I would wait until the child is 10 if the child is sensitive. But know that this book focuses more on the goodness of people's hearts rather than the evil.

I will close with a quote from Anne Frank: It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Yes, Anne, I hope and pray too. Requiescat in pace.