Immaculée Ilibagiza

It was April 1994, in Mataba, in the Kibuye region of western Rwanda.

Immaculée Ilibagiza had come home to her parents for the Easter holidays, at her father's request.

She was born around 1972, into a Tutsi Catholic family. Her parents were teachers. She was the only daughter among four children.

Thanks to a scholarship, she was studying engineering at the National University of Rwanda, in Butare.

On April 6, the Rwandan president's plane was shot down over Kigali. Across the country, the killings of Tutsi began.

Her father went to see a neighbor, a Hutu pastor, Simeon Nzabahimana. He asked him to hide his daughter.

The pastor hid Immaculée and seven other women in a small bathroom, behind a concealed door.

The room was about three feet by four. The women talked to each other in signs.

They stayed there for ninety-one days.

Immaculée had a rosary with her. Her father had given it to her. She prayed to push back her anger.

The pastor lent her an English-French dictionary. With it and a Bible, she taught herself English.

After ninety-one days, the women were able to reach a camp held by French soldiers.

Immaculée weighed only about sixty-five pounds.

Then came the truth. Her parents had been killed. Her brothers Damascene and Vianney too. Only Aimable had survived: he was studying in Senegal.

Nearly a million Rwandans had been killed.

Later, in a village jail, Immaculée found herself before the man responsible for the deaths of her mother and brothers. He could not look at her. He kept his eyes down, full of shame.

She said three words to him:

That forgiveness erased nothing. Not the truth. Not the memory. It was a personal path, her own.

The jailer later wrote to her. Her act, he said, had moved him to forgive in turn.

Immaculée worked for the United Nations. In 1998, she moved to the United States. There she was a program assistant with the United Nations Development Programme.

In 2006, Left to Tell was published. The book became a New York Times bestseller. It was translated into seventeen languages and sold more than two million copies.

It is used in dozens of school and university programs.

In 2007, she received the Mahatma Gandhi Reconciliation and Peace Award. In 2013, she became an American citizen.

Immaculée comes from the Catholic faith: in hiding, she prayed the rosary. Her forgiveness echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing: even after the worst, refusing to let hatred decide who we become.

What remains is the image of a hidden door, in a house in Mataba. And of a man who agreed to open it.