Life Laid Bare (The Survivors in Rwanda Speak)
Hatzfeld, Jean
Book of the month – September
In Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (2005), French journalist Hatzfeld interviewed the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide that killed several hundred thousand Tutsis. Now he returns to speak to 14 survivors, who remember the horrifying atrocity they witnessed, from a 12-year-old schoolboy (who hid in a mound of corpses) to a 60-year-old teacher (who remembers his well-educated neighbors with their machetes).
More than a random collection of oral histories, the focus is on one district, an area of 154 square miles, where in a period of six weeks, about 50,000 Tutsis—five out of six—were murdered by their Hutu neighbors. For each of the 14 interviewed today, Hatfeld fills in the background and provides a black-and-white photo. Those photos are accompanied by the clear personal voices. Booklist, Rochman Hazel.
