Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“We had to pull the live ones out,” Annick said. She and Alexandre had collected hundreds of lost and orphaned children from the body piles, and from every crevice where a small person could hide: from the wheel wells of trucks, from under the hoods.

“I don’t know why but I didn’t care about the people killed by a bullet. I didn’t give a fuck about them,” Alexandre said. “They were dead, and the people wounded by bullets, they meant nothing to me. It was the people who were crushed.”

“Bullets and machetes are supposed to kill,” Annick said. “The people who got crushed were just killed by other people, like them, vulnerable, trying to live.”

“I got a doctor,” Alexandre went on, “I said, ‘They just look like they’re sleeping, I don’t know how to tell if they’re dead.’ He went through and checked twenty or thirty people, and he said, ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead.’ But when I had to walk on them, I felt I might wake them.”

“They were like all the luggage,” Annick said. I was able to picture that: Kibeho was a ghost town, piled deep with the abandoned belongings of displaced persons, smelling of death—and atop the hill, the charred cathedral that had become a crematorium during the genocide. “When we walked on the luggage,” Annick said, “there were probably people underneath. You can’t feel guilty, because it’s useless, and you walked on them to save lives.”

“Walking on them was about being alive,” Alexandre said. “After a while it was just about getting on with life. The dead are dead. There’s nothing you can do. Even with the living, what could we do? We gave them water. It was our only medicine. It was like a miracle. You’d see the face of a boy, fallen and death-like in the crowd, and you drop a few drops of water on him and he is like —aahhh!” Alexandre’s face expanded and he rose a bit in his seat, like a sped-up film of a flower blossoming. “Then you turn around,” he said. “And the next minute everyone we gave water to was dead.”

“Yah,” Annick said.

“Bodies,” Alexandre said.

“That guy with the spear in his throat,” Annick said. “I just left him. And at one time I was laughing and laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing. I was with the wounded, blood everywhere, and a shoulder hanging off from a grenade, or a mouth split open with a machete, and I was just laughing. Me!” she said. “I used to faint with injections, and here I was sewing machete wounds. All I could think was, Do I wrap the bandage this way?”—she whirled a hand in a horizontal orbit—“Or this way?”—vertically.

“Sunday when we drove away, there were people all over the road, bodies, and wounded,” Alexandre said. “In a normal time, for people in much less bad shape, you would stop and do anything. We didn’t stop. We just left them. I feel very bad about that. I don’t know if it’s guilt, but it’s a very bad feeling.”

“Yah,” Annick said. “That was bad, eh? We just drove. It was too many people.”

“Too many people,” Alexandre said. Tears had welled from his eyes, and his nose was running, streaking his lip. He said, “I don’t know how my mind works. I just don’t know. When people are dead, you expect to see more people dead. I remember in 1973 in Athens, we had cars making a blockade, and the tanks came and crushed the cars. I was eleven or twelve and I saw the people. They’re dead, and I expected more and more to see dead people. It becomes normal. We have so many films to see death with bullets, but this is real death, the crushing. At Kibeho, in the second attack, they were just shooting like hell. Shooting like you can’t imagine. The RPA was just shooting and shooting, they didn’t even look where. I was standing out there, it was raining, and all I could think was I want to get out of the rain. I didn’t even think of the shooting, and it was shooting like hell. To get out of the rain—that was all I wanted.”

“You shouldn’t feel badly,” Annick said. “We saved a lot of lives. Sometimes it was useless, there was nothing we could do.”

“You know,” Alexandre said, “the RPA—they were taking the wounded and throwing them in the pit latrines. They were alive. You know that?”

“Yah,” Annick said. “That was bad.”

“I don’t want to be judged,” Alexandre said. “I don’t want you to judge me.”

He got up to go to the toilet, and Annick said, “I’m worried about Alexandre.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“They tell me go to a psychiatrist,” she said. “The Human Rights mission. They say I have post-traumatic stress. What will they give me? Prozac? It’s stupid. I don’t want drugs. I’m not the one with the problem in Kibeho.”

LATER, WHEN I did visit Nyarubuye and found myself treading among and on the dead, I remembered my evening with Annick and Alexandre. “You don’t know how to think about it,” Alexandre had said, when he returned to the table, “who is right and who is wrong, who is good and bad, because the people in that camp were many of them guilty of genocide.”

But how do we think about genocide? “I’ll tell you how,” the American officer with his Jack Daniel’s and Coke at the Kigali bar told me. “It’s the passenger pigeon. Have you ever seen a passenger pigeon? No, and you never will. That’s it. Extinction. You will never see a passenger pigeon.” Sergeant Francis, the RPA officer who showed me around at Nyarubuye, understood. “The people who did this,” he said, “thought that whatever happened, nobody would know. It didn’t matter, because they would kill everybody, and there would be nothing to see.”

I kept looking, then, out of defiance. Ninety-five percent of the species of animals and plants that have graced the planet since life began are said to be extinct. So much for providence in the fall of a sparrow. Perhaps even extinction has lost its shock. I saw several hundred dead at Nyarubuye, and the world seemed full of dead. You couldn’t walk for all the dead in the grass. Then you hear the numbers—eight hundred thousand, one million. The mind balks.

For Alexandre, all of Kibeho had come down to one fat woman in a yellow blouse drowned by the thousands and thousands of others. “After the first death there is no other,” wrote Dylan Thomas, in his World War II poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Or, as Stalin, who presided over the murders of at least ten million people, calculated it: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The more the dead pile up, the more the killers become the focus, the dead only of interest as evidence. Yet turn the tables, and it’s clear that there is greater cause for celebration when two lives are saved instead of one. Both Annick and Alexandre said they had stopped counting the dead after a while, although counting was in their job description and tending to the wounded was not.

Still, we imagine it’s a greater crime to kill ten than one, or ten thousand than one thousand. Is it? Thou shalt not kill, says the commandment. No number is specified. The death toll may grow, and with it our horror, but the crime doesn’t grow proportionally. When a man kills four people, he isn’t charged with one count of killing four, but with four counts of killing one and one and one and one. He doesn’t get one bigger sentence, but four compounded sentences, and if there’s a death penalty, you can take his life just once.

Nobody knows how many people were killed at Nyarubuye. Some say a thousand, and some say many more: fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand. Big differences. But body counts aren’t the point in a genocide, a crime for which, at the time of my first visit to Rwanda, nobody on earth had ever been brought to trial, much less convicted. What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime. No wonder it’s so difficult to picture. To do so you must accept the principle of the exterminator, and see not people but a people.