March 2006

I’m eating a hamburger and chips as I write this, as if it will stop the aching feeling that rests in my stomach and chest and deep behind my eyes. I just watched an hour’s worth of footage of bodies being carried and dumped into mass graves by SS soldiers recorded by British troops three days after Allied forces arrived in Germany. With no hint of compassion on their faces the men with their death badges roughly carry and drag lifeless bodies thin as skeletons from where they died of starvation to mass graves. This footage is so vivid and graphic that the British government would not allow it to be shown until 1986. I guess that reconstruction was more important than showing an “atrocity film.” Today I sat and watched the documentary at the Kigali Memorial Centre with a group of Rwandan survivors. As the bodies were dropped into the mass graves, falling like puppets without strings onto other bodies below, there were gasps and mutterings from some of the Rwandans who lord knows have seen or experienced scenes just as horrifying.
In Rwandan culture, the way that the dead are treated is a very sensitive issue. In a ceremony known as Ikiriyo, the relatives of a recently deceased person travel to that person’s house and spend the night mourning their loss. The deceased’s body is meticulously prepared for burial and buried as soon as possible to allow the spirit to reach heaven. During my research in Rwanda the need for giving genocide victims a dignified burial has arisen again and again. At one memorial in Nyamata authorities are in the process of removing the remains of two thousand victims from a mausoleum where they had been piled messily on shelves and were decomposing. The bodies had been removed from the Nyamata church where Tutsis had sought shelter during the genocide and were slaughtered ruthlessly. The church has been made into a memorial. There are piles of victims’ clothing and holes in the ceiling from the shrapnel of grenades thrown into the church by Interahamwe forces. When I visited, a group of young men were in the process of bringing canvas tarps full of remains back into the church. They would emerge from the mausoleum with their bulging canvases struggling with the heavy load as they carried them from the back of the church to the doors at the front. A sickeningly sweet smell followed them as they passed by. It was hard to imagine what it would be like to have lived through a genocide and to then have to transport the bodies of those who did not. The bones of victims will be returned to the mausoleum after it is finished while what remains of flesh and the dirt that was once flesh will be buried nearby.
At another church where Tutsis were killed about 5km from Nyamata the remains have been left on the floor of the church along with other items such as combs, books, and purses. I was allowed to step carefully from one wobbly pew to the next over these remains. Against one wall were several bags full of bones and skulls that I was informed had been placed their by survivors who were “trying to tidy up.” Once again the image of survivors sifting through the bones of their lost relatives and neighbors effected me strongly. At another memorial in Murambi the remains of victims have been preserved by survivors using lime salt. Here the bodies are laid out across wooden platforms in what were to become classrooms of a technical school before the genocide. The bodies are bleached white by the lime and sunken and flattened by years of laying there frozen in the position in which they died. A child holds his mother’s finger. A woman clutches her rosary to her lips. A man covers his head. There are machete cuts across skulls where bits of hair still cling. But the most disturbing thing is the smell. Upon entering a room and before your brain can register what you’re seeing the smell hits you, staggeringly putrid. It has stayed with me since I visited nearly three weeks ago. Every once in a while I will get a hint of the smell from my own body and become nauseas and light headed. The bodies in the video today, starved as they were and pale from the cold of winter reminded me of the preserved bodies at Murambi.
I’ve lost my ability to not cry. All through my research in Cambodia I was able to keep an appropriate emotional distance. Somehow in the last month and a half I have lost that separation. I am destroyed after every visit to a memorial. I cry a lot, even on days when I am only doing interviews or background research. I just don’t know what to do with the images I’ve seen, except I suppose to share them with others and hope that I will be able to help in some way to keep such things on the consciousness of people who might not think of them otherwise. I do still believe that memorials are a positive thing and contribute to important discussions about genocide that might not exist otherwise. I met with a man named Andrews, the district director of Gacaca courts (a local justice system specifically created for perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, meaning literally “justice on the grass) in Nyamata whose wife is a guide at the memorial there. He was living in exile in Kenya during the genocide and returned to Rwanda in late 1994, but his now wife was in Nyamata and watched as her mother and sister were raped and murdered. Andrews told me that they have been trying to “forget what happened.” How difficult it must be for them to forget the genocide if one of them is in charge of justice for perpetrators and the other keeps watch over the remains of victims. I think that what he was trying to say is that they are working to move on from what happened and to not let it control their lives now. Maybe for some that is only possible with a close look at and acknowledgement of the horrible things that happened.