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Interview With a Rwandan Genocide Survivor Jacqueline Murekatete was 9 years old in April 1994, when the Rwandan genocide began. A Tutsi, she was the sole survivor in her immediate family. Jacqueline now lives in New York City, where she works tirelessly to raise awareness of genocide and to encourage young people to fight hate and racism. She shared her story with Upfront. Murekatete speaks at the U.N. on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide The Genocide Begins hundreds of Tutsi—men, women, and children—had found Jacqueline went to school in her maternal grandmother’s refuge there. Within a few days our Hutu neighbors started village, a few hours away from her parents’ village. When coming in mobs with machetes, singing, “All Tutsis deserve the genocide began on April 6, 1994, she had just returned to die! All Tutsis are cockroaches!” there after spring break. This is the kind of hate speech and dehumanization that was going on every day on the national radio. Every day, When the killings began in my grandmother’s village, my the Hutu-led government officials would come on the radio grandmother and I and some of my other relatives decided and they would say, “Tutsis are cockroaches!” and, “All to run away to a county office. We thought maybe we’d Hutus everywhere, you have to do your duty, and you have find protection there, or people thought at least they could to kill your Tutsi neighbors.” defend themselves there. When we got to the county office, U p f r o nt • w w w. u p f r o ntma g a z i n e . c o m [So the mobs] would come, they would kill indiscriminately a p r i l 2 0 , 2 0 1 5 • pa g e 1 o f 3 Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo Uses: copy machine, opaque projector, or transparency master for overhead projector. Scholastic Inc. grants teacher-subscribers to The New York Times Upfront permission to reproduce this Skills Sheet for use in their classrooms. ©2015 by Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved. For use with “From Rwanda to Harvard” on p. 14 of the magazine Interview With a Rwandan Genocide Survivor (continued) Uses: copy machine, opaque projector, or transparency master for overhead projector. Scholastic Inc. grants teacher-subscribers to The New York Times Upfront permission to reproduce this Skills Sheet for use in their classrooms. ©2015 by Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved. men, women, and children, and then the [Tutsi] men would do And initially, the orphanage was a haven for us from their best to protect us. It became clear that we were not going the killers. But as the genocide continued, the priests to be protected there. We were going to die. So some people began to be threatened. Hutu mobs would come inside the started leaving the county office to find other places to hide. orphanage, and they would tell them that they were going to kill every Tutsi child. The priests would beg, they would Hidden by a Hutu bribe them. Initially, they would give money, and then later One of Jacqueline’s uncles paid a Hutu man to hide her, her on, once the money ran out, they started giving the killers grandmother, and her cousin. food—the food that they had originally used to feed us. They started giving it to these people who were coming The Hutu man hid us for about a week. One morning, to take our lives, in order to hopefully save us for another we heard loud banging on the door and Hutu screaming, day, for another night. “You have cockroaches inside your house! We’re gonna find them, and we’re gonna kill them.” And within a So it is in those circumstances that I and a number of other children survived the genocide. few minutes, we heard this group of men, armed with machetes. And at that point, we thought, this is it, we’re The Fate of Jacqueline’s Family going to die. And whenever I speak about my experience, The genocide lasted more than three months. During this I always say I have no logical explanation as to how we time, Jacqueline had no news of her family, but she prayed survived that particular attack on our lives. constantly that they were safe in hiding. When the But for one reason or another, after a lot of begging and pleading by the man who was hiding us, the Hutus decided to leave. But they told him, “You have to kick these cockroaches out of your house. Otherwise we’re going to come back, and next time we won’t spare them.” genocide ended, she was reunited with the ‘At that point, we thought, this is it, we’re going to die.’ uncle who had saved her. He told her that her parents, six brothers and sisters, both grandmothers, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins had been murdered. The first time I learned about this, I refused to believe it. For a long time, I used to say Survival in an Orphanage that it was a cruel joke. I used to go to bed praying that Afraid for his life, the Hutu man told Jacqueline’s the next morning when I woke up, somebody would tell grandmother about an orphanage run by Italian priests me the whole entire period had been a nightmare. But at that was taking in Tutsi children. But Tutsi adults, whose some point, we who had survived had to acknowledge that presence increased the risk of attack by Hutus, could not this was not a nightmare that we were ever going to wake stay there. Jacqueline’s grandmother accepted the Hutu up from. This was a reality that this government and our man’s offer to take the children there. She promised she own neighbors had taken part in—murdering [about] a would come for them in a few days—but that was the last million people. And not because of anything they had done, time Jacqueline saw her grandmother. but simply because of who they were, because of their ethnicity, something that we did not have a choice in being. At the orphanage, there were children whose arms had been cut off, who were coming in bleeding from their From Silence to Activism legs and heads because they had been macheted. And In 1995, at the age of 10, Jacqueline moved to the U.S. to there were children who came in very much traumatized live with an uncle who had settled there before the genocide. because they had witnessed their parents being killed in Traumatized, she did not speak about her experiences front of them. for years. When she was a sophomore in high school, U p f r o nt • w w w. u p f r o ntma g a z i n e . c o m a p r i l 2 0 , 2 0 1 5 • pa g e 2 o f 3 Uses: copy machine, opaque projector, or transparency master for overhead projector. Scholastic Inc. grants teacher-subscribers to The New York Times Upfront permission to reproduce this Skills Sheet for use in their classrooms. ©2015 by Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved. Interview With a Rwandan Genocide Survivor (continued) her teacher invited a Holocaust survivor named David Our goal was always the same. And that was to raise Gewirtzman to speak to the class. This marked a turning awareness, not only about what happened to us— point in Jacqueline’s life. myself in 1994 and him during the Holocaust—but to talk about hate, to talk about racism, to talk about I remember that David talked about one day being a happy discrimination, to talk about anti-Semitism, things that child going to school, collecting stamps. And he talked about how all his rights and the rights of other Jewish people in Poland were taken away slowly. And about being sent to a [Nazi] concentration camp and all the persecution and the loss that he had suffered. In addition to being one of the students who was obviously very saddened ultimately reaped genocide or enabled ‘This is not history— genocide is not history, the Holocaust is not history.’ and who cried as David was telling his story, genocide to happen. And these are things that are happening even now, as we speak. And we were helping young people, in particular, realize that this is not history—genocide is not history, the Holocaust is not history. This is something that is a major threat in this day and age. And unless we do something about it, and we are educated about it and I also began to see some similarities between what had we understand it and we participate in its prevention, it’s happened to him and what happened to me. Although going to continue to happen. he was many, many years older than me and had lived in Poland, on a different continent, we had something in Today, Jacqueline carries on the work that she and David common. And that was that both of us were children one began together. In 2014, she founded the Genocide Survivors day and our lives were dramatically changed, not because Foundation, a nonprofit committed to preventing genocide of anything that we had done, but simply because of who and helping survivors of mass atrocities. we were. David and Jacqueline connected through a thank-you note Interview conducted by Veronica Majerol and edited and that Jacqueline wrote. David drew Jacqueline into his work condensed by Kaaren Sorensen. To read the full interview, raising awareness about the Holocaust and the present-day go to scholastic.com/holocaustteacher threat of genocide. Until David’s death in 2012, they spoke together in schools, churches, and synagogues all over the U.S. and in Europe. Questions 1.How was Jacqueline able to survive the Rwandan genocide? 4.What does Jacqueline mean when she says that “genocide is not history”? 2.Why do you think she didn’t speak about her experience for years? 5.What does this interview with Jacqueline add to Justus Uwayesu’s story in the Upfront article? 3.How did meeting a Holocaust survivor help Jacqueline cope with her own past? U p f r o nt • w w w. u p f r o ntma g a z i n e . c o m a p r i l 2 0 , 2 0 1 5 • pa g e 3 o f 3