(2/3) “It was too dangerous to hide the man in the house. So...

(2/3)  “It was too dangerous to hide the man in the house.  So I brought him to this small room in the back, which we sometimes rented to tenants.  I pushed him inside and locked the door.  When I was opening our shop the next morning, another man came running to me for help.  He was limping badly.  He was out of breath and drenched in sweat.  I recognized him as a prominent Tutsi businessman.  ‘Save my life!’ he screamed.  ‘They are chasing me!’  So I quickly pulled him to the back of the house and locked him in this same room.  A few minutes later the killers arrived.  They searched all over the main house, but never checked the back room.  Over the next few days, six more people came looking for help.  We hid them all.  But my neighbors had been spying on us.  They reported everything.  And one night the killers showed up with guns.  When they knocked on the door, my husband started shivering and couldn’t stand up.  I told him: ‘You’re the man of the house. You must stand firm and face them.’  But he couldn’t move.  So I went to the door myself.  The killers were standing there with a list of the people hiding in our house. ‘Where are these cockroaches?’ they said.  I tried to tell them that we had no cockroaches, but they pushed past me and started searching.  They beat my husband until he was unable to speak.  I offered them all the money we had, and only then did they stop.  But they told us that they’d be coming back during the daylight for a house-to-house search.”
(Kigali, Rwanda)