We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

by Philip Gourevitch

The dead were rolled up in straw mats and deposited along the roadside for collection: mile after mile of neatly bundled bodies. Bulldozers had to be brought in to dig mass graves and plow the bodies under. Picture it: a million people, shifting through the smoke of cooking fires on a vast black field, and behind them—it so happened—the huge dark cone of the Nyaragongo volcano had come to life, burbling with flame that made the night sky red and smoke that further clouded the day. This scene was broadcast to the world around the clock, and it came across in one of two ways. In the sloppy version, you heard, or read, that there had been a genocide, and then you heard and saw, or read, that a million refugees had wound up in this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth, and you thought genocide plus refugees equals refugees from genocide, and your heart was wrenched. Or else you got the story straight—these were people who had killed or who had been terrified into following the killers into exile—and you heard, or read, or could not but infer, that this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth was some sort of divine retribution, that the cholera was like a biblical plague, that the horror had been equalized, and it was all much more than you could stomach, never mind comprehend, and your heart was wrenched.