You Alone May Live [Hardcover]

Mary Blewitt is one of the heroes of our time. For years she has worked, too often without help, with the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. She has listened to their stories, brought them practical assistance, and help them rebuild their shattered lives. That takes courage of the highest order. Too often, after humanly inflicted tragedies, we hear the words Never again. They were said after the Holocaust, yet the Rwandan massacre 800,000 people brutally murdered in a mere hundred days happened despite the warnings given before the event. Too often, we ve had reason to recall the words of Martin Luther King, In the end we will remember, not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. It is all too easy, after events such as these, to think of the victims. It is much harder to think of the survivors and what they need in order to survive. They have lost their families. Their world has been destroyed. In the case of Rwanda, the crisis goes even deeper because so many of those who were not killed were deliberately infected with AIDS. They need our help and help begins with the act of listening to, and empowering them to tell, their stories. This too is deeply difficult. It took fifty years for many of the Holocaust survivors to be able to speak of what had happened, so painful was the memory of trauma and the trauma of memory. Yet the telling is essential, both for the survivors and for us. We need to be reminded of what happened. And they need to speak as part of the healing of memory and mind. This is a book of tears, tragedies and wounds, of lives lost, injuries sustained, and of much work still to be done. I hope it speaks to you, for we are all bound by a covenant of global solidarity, and though we cannot change the past, only by remembering it do we have a chance of changing the future. --Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Mary Blewitt is quite a remarkable human being, one of the most remarkable I have ever met. Her work has involved extraordinary personal sacrifice. Those of us who witnessed genocide in Rwanda know that Mary Blewitt stands among the bravest of the brave, the kindest of the kind. --Fergal Keane, BBC Special Correspondent, author and columnist for the Independent

Mary Blewitt is quite a remarkable human being, one of the most remarkable I have ever met. Her work has involved extraordinary personal sacrifice. Those of us who witnessed genocide in Rwanda know that Mary Blewitt stands among the bravest of the brave, the kindest of the kind. --Fergal Keane, BBC Special Correspondent, author and columnist for the Independent

Up to a million Rwandan Tutsi were murdered by Hutu militias during the Rwandan genocide on 1994, fifty members of Mary Kayitesi Blewitt s family among them. Seeking sanctuary in her grandfather s village, they were herded by Hutu neighbours into a school classroom to await the Interahamwe militia, who later arrived in trucks, armed with machetes. Mary managed to locate the bodies of her loved ones and lay them to rest. After the killing ended she travelled around the capital, Kigali, witnessed the exhumation of mass graves and struggled to understand the scale of the killings. She recounts standing shoulder to shoulder with the Hutu neighbours who had done nothing to help when the killings began but later helped her bury her family. To try to make sense of what had happened, Mary undertook voluntary work, believing that she had been allowed to survive in order to help others like her. She became a figure of trust with survivors seeking her out to tell their own stories of atrocity and survival. One woman told how she was raped in front of members of her own family who were then murdered. She was allowed to live and told, You alone may live, so that you will die of sadness. This was a common experience for women survivors. You Alone May Live is an important book about grief and survival in the face of unimaginable trauma. It traces the arc of Mary s own extraordinary journey from a childhood in exile in Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda, to trying to come to terms with the loss of her family in the Rwandan genocide, to setting up the Survivors Fund (SURF), a charity providing aid to Rwandan survivors. Poignant, sad and sometimes overwhelming, this book records Mary s story but also encompasses the painful testimonies of those who survived and shared their memories with her.

Mary K. Blewitt OBE is the founder and former director of the Survivors Fund (SURF). She received a Woman of the Year award in 2004 and received the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her work for charity.