From Kigali to Boston: Reflections on the Rwandan Genocide and the Holocaust
Co-authored by Godlive Mukankuranga & Jenna Zitaner
Recently, the world turned its attention towards tragedy. April 7th marks the official “start” of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide — each year, Rwanda and the international community reflect on this event. Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) follows not long after, when Jews around the world commemorate those who perished in the Holocaust. As part of that remembrance, Global Health Corps (GHC) fellows Godlive and Jenna sat down to share their stories with one another, discussing the role of memory and narrative in understanding one’s roots and how family identity has shaped their personal commitments and passions.
Godlive: My grandparents had lived in Southern Rwanda (then known as ‘Nduga’). In light of the “ethnic tension” took place during the 1950’s and 1960’s, many living in Rwanda decided to flee to different countries. My grandparents resettled in Southwestern Uganda. Even before the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, there was “ethnic tension” between Hutus and Tutsi, leaving some thousands of Tutsis killed, and forcing some to flee to neighboring countries, in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time the 1994 Genocide happened I was about five years old, so I still don’t think I experienced the whole story, but I grew up with the stories and history told, shared by parents and relatives. I am not a genocide survivor, but I lost relatives and fellow citizens in the 1994 genocide and long before that.
Jenna: So for you at age five in Uganda, what were you hearing — if anything — at that age?
Godlive: When I think back on how I felt, or what stories I heard about the genocide at the time, it’s like faded memories of a five year old who could hear my parents saying “maybe Uncle so and so has just been killed,” seeing people crying at hearing that someone has died, and asking why they’re crying. There was one uncle that used to visit us before he moved to a different camp in Uganda. Later he went back to Rwanda just before the genocide. When the genocide started, he was killed and that was the uncle that I had such fresh memories of and was so close with. When they mentioned his name, my heart kind of blew out because he was my best friend. When I heard that he’d been killed that’s when I actually realized what genocide was. That’s when my family tried to explain to me that there were killings in Rwanda and that a particular group of people had been targeted and my uncle was among that group.
Jenna: I’m sure it was quite a lot to absorb, to say the least.
Godlive: At five you just grow up with many questions and you keep learning why and how people kill, you keep learning from different books and from visiting memorial sites.
Jenna: That experience of growing up with a hazy understanding of this story that your family has, having a lot of questions that you’re always filling in — that definitely resonates with me, even though I had a greater generational distance. I was always aware that my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and while I was introduced to the history at a pretty early age, I was still a child. My grandpa loved cracking jokes — he would always try and find humor, or light, if possible, in telling me some of those stories, so I held onto the emotions and the tales and filled in the chronology and struggle later on.
Godlive: What did your grandpa tell you about life before the Holocaust and in the camps?
Jenna: My grandfather was born in a small town called Hajdúdorog in Hungary — it’s about two hours away from Budapest. In his early years they lived a pretty quiet life — my great-grandfather was the Rabbi, the Shochet, and the Moel and the Cantor…which are a lot of different religious roles. He was essentially the one-man band of Judaism in their town. My grandpa was the oldest of five brothers and he loved playing soccer.
He would focus on stories about him and my great uncle Marty, who he adored and managed to stay with throughout the war, from forced labor camps, to death marches, to Mauthausen, which was a concentration camp in Austria. The death marches that they were on were very brutal, and that’s something that he shared with me very clearly. I mean, it’s Europe in the winter, and so they were barefoot, walking with hypothermia for miles and miles. If you stop walking or anything happens you get…shot, on the spot. Yet somehow he and his brother found the strength to carry this boy who was from the same village as them. They knew that if they left him, he would die — not only was he close to death, but he would get shot if he didn’t keep moving — and so somehow, even though the two of them were incredibly weak themselves, they carried this boy along with them for miles and miles and saved his life. After the march, when they made it to another camp, someone managed to recognize them and knew that their mother was there, and brought them to their mother, who had sewn sugar cubes into her dress and was able to melt them in water to revive them. There were these instances that verged on miraculous that my grandpa would share with me.
Godlive: Wow. That’s such a touching story.
Jenna: Yeah, I’m pretty fortunate that my grandpa’s Holocaust testimony was recorded through Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation. And so even though he’s no longer with us, I have a little over an hour long video where he retells everything in a lot more specificity and detail, and exact chronology, than I ever got growing up. I watch it periodically, and I always discover something new that I didn’t quite remember, or I didn’t pick up on the first time. And so I feel like even though he’s passed, I’m always kind of learning new pieces about what he went through.
For you, it sounds like a lot of your own education was self-directed, and rediscovering as you got older, right?
Godlive: When I worked in the Institute of National Museums of Rwanda, that was my greatest opportunity to actually learn those histories. That’s when I learned that those 100 days in 1994 were not in fact the first acts of genocide in Rwanda, but actually went way back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, and even earlier if you keep going back in history.
When I moved to Rwanda, I was living with an uncle who was directly involved in the liberation of the country, and that’s when I kept discovering different ways of how the genocide was planned and put into action. I realized how the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) started trying to move into the country to liberate the people who were being killed. So it was very different from before I moved to Rwanda, because I had someone who was directly involved in the liberation and who had a history of moving to different countries trying to look for refuge. I realized that the RPF started saying enough is enough, we have to go back to our country, we have to liberate the people who are there and bring back the people who are in different countries who fled way back, before and during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Jenna: And with your relatives back in Uganda? Have those conversations evolved since you moved to Rwanda and have learned more?
Godlive: Yes, when I discover something new, I have the understanding and the ability to discuss it with my family back there. When I was reading about the Holocaust and how Hitler and the Germans mistreated the Jews, and how their aim was to claim them all, I was so interested in how your family was treated after they moved to the U.S. Did your grandpa narrate to you how life was when they were living in the U.S. as refugees and immigrants? How were they treated? Were there any rights denied to them because they were immigrants? And did your grandpa’s story shape your own journey?
Jenna: If I look at the general history, detached from my family, I know that there were different periods in the U.S. where Jews faced different types of discrimination and were a more identifiable minority — what neighborhoods they were allowed to live in, for instance. For my grandfather, the way in which he would discuss it with me focused much more heavily on the ways in which he built a life here. He arrived in the U.S. when he was 18 years old, in New York. He weighed about 90 pounds when he arrived with his brothers.
One thing that my grandfather did always share with me was the ways in which sometimes they weren’t treated any differently, despite their refugee status, and he felt like in some cases they should be. Not long after they came to the states, two of my grandfather’s brothers were drafted to go fight for the U.S. in the Korean War. He viewed this as a very personal injustice, because he and his brothers had just escaped the Holocaust, and so I think he really blamed them being thrown into military service directly afterwards on a lot of the subsequent struggles that both of his youngest siblings faced.
For me, I attribute my own orientation towards health equity and social impact to a medley of influences. There was the impact of my grandfather’s story, but also how the Holocaust was discussed in school and by my parents and the ways in which they kind of viewed it as a call to action.
That anthem of “never again” was such a big message growing up, and, of course if we’re looking at the atrocities around the world, we know that it’s happened many, many, many times again. It was always really impressed on me that there is this charge that you have to keep this memory alive. For me that was a bigger conversation because, my grandfather and other survivors are a dying generation. So I ask myself a lot about what my responsibility is to remember — what charge does it leave me, if any? I think my answer for myself has always been, whether it’s in my career or just as a citizen, paying very close attention in devotion to social justice, and looking out for the rights of everyone. That’s what it’s meant for me personally.
Jenna: Did your own childhood memories, or what you learned as an adult in talking to your uncle and during your own learning, shape the issues you have chosen to focus on?
Godlive: He kept telling us stories. Every commemoration day he would sit us down and tell us stories, and we would learn something new in every narration. He was so involved in mobilization, fundraising, and also designing peace talks for agreements like the Arusha Agreement, because there were different talks and agreements between the RPF and the government of Rwanda at the time to let all Rwandans come back into their country.
For example, he told us about when he got a message about his friend, called Fred Rwigema, who was shot dead on his way to Rwanda because negotiations with the government had failed. When he learned about his friend’s death, he felt that he had lost everything, but he would tell us how he sat down and thought of how many other Rwandans would lose their lives or even the rights to enter their country, and that would push him. He said that if his friend had sacrificed his life trying to liberate the rest of his fellow citizens, then why not him? He said, “If I die, then I die for my people and if I don’t die, then I will celebrate the victory with them.”
That was what pushed him, and it touched me as well. Those stories made me look to find a way to join hands with those that fight for rights that have been denied. The way I grew up definitely shaped my desire to be involved in promoting social justice and equity.
Jenna: Yes, it’s hugely powerful.
Godlive: It pushes me — I feel this weight on me to fight for rights for those who may not be able to fight for their own rights. I am motivated to join the entire community of those who fight for social justice and to fight for what I believe in. I believe in offering what I have for others to have a better life and a sense of belonging.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
Godlive Mukankuranga is a Global Health Corps fellow placed at Partners In Health/Inshuti Mu Buzima in Rwanda as a Communications Fellow. She was born and raised in Southwestern Uganda, where her family resettled because of ongoing ethnic tension in Rwanda. Godlive returned to Rwanda after completing her university studies with a commitment to use her communication skills to promote social justice and health equity in her family’s home country and around the world.
Jenna Zitaner is a Global Health Corps placed at DotHouse Health in Boston, a federally qualified health center that supports 20,000+ community members with healthcare services and programs addressing the full spectrum of health and wellbeing. She brings a love for cities and a firm belief in primary care as a necessary building block for equity to her communications work at DotHouse. Jenna grew up right outside of New York City, the place her family first called home upon arriving in the United States after surviving the Holocaust.
