Giving Voice to Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide

Taylor Krauss went to Rwanda for the first time in 2004, with the intention of filming a documentary about the African country's media and returning home to his life in New York. But the local people he met during his stay, many of them survivors of the genocide and the stories they shared with him had such a profound effect on him, he couldn't shake off the feeling of needing to do something with these harrowing tales. Shortly after his trip, he founded Voices of Rwanda, a nonprofit organization dedicated to filming testimonies of the genocide survivors — giving them a voice for the first time.

"Being in Rwanda really called upon me to do something," the 29-year-old American video-journalist tells Tonic, admitting that he had no intention of starting a nonprofit organization when he first went to Rwanda, back in 2004. "I studied film and I wanted to make movies," he says, adding: "I didn't plan on uprooting my life to live in Rwanda but people just kept coming up to me and telling me their stories in cafes, even when I wasn't filming and I didn't really know what to do with all this information." As a young Jewish-American, Krauss had grown up listening to stories about the Holocaust and he had a keen interest in history (he had been working on a film about World War II before he left for Rwanda). To think that something similar to the Holocaust had happened in his lifetime was incomprehensible. "I knew I had to return but I didn't know how or in what capacity until I realized that people wanted to share their life stories and so I came up with the idea of an archive."

The Yale graduate was just 25 years old at the time and had no idea what it meant to start an organization from scratch. But, encouraged by his friends and former professors, he packed his camera equipment and set up a base in Rwanda, and simply waited. Once he had earned the trust of the locals, survivors began to visit more and more regularly. And once they started to talk, the flood gates opened, with many of the testimonies lasting all day. "Survivors of the genocide really want to share because they don't have a place to talk," he explains. Despite the fact that this event started 17 years ago, people are still wary of discussing it amongst themselves for several reasons. "They might be living next to the people who killed their family, isolated in their towns," says the Voices of Rwanda founder, adding: "or the survivor who lost fewer family members doesn't feel justified to talk about their horrors to someone who lost everyone they knew." Slowly, the locals began to truly believe he could help them. "People know they can trust our organization, as a group who serve survivors," says Krauss, who says they are still the only team of people in Rwanda communicating with the survivors of the genocide that took nearly one million lives. "We will broadcast their stories as loud as they want and we will guard them and preserve them," he promises.

Krauss had to start with the basics, such as teaching his staff to type, so that they could transcribe the hundreds of testimonies. He had to investigate archiving systems to make sure the testimonies were stored in the most technologically advanced way. With over 1000 hours of testimony material to date, it was no small task. "Just one testimony is on average eight hours long. That takes two weeks to transcribe, one month to translate — we're talking months and months of work that goes into each individual testimony." Listening and documenting the heart-wrenching stories of the survivors has been an emotional journey, which at times can be difficult for him and his team of seven employees, many of whom are survivors themselves. "I'm a very different person now, on an emotional level to what I was before I went to Rwanda," admits Krauss, who offers all of his staff psychological support. "In some ways that bothers me but I feel lucky to have had this profound experience."

Although Krauss admits the listening process often leaves him "unhinged," he is more concerned for the survivors and his staffers, many of whom have lost relatives in the genocide. Recalling one particularly emotional day in the office, Krauss says: "I walked into the office and saw one of the employees crying. I thought 'oh my God, what I have I done?' I asked her to take the rest of the day off but she refused. She said 'I have to stay. I have to listen to the rest of this story.' When I asked her why she said 'I have to know what happened because this is the same story that happened to me.' Down to the words that the man was saying when he killed her mother, she was listening to exactly the same conversation," says Krauss. The staffer insisted on finishing the transcription as she said "it made her feel less alone." For Krauss, it made him realize the bond that exists between survivors and how these testimonies were affecting the survivor community, in a positive way.

Just the simple act of talking and unburdening themselves is enough for many of them. But for others, they want the world to know what happened to them, for their history to be documented and preserved forever.

One such person is Antoinette, a survivor whose entire family was murdered in the infamous genocide that started in 1994 and continued for many years after. "This is the first thing I can do to help my future child ... to learn about our history," she says in an emotional testimony, as she dries her eyes with a tissue. "I do not want it to be hidden. I want it to be seen. If I die, my family's name will disappear." For many of them, they are the sole survivors and so it is important to document their experiences. As well as a national archive for the country, Krauss is campaigning for a genocide curriculum to be taught in high schools across America and eventually around the world. "I think kids being exposed to the narratives is really important and people are emailing us practically every day saying they want to have these testimonies in their schools." Krauss hopes that by educating the next generation about these atrocities, we can work together to make sure it never happens again. "I believe that when people sit down and watch a testimony, it changes them as a person," he says with a positive air. "I hope that we can contribute to the process of making the world aware of genocide and contributing to stopping it in some small way."

Ultimately, Krauss hopes that the people of Rwanda will treasure the archive as a nation, and not only the traumas of the genocide but the proverbs and songs of their culture that have passed from generation to generation. "I hope that in 100 years time, the people of Rwanda and the rest of the world will feel that this is invaluable history."

To contribute to Voices of Rwanda, please click here.

Photo 1 by Ted Alcorn, photo 2 by Aaron Soffin, photo 3 by Mitch Stookey.