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“Because we were Tutsi – that was the only reason,” she says, shaking and scratching her head as though she’s still trying to make sense of it all.

Rose and her children, who then ranged in age from 10 months to 16 years, were taken to a large military brigade, where they joined hundreds of other Tutsi prisoners. She knew there would be no lawyer, no judge, no government official to spare her and her family. Death was the only possible outcome.

After his family was in the brigade for three days, Moise grew tired of hiding and turned himself in.

“I just asked him why he give up,” Rose recalls. “He said, ‘I wish to die as a man. I cannot save my own life when I knew you would be killed, and the children.’”

Adult male detainees were immediately put to work, digging what would become their own graves. 

Male captives posed the biggest threat of retaliation and thus were dealt with quickly and ruthlessly. Beatings were delivered without thought or provocation. One by one, soldiers grabbed a prisoner, stripped his clothes and shackled him.

“They made fun at us,” Rose recalls. “They would say, ‘We want to see what a Tutsi looks like naked.’”

Moise was the victim of serial beatings.

“They would take him at breakfast time, lunch time and supper time,” Rose quietly details. Grappling hooks attached to ropes tore his flesh while heavy clubs crushed his bones. Rose and her children witnessed every beating and returned his desperate cries.

“He suffered so much,” Rose says, pausing to wipe her tears.

The soldiers weren’t looking for information, a confession or even a pledge of allegiance. It seemed as though if they hit him hard enough and tortured him long enough, they would eventually pound the Tutsi out of him. The weeklong beatings rendered Moise paralyzed from the neck down. Finally, a rope was looped around his neck while soldiers grabbed his feet. They stood at each end and pulled until the last breaths of life were choked out of him.

“When the guards told me that my husband was dead, they say, ‘The same thing we do to your husband, we will do to you,’” Rose says. “I love my husband. He was a very good man.”

Moise was just one of the more than 200 Tutsi men executed in the first few weeks at the brigade.

“Not one man survived. They finished them all.”

Photo courtesy Mapendo International When Rose and her children arrived at a safe haven in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, her twin boys were 8 months old and weighed no more than 6 pounds each.

Once all of the men were killed, the commanders of the brigade decided that they didn’t want to be responsible for the blood of widows and orphans. Broken and distressed from weeks in a sadistic hell, the women and children once again were loaded into trucks and transferred to a different brigade in another region of the country – a “death camp,” where they would suffer for the next 16 months.

Surprised to even be alive, Rose was emotionally torn between mourning her husband’s grisly death and being a rock of strength and hope for her seven children. It was especially difficult for her knowing it was only a matter of time before death would fall upon the rest of her family.

“In the camp there was just only one option. That is to die from different ways,” Rose explains. “I was expected to be killed by knives. I was expected to die of starvation. I was expected to die from sorrow. I was expected to die from infection.”

Her hope shifted from being rescued to just the daily survival of her children. In seemingly hopeless moments, Rose sang to her children and the other prisoners, offering something familiar, stable, hopeful.

Like many cultures, in the Congo the notion of killing helpless women and children was deplorable. So the commanders at the death camp would let them die from starvation and infection rather than kill them outright. In their minds, this absolved them of any wrongdoing, Rose says.

All of the women and children were held in one dilapidated room no bigger than a small classroom. There were no beds or toilets, and they were allowed only the clothes they were wearing when they were captured. They sat and slept on the floor. They were not permitted to go outside, and when the guards decided not to escort them to the bathroom, they would have to “go where we slept,” Rose says.

Day and night the prisoners sat in the room, picking lice from their bodies and wasting away. Once every two weeks or so, the prisoners were given three minutes in a nearby pond where they could wash themselves. Not allowed any soap, they grabbed handfuls of sand and scrubbed their skin in order to kill the lice and bugs that infested their bodies.

All the while the guards ridiculed them.

“They would make fun and say, ‘We will finish you.’”

With no men to offer any protection, the women and children were especially vulnerable to the treacherous wiles of overly hostile guards. One day, guards burst into the holding room, intent on taking one of the young girls to satisfy their pent-up sexual aggression. Attention turned to Rose’s teenage daughter. As they approached, Rose told her daughter to “hold me very strong” and pulled her close, refusing to let go. With a gun pressed against her temple, Rose continued to cling to her as guards pried her daughter away.

While physical threats and actions devastated the prisoners, it was the soldiers’ daily neglect of their basic needs that was slowly sapping the will and strength of the women and children. Rose was given one or two cups of rice a day and small amounts of corn flour to share with her children, but even that was intermittent. Days would pass with no food or water. Rose remembers a period when they were deprived of any food for 15 straight days.

“That’s when our friends began to die,” she says.

Some prisoners were beginning to succumb to malnutrition and infection, just as the soldiers had hoped. As a reminder of what the rest of them faced, days would go by before the bodies of the dead were removed from the room.

Those who survived did so by begging guards for scraps and eating unripe mangos the kids sometimes found during the few chances when they were taken outside. Although the mangos helped sate their empty stomachs, they caused bloody diarrhea, especially in the children. One of Rose’s boys still bears a scar on his chin from when he would attempt to stand but was too weak to support his head and hit his chin on the concrete floor.

The prisoners deteriorated into lethargic, skin-draped skeletons. As days became weeks, then months, the spirits and bodies of the remaining women and children were slowly dying. And so, too, was Rose’s sense of hope.

“I asked God a thousand questions,” she says. “I asked what my husband had done to be killed, what I had done to be in death camp with children. I asked God if he thought my children had sinned more than the people who were making fun on us.” Rose became so angry with God that she stopped singing, stopped praying and stopped believing that an end would come to their suffering.

Several months into their captivity, Rose discovered she was pregnant but had no idea she was carrying twins. Unable to nourish herself, her babies stood little chance of survival.

“I could not see a doctor,” she says. “They wanted me to die that way.”

The night Rose went into labor, she did not want to alert the guards or frighten her children.

“It was in darkness. I tried to keep quiet. I crossed my teeth, very strong,” she says.

By herself and without medical supplies, Rose gave birth to very small twins on the soiled prison floor. She cut the umbilical cords with a stick and tied them off with strands of her own hair.

“For a month after I give birth, I could not stand straight because I hurt and was weak. I thought maybe I could be like that forever,” she recalls. Rose tried to nurse the babies but was so malnourished that she wasn’t producing enough milk. Instead, she would give them small amounts of corn flour. She taught them to suck their fingers or tea-soaked rags so they would not fuss or make noise.

Rose nearly died giving birth; she never expected that the twins would save her life.

“When I thought it was the last minutes of my life, I asked God to forgive me and give me the strength to forgive the soldiers who were doing this to us,” Rose says. “If I was going to die, I did not want to die angry with God. I wanted to die free.” She says her strength and hope returned with her ability to forgive. So did the singing.