Paul Rusesabagina, Tom Zoellner
An Ordinary Man
To all the victims of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,
to their widows and orphans, to the survivors.
To Tatiana, my wife and right hand;
to Lys, Roger, Diane and Tresor Rusesabagina
as well as Anaise and Carine Karimba.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank Kathryn Court, Jill Kneerim, Alexis Washam, and Paul Buckley for their invaluable assistance in the production of this book.
“Many fledging moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming that there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.”
– From The Plague, by Albert Camus
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. All of the people and events described herein are true as I remember them. For legal and ethical reasons, I have given pseudonyms to a handful of private Rwandan citizens. Each time this is done, the change is noted in the text.
Paul Rusesabagina
INTRODUCTION
My name is Paul Rusesabagina. I am a hotel manager. In April 1994, when a wave of mass murder broke out in my country, I was able to hide 1, 268 people inside the hotel where I worked.