The Strategy of Antelopes: Rwanda After the Genocide

The experiences of the massacre, which went beyond death or fear or hopelessness into a new territory of existential nihilism, have profoundly shaken those who survived them. In addition to psychological tremors, lapses in concentration, grief, nightmares, fear, loneliness and bouts of alcoholism, Hatzfeld observes a profound shift in internal philosophy. Many survivors have remarried, ostensibly picking up the pieces, but the knowledge that life can tip in a moment into hell has changed all of them.
From time to time, Hatzfeld breaks the suspension of authorial judgment that he kept in his previous books and probes the questions of why and how. He considers the role of God and faith and discovers that both victims and killers alike have slipped these moorings. He reads Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi, who asked the same questions of the Holocaust, and honestly acknowledges the impossibility of his task: "Writing can't replace the testimony of the dead."
(The Observer review)