Scarred survivors of the Rwandan genocide met with a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Paris this week, to draw support from one another and discuss ways to prevent history from repeating itself.
Young Rwandan Tutsis who miraculously escaped the 1994 genocide fought back tears to tell of the 100 days of killing, as Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps recounted how they had found the courage to live after the horror.
One of those present was Samuel Pisar, the youngest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, who was imprisoned at the age of 12, his head shaved, and starved into submission.
Alongside him stood Reverien Rurangwa, a Rwandan Tutsi who was just 15 when Hutu killers left him for dead after slaughtering 43 members of his extended family. "I will never be able to tell what I have seen," the young man told the group, tears streaming down his face, which still bears machete marks from the killing spree, in which his ribs were smashed and one of his hands hacked off.
Twenty-five-year-old Annick Kayitesi lost her entire family but one sister in the genocide. She struggled for a long time before finding the strength to talk of her suffering before the assembly.
"When I see that today there is a Holocaust centre, I tell myself there is a reason to testify, even if it is painful," she said after a long, anguished silence, as other Tutsi women in the assembly heaved with tears. Pisar sought to comfort his Rwandan "brothers" in suffering, with a message of hope and optimism.
"In spite of everything, you can and you must live, because that is the only possible revenge on the enemy, the sweetest kind of revenge," he told them.
But Charles Baron, who also survived the death camp at Auschwitz, could not hide his dismay that the Rwandan genocide had been possible, half a century after the end of World War II.
"How can it be possible that mankind has yet to learn the lessons of Auschwitz?" he asked.
Reverien belongs to an association called Ibuka - "Remember" in the Rwandan language Kinyarwanda - which seeks to prevent the world from forgetting the genocide, and is campaigning against impunity for the killers.
He said he wished to learn from Holocaust survivors how to ensure memory endures, and that to do nothing would be to "play a part in your own genocide".
Before leaving the room, he clasped Samuel Pisar's hands in his own, telling him: "You know, genocide survivors are the only family I have left."
The encounter took place at a Jewish cultural centre in Paris, on the sidelines of a photo exhibition called "The wounds of silence", which features 60 black-and-white shots of perpetrators and victims of the Rwandan genocide.
Rwanda this week remembered the massacres in which at least 800,000 and as many as one million people were massacred, most of them by the then-Hutu army and extremist militias.
UN chief Kofi Annan has led a global admission of guilt over the failure of the international community to stop the genocide in Rwanda, calling upon the world to act to prevent it from ever happening again.
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