On a summer afternoon in 1994, David Guttenfelder took a taxi from the Rwandan capital Kigali to the nearby region of Bugesera. He walked inside the Ntarama Church and began taking photographs of people who had been murdered by their neighbors. They had come to the small, red-brick church from all over the area seeking refuge—just as their parents and grandparents had come in the past when violence broke out between the ethnic majority Hutus and minority Tutsis. But this time the church, like many others in Rwanda during the genocide, became a killing ground.Thousands of bodies—old men and women, young men and women, boys and girls, toddlers and infants—filled the entire sanctuary. “People piled on top of one another, four or five deep, on top of the pews, between the pews, everywhere,” he said.Outside, the grounds were overgrown, and victims lay where they had fallen. “People had been hacked to death and left slumped against trees. I remember one woman with her underwear pulled down lying on the ground. You didn’t have to be a detective to see how people were killed,” he said.
