Jean Hatzfeld

He spent his childhood in Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in the mountains of Auvergne in France, the town where his parents took refuge in 1942 and whose inhabitants distinguished themselves by welcoming thousands of Jews during the war.

Hatzfeld finally became a foreign correspondent, traveling to Israel, Palestine, Poland, Romania and other places in Eastern Europe.

After his arrival in Rwanda as a reporter, shortly after the Rwandan genocide, Hatzfeld was struck by the collective failure of journalists covering the event and their incapacity to face up to the silence of the survivors.

He then wrote a novel, "La ligne de flottaison" (The Waterline),[2] about a war correspondent struggling to return to his life in Paris.

Twenty years after the butchery, he returns to the banks of the swamps to work with the children of the killers and the survivors, who already appeared in his former books, youths who have not experienced the machetes, but who have inherited the memory of them and who share a language consisting of metaphorical and often poetic vocabulary.

Hatzfeld contributed to L’Autre Journal, GEO, Autrement, Rolling Stone, Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde, Actuel.