A few months back I saw a story on public television that told of a remarkable woman named Immaculee Ilibagiza. She is a survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that pitted Hutus against Tutsis. Nearly 1 million people were slaughtered, including her parents and two brothers.

It was only because of the goodness of a local pastor that she and seven other Tutsi women escaped the machete-wielding killers looking for them. This good man hid the women in a small, obscure bathroom, the seven of them huddled together, hardly able to move, for 91 days!

That Immaculee survived unbelievable horror is not why I still think of her. Not at all. It is what she has passed on to me and others that makes her so special: her love of God and her outspoken forgiveness for the killers of her family, friends and neighbors.

It wasn't until I read Immaculee's book, "Left to Tell, Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" (with Steve Erwin, Hay House), written after the urgings of noted spiritual speaker Wayne Dyer, that I really understood how she could forgive such evildoers.

She speaks often and profoundly of her Catholic faith, her love of the rosary and how God helped her know she should "open her heart" to him so he could "touch it with his infinite love." She began to call that tight space in the bathroom her "sacred garden" where she spoke with God and meditated on his words. And what she heard over and over was "forgiveness": "I'd opened my heart to God, and he'd touched it with his infinite love. For the first time I pitied the killers. I asked God to forgive their sins and turn their souls toward his beautiful light."

But it was a dream she had that really solidified her faith. Jesus was standing in front of her, his arms outstretched, telling her that almost everyone she knew and loved had been killed. But then he told her, "They are with me now, and they have joy. I will be your family." She awoke feeling that joy, assured that "God never breaks a promise."

Reading this, I remembered a dream from heaven that "saved me" after I got the news of the murders of my son and his wife. John had entered my kitchen and come to hug me. I called out joyfully to my other children, "John's here!"

Then I asked, "John, why did you have to die?" While we knew who the killer was, we had no motive. I kept repeating "Why?" and John started to go away.

I begged him to come back, and then John did so in order to tell me not to question but to forgive. "You see, Mom," he told me, "all that is important where I am is love."

No wonder I could relate so well to Immaculee! When Immaculee and the women were finally able to leave their bathroom "cell," they saw the ruins of the village they had known and the corpses of people they had known and loved.

"We all shared in the misery that had descended upon the village, but I knew that the people gathered around me had lost much more than I had. They'd lost their faith, and in doing so they'd also lost hope," she wrote.

Today Immaculee, a woman of incredible strength, wisdom and grace, works for the United Nations in New York. She is married to Byran Black, the Catholic man "sent by God to complete me," she writes. They have two children.

Antoinette Bosco is a columnist with Catholic News Service.