From Auschwitz to Butare: the Holocaust as ‘missing picture’ in Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s Le Convoi

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse's memoir of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Le Convoi [The Convoy], echoes Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo's Convoy to Auschwitz. Umubyeyi Mairesse came to France on a Swiss humanitarian children's evacuation convoy on 18 June 1994. Through her search for a photograph that would bear witness to her survival, she sets out to reverse the neocolonialist narrative of African history in which victims are turned into props of their own history. Engaging with Georges Didi-Huberman and Rithy Panh, the Holocaust is eventually substituted for the missing image, serving as a necessary mediation without which the author's testimony proves impossible.