This book is about those who decided to do something. It is about their struggle to make sense of the things they’ve seen, the price they have paid for their commitments, and what difference—if any—they feel they have made.

The events described in this book help to answer two important questions: How do we make comprehensible stories out of incomprehensible atrocities? And what are the ethical risks and obligations of doing so? For many of the humanitarian and human rights workers I interviewed for this book (and the field of the committed includes journalists, teachers, and novelists as...

Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop told me a story about Rwanda. Toward the end of the hundred-day genocide in 1994, when forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) began an advance that drove the génocidaires out of the country, they encountered dogs. The dogs were unusually large and fierce, having fed well on the heaps of corpses choking the roadways. RPF soldiers, sickened by this final indignity, and hoping to preserve as much as possible of the dead for proper burial, began to shoot the dogs. Immediately, animal rights groups in London launched a protest to protect the dogs.

Diop’s...

To enter the headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ankara, Turkey, you must pass through barbed-wire gates and a security checkpoint. If you are seeking UN protection as a refugee (because you have escaped Iraq after being raped and tortured or because you will be executed if forced to return to Iran), you will be escorted through these gates and then taken downstairs to the holding chambers in the basement. There you will be required to answer a series of questions to determine whether or not you meet the specific conditions for refugee status under international...

There is no reliable, comprehensive data on deaths among humanitarian workers, but much of the available information points to a steady rise in fatalities—presumably because humanitarian relief is increasingly directed not toward wars between states but rather toward internal conflicts in weak or failed states, where civilians and those protecting them are often direct targets.¹ While death is still not a common outcome in humanitarian work, exposure to the risk of death is.

Colleen Striegel, director of human resources for the American Refugee Committee (ARC), says that heightened risks and associated stress have made it increasingly difficult to recruit...

A number of the human rights advocates and humanitarian workers we’ve met thus far are also artists, or found themselves turning to art as a way of working through their experiences, whether in the form of film (Nancee Oku Bright, Rony Brauman), memoir (Roméo Dallaire, Clea Koff, Kenneth Cain), or, as we’ll see in this chapter, novels. John Coyne, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, claims that “three hundred and fifty returned Peace Corps Volunteers have published books, many of which have been based on their experiences overseas.”¹ The kinship between professional storytelling and humanitarian work is especially close...

I’d like to close this book where it began, with a story from Rwanda—a story whose telling raises important questions about many of the issues that have structured this book: the physical and moral risks of professional witnessing; the difference it makes; the simultaneous suspicion of and yearning for therapeutic narrative closure; the nature of hope.

Donatella Lorch was taken to the Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali by an ICRC convoy at the height of the killings (Belgian troops had already come to evacuate the foreigners at the hotel and refused to come again, so Roméo Dallaire arranged a...