I Ve Lost Nearly Everyone.

““I’ve lost nearly everyone,’’ he said, his voice a soothing baritone, his handsome, bearded face an oddly impassive mask. Gerard, 37, was a Tutsi customs inspector and government opponent whose family had been wiped out – about 40 people in all. He’d heard that his 4-year-old daughter had survived and he had made arrangements with my escort the previous night for a lift to Nyanza, where she was last seen. Our journey over the next 48 hours brought home Rwanda’s genocidal madness as no body count could ever do.

Gerard had seen the holocaust coming. Three times in the past year Hutu militiamen, known as interahamwe, broke into his home in Kigali, beat him and threatened to kill him, he told me. Last February he sent his 29-year-old pregnant wife, a teenage son from a previous liaison and two young daughters to live with his parents in Nyanza, 40 miles south of Kigali, where he thought they’d be safe. ““I was wrong,’’ he said bitterly. He was working late in his office near Kigali’s Parliament on April 6 when he heard about the president’s assassination on the radio. Gerard took refuge in a hotel nearby, listening as interahamwe destroyed the hotel generator and rampaged in the streets outside. The next morning two Malawian U.N. soldiers hid him under blankets in their jeep and drove past militia checkpoints to the national stadium. Gerard eventually made his way to the rebel-held provincial capital, Biumba. He waited there for eight weeks, cut off from any word of his family’s fate.

As the rebels advanced to the north and west in early June, a driver who had trav-eled through the region gave Gerard the terrible news, pieced together from his surviving grandparents and other witnesses: government soldiers in Nyanza had hacked his wife to death as she walked home from her obstetrician on April 15. Then they broke down the door of the family’s house and shot his 62-year-old father, mother, three eld-er brothers and 14-year-old son. (His wife’s entire fami-ly was also slaughtered.) A Hutu nursemaid had passed off his 2-year-old daughter as her own child and disappeared with her into a displaced-persons’ camp. And 4-year-old Zita had escaped from the killers by hiding in a banana field for four nights. She was rescued by an Italian priest from the local orphanage. The day before the rebels seized the town, 12 drunken soldiers broke in, lined the children against the wall and threatened to shoot them. The priest fended them off with bribes of radios, cameras and cash. On June 5, the child’s great-grandparents – who had survived by hiding in a hospital – retrieved her.

Nyanza was a shattered ghost town when we arrived around midnight, after a 12-hour drive over twisting dirt roads. In the moonlight, Gerard gazed grimly on the smashed windows and rubble-strewn street. ““Everything destroyed,’’ he muttered. We slept on flea-infested mattresses in an abandoned schoolhouse. Machine guns fired in the distance.

Before dawn, Gerard ventured into the now deserted town center to fetch Zita. Hours later, he reappeared, carrying a thin girl in blue jeans with huge brown eyes who hugged him tightly. Gerard had found Zita with his grandparents at the hospital, where she was still recovering from a chest infection and two months of terror. ““She had lost her voice but regained it when she saw me,’’ he said, betraying uncontrollable emotion for the first time in our journey. ““She is traumatized, but starting to smile.''

Heading back up north, we passed long lines of refugees and truckloads of fresh recruits singing victory songs on their way to the front. Gerard had given up trying to find his other daughter; the region around Nyanza was still filled with interahamwe, and it was impossible to move freely. For now, all his energy was focused on Zita, who had emerged from her terrified silence and begun to murmur softly to her father. Arms clasped around her, he said, ““She is a consolation for everyone I’ve lost.’’ They caught a lift on the road to Biumba, survivors alone in a world without mercy.