MARLBOROUGH -- Three days before the fateful night, Immaculee Ilibagiza was attending college on a scholarship.

She had her own room in a house with loving parents and three brothers who protected her. They would get down on their knees and pray together every single night. That was three days before the genocide began in her native Rwanda. Now, Ilibagiza's entire life was 12 square feet. She had just seen her parents and two of her brothers for the very last time. Her father told her to go to a neighbor's house to hide, and now she was there, standing in his bathroom. She wondered where she would eat and sleep. That was before her neighbor came back with seven more women. The youngest was seven. The oldest was 55. They spent day and night on top of each other in that bathroom.

"When you think things are bad, they can get worse," Ilibagiza said to a crowd who had come to hear her life story at Immaculate Conception Parish in Marlborough on Sept. 4. "And again, this is not to scare you. It is more like, complaining doesn't help."

After surviving the Rwandan Genocide, Ilibagiza worked for the United Nations and became an author and motivational speaker. Her bestselling memoir "Left to Tell" has been translated into 17 languages. About once a week, she addresses a different audience about her experience in Rwanda and how it taught her to forgive like Christ.

"Love is the greatest commandment," she said. "And I realized how important that was when I saw what lack of love can do. I saw human beings taking machetes and cutting each other -- other people -- people they've never met before, just because of the hatred there was in their hearts."

She said that she felt "very much home" at Immaculate Conception, because she and the parish share the same name. She has a strong devotion to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and has prayed for her intercession throughout her life.

"I felt like it was really fitting, her coming here to Immaculate Conception, which is named after Our Lady, and to see her hidden presence, looking to bring this message of love and forgiveness," Parochial Vicar Father Gabriel Hanley told The Pilot. "And that was one of the things that was most good. It was almost like you could really sense that Our Lady was here with us."

Ilibagiza's mother was a teacher, and her father was a director of local Catholic schools. Her family was Tutsi, one of Rwanda's two main ethnic groups, along with the Hutu. The Tutsi once dominated Rwandan society but had been usurped by the Hutu by the time Ilibagiza was born. She said that the two groups were deeply polarized, and that ethnicity was the same as political identity (she doesn't believe that a genocide like Rwanda's can happen in the U.S., where she has lived for the past 25 years, but she said she has "never prayed for this country as I did in these past years.") Decades of tensions boiled over when Rwandan President Juvenal Ntaryamira -- a Hutu -- was assassinated in 1994. Ilibagiza recalled her brother barging into her room to tell her the news of his killing.

"I remember jumping out of the bed, and I told him, 'That's it. They're going to kill us,'" she said.

Propaganda broadcasts on the radio escalated genocidal rhetoric against the Tutsi. At the time, Ilibagiza thought of the apparition of Our Lady of Kibeho, who appeared in Rwanda in the 1980s. Our Lady told three Catholic schoolgirls that terrible violence would ravage the country unless people turned to God. Shortly after Ntaryamira was killed, the Ilibagizas heard reports of mass murder on the radio. Rwanda's borders were closed, as were institutions like schools and banks.

"The only thing that was being done was killing people, family by family," Ilibagiza said.

Her fellow villagers came to her parents for help.

"They were really people who lived their Catholic faith to the letter, just trying to be good human beings," she said.

Rosary in hand, her father told the people, "Do not be scared. We will defeat them." However, he told them the truth that forces within the government were carrying out the killings, and that the police and military had turned on the Tutsi.

"I was very close to my father," Ilibagiza said. "I knew he loved me. He could die for me. And even if I never heard him say 'I love you,' I just know how much he protected me."

He told the villagers that this was their chance to repent for their sins so they could go to Heaven. Ilibagiza was confused.

"Are we supposed to be happy that we're going to die and be killed?" She remembered wondering at the time. "And I really thought people maybe were going to be scared and scream and throw stones on him, but actually they did listen to him. Everyone was quiet."

She started to pray and told God to forgive her sins if these were indeed her final moments. Her father's certainty of Heaven, to the point that he was not afraid to die, strengthened her faith. He gave her his rosary and told her to go to the neighbor's house.

"And when I left, in my heart, I knew that this was the last time," she said. "And I remember just looking back, and it cannot be right. And another part of me was like, 'Take a good look. This is it.'"

Inside the bathroom, she and the seven other women and girls could not speak or even flush the toilet unless someone in the house's other bathroom did at the same time. The first time the neighbor left Ilibagiza and the women alone, he did not return for three days.

"I felt hunger I never felt in my life," she said. "It was not just like a headache of hunger or like feeling empty. It was like a razor in that bathroom inside of my stomach, like wounds inside."

When he finally returned with food, she asked him, "How long can we be here? We're going to die here."

She said her head and muscles ached with anger at the Hutus. She felt her stomach burn with fear. She thought she was dying. Her only access to the outside world was the radio.

"I couldn't believe what was going on in the country," she said. "The leaders who used to tell us to be good to one another, they were now on national radio, calling everyone to kill everyone of my tribe."

She heard one government minister remind listeners not to forget children or the elderly. It was a cleansing, he said. None could be spared. She thought that if the killers got to her, they would let her live because she hadn't done anything wrong.

"But this was a time when I realized, is evil doing evil," she said. "Who says a child is an enemy, kill children? But that, even it was bad, it started to push me in the hands of God. Who else is there to help me? Only God."

Churches were destroyed. Stadiums became littered with dead bodies. Militants searched every home looking for Tutsi. When they entered the four-bedroom home Ilibagiza and the others were hiding in, she felt there was no way they could remain hidden. A voice in her head urged her to expose herself so she could be put out of her misery. Another voice came from her heart: "Do not open the door. Ask God to help you."

"And that was really the fight," she recalled, "either stop praying or keep praying."

She begged God to give her a sign. If he did, she promised she would give her life to him. She subsequently fainted. It was five hours before she woke up. Her neighbor told her that 400 people surrounded the house. Those who entered searched everywhere. They opened closets, tore up carpets, looked into the ceiling, even opened suitcases to see if babies were inside. They were just about to enter the bathroom when one soldier, his hand on the doorknob, told the neighbor "You know what? We trust you. There's no one here. You are one of us. You are a good man, good citizen."

"I don't know how you are praying or whatever you are doing," the neighbor told Ilibagiza. "Keep doing it."

While hiding in the bathroom, she read her neighbor's Bible and used it to teach herself English. She was touched by the Book of Job and the story of Daniel in the lion's den. All of her thoughts went toward salvation. However, there was one of Jesus's teachings she struggled with -- forgiveness. She did not want to think about forgiving the people who had done this to her and her family. She began to pray with her father's rosary.

"You don't run away from the Bible by going to the rosary," she said.

She would pray from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. -- 27 rosaries and 40 Divine Mercy chaplets per day. But when she prayed the Lord's Prayer, she would remove the part about forgiving those who trespass against her. She felt that if she said those words, she would be lying to God. She didn't understand how she was supposed to forgive the people who killed her family and would kill her if they had the chance. Then she thought about how Jesus forgave those who crucified him.

"I used to think you forgive when somebody says something bad about you, not when somebody is trying to kill you," she said. "Not when somebody is still trying to hurt you. Not afterwards, but during."

Ilibagiza spent 91 days in the bathroom. When she came out, she weighed 65 pounds. Almost everyone she knew had been killed. Only one of her brothers survived because he was studying abroad at the time of the genocide. Her home was destroyed, her family photos burned. She had to collect her family's remains to give them a proper burial. The rosary became her "spiritual therapy." Without her family, God was the only constant in her life. Over time, she realized that her family's killers "were also children of God" like anyone else, and that she had to pray for them. She visited the imprisoned leader of the gang that killed her mother and one of her brothers. She reached her hands out to his and told him "I forgive you." If she could forgive, she said, anyone can.

"How long does a human being live?" she said. "Okay, maybe 100 years. What about after that? Where do we go? There is heaven and there is hell. It's up to you what you work for. And I remember I didn't want to look at hell because, I mean, I was in hell already."