After watching the first two months of their basement ordeal play out almost day by day in Trees of Peace, we pick back up with the four women after a rapid countdown, which ends when Annick’s husband Francois opens the basement to reveal that they only have one more day to sit through down there before they can all escape to safety.
This is a revelation that gives them all hope, only for it to be destroyed when a number of Hutu soldiers pull up outside the house with an appetite for information or bloodshed. They have managed to round up a group of students and colleagues of Francois who they demand information from and then slaughter.
Not long after this, near the end of Trees of Peace, a group of Hutu soldiers turn up and march inside the house about Annick and the other women’s heads. They know that Annick is tucked away inside somewhere and tell her that Francois is dead, describing in detail how they brutally killed him in a bid to smoke her out. Just before they begin to tear the house apart looking for her, the soldiers are called away by command, but the damage to Annick’s fighting spirit has already been done.
Fortunately for her, the months they have spent in the basement together has bonded the four women in ways they could never have imagined, and the others rally around her, determined to escape and make it to refuge. Following a failed attempt to break out of the basement – which locks from the outside due to it’s previous life as a pantry – Mutesi takes a knife and manages to pry the door open.
Starving and exhausted, the four women just about manage to haul themselves above ground and into the kitchen. Just as they do, rebel soldiers turn up at the house, followed closely by Francois, who by some miracle wasn’t at the school when Hutu troops were sent there for him. He and Annick are reunited, and she and the other women are led to safety.
