Jeffrey Gettleman is seasoned more than most when it comes to international injustice, humanitarian aid and reporting on the world’s biggest disasters.
A foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and Pulitzer Prize award-winning author, Gettleman has covered everything from “genocide in Sudan, to children being blown apart in Iraq.” He’s rushed into earthquakes, hurricanes, civil wars, international wars and famines.
He calls himself “a specialist in despair.”
Though he’s seen and reported on just about everything, Gettleman reveals in a recent New York Times article the one interview that stopped him dead in his tracks.
“I was standing near the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh, where half a million Rohingya people, probably one of the most unwanted ethnic groups on the planet, fled after government massacres in Myanmar,” he writes.
It was there where a young woman named Rajuma shared “one of the most horrible” experiences Gettleman had ever heard, which he relays in his piece titled “My Interview With a Rohingya Refugee: What Do You Say to a Woman Whose Baby Was Thrown Into a Fire?“
Similar to the dozens of other witness accounts Gettleman had heard in the area, Rajuma told the journalist that Myanmar government soldiers had stormed her village in August. They burned down all of the houses and separated the men from the women before then proceeding to execute each of the men.