Maggie O’Kane was a war correspondent who is now a film critic and heads up the Guardian Film Unit.

I was a war correspondent in Kosovo during the war, and soon after it ended I went into the town of Pristina, with NATO forces.  I went to a village outside the town where there had been a massacre – a whole family had been wiped out.  I managed to track down the only survivor: it was the mother, and all four of her kids had been killed.

She told me her story, and it was a truly terrible one.  She and the children had been pursued through the town by militiamen – from her house they’d chased her through the streets, to the village pizzeria.  They’d cornered them there, and they’d rounded them all up and then they’d pumped bullets into them and she described feeling her children cowering around her, and then feeling the thud as the youngest child, who was between her knees, was hit by a bullet.

The men thought she was dead along with her children, and they loaded them all onto a lorry and drove off.  And on the journey she climbed out from under the bodies, and got away.

She described feeling her children cowering around her, and then feeling the thud as the youngest child, who was between her knees, was hit by a bullet.It was one of those stories you never, ever can forget – what struck me so forcefully was that description of the bullet going into her youngest child’s body.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind; in some ways I never have been able to.  It’s affected how I see the world, my whole perspective on life.  When you’ve met someone whose suffering has been so profound, it stays with you.  I think of that woman on rainy Saturday afternoons when I’m playing with my own children and it’s a so-so kind of day: I think, actually, there are no so-so kind of days.  I don’t take any days with my children for granted.

I feel, too, that my journalism has moved on because of that mother and her story.  These days I don’t do stories like that any more, but I do run the Guardian’s film unit and I’m dedicating my working life to seeing the big picture, to addressing the big themes that mean that women like this woman don’t have to go through the suffering they do.  Meeting women like her has given context to what I do now, and it’s given me the energy to believe in it.  I’m interested in seeing problems at a macro level, and in using journalism to try to make the world a better and a fairer place – and a place where what happened to that mother never happens to another mother.  Even though that is, I think, still a long way off.

Bess Twiston Davies along with Libby Purves edits the Times Faith Online Section.

The story I’ll never forget is that of Immaculee Illibagiza, who was a Catholic survivor of the Rwandan genocide. She hid with six other women in a tiny bathroom for more than 90 days; and when I interviewed her about it, she told me how at one point her persecutors came looking for her, and she heard a voice in the next room ask: ‘Where is that cockroach Immaculee?’.  And the voice was a voice she knew – it was a businessman from her village, someone she had always respected.  She described to me the shock of hearing that voice, a voice she thought she knew, and suddenly realising in that split second that he was a man who wanted to kill her.

Her story made me think about a lot of things.  It made me think about language and its use, because I realised how powerful language is and how it can be used – as in this case – to strip someone of their dignity, to take away her humanity.  It made me realise how powerful words are, and it redoubled my efforts to use words and language as a force for good, rather than as in this case as a force for evil.

But Immaculee’s story hit home in other ways too.  She described to me how she had prayed her rosary, in that tiny bathroom, and that made me think about what it’s like when your faith suddenly is all you have to hold onto – how that must feel.  

The most lasting impact Immaculee’s story had on me, though, was in its ending.  Because, astonishingly, she managed to forgive that man who called her a cockroach, and who would have killed her: she escaped from Rwanda, but she went back later and sought this man out and forgave him.  That’s an extraordinary act of faith and of forgiveness, and it’s always stayed with me.

Peter Stanford is a freelance writer who writes for the The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Independent on Sunday.

I went with CAFOD to Angola, to do a story about how they were rebuilding their lives after the civil war of 2005/6.  And I remember one day we flew into the town of Uige, which had been completely destroyed in the fighting.  The whole place was utterly ruined, and the aid workers took me to the old hospital on the hill, and there was one doctor, an Italian, who was running a malaria programme.  As we arrived I saw this long queue of women, all mothers, all holding sick babies.  I went inside to interview the doctor, expecting him to tell me what he could do to help their babies: and instead he told me that there was nothing he could do, because in that region there was a form of cerebral malaria that could be treated with drugs, but the drugs weren’t available there.  I said: ‘What will happen to those babies?’  And he said, quite simply: ‘They’ll all be dead by the morning.’

I went out of the clinic, and I simply couldn’t take it in.  And then the women started holding out their babies towards me, because they thought that because I was white and from the west, I could save them.  And I realised, in that moment, how completely impotent I was: there was nothing at all I could possibly do to save them.  They were all going to die.

Since then I often think about those mothers, and their children.  Because the truth about Angola is that it’s got plenty of wealth – oil, other resources.  But its people have been crushed by powerful politicians and businesses which have failed utterly to address their real problems, and the end result of that is that babies who could be saved, die.  It struck me that this is the price we pay, in the west, for the comfortable life we lead: we think it doesn’t touch other lives, but in fact it does.  We have too much, we use too much, we care too little, and other lives in another part of the world, a world most of us never visit, are snubbed out because of it.  I’ve never forgotten that.

Joanna Moorhead is a freelance writer for the Guardian and the Independent.

Last year I interviewed Robert Meeropol, whose parents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the US in 1953 after being convicted of passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  He told me the story of how he and his brother were sent out to play in the garden that evening – his parents were put to death at sundown – and how they played outside for ages, with no-one calling for them to come back in.  And eventually they did go inside the house, where their parents’ friends were crying; and they realised that their lives had changed forever, and that nothing ever would or could be the same again.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in the US in 1953 after being convicted of passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

I was terribly struck by this child’s eye view on a colossal tragedy.  How does a little boy survive losing both his parents – especially in circumstances like this, where they’ve been put to death by the state, leaving him and his brother also tainted with the brush of wrong-doing?  But whatever the Rosenbergs had done, Robert and his brother were innocent – and they have gone on suffering, for a whole lifetime.

What struck me about Robert was that he refused to be bitter.  He’s set up a foundation to help children whose parents are being persecuted; he’s used what happens to his parents as a way of carrying on in a positive way.  His story also made me think about what parenting means, and what we leave with our children if we’re suddenly taken from them.  Robert felt he was absolutely the child of his parents, even if they couldn’t stay with them.  It made me think about how great our influence is on our children, and I think we never should forget that.