Belise Rutagengwa (center) poses with Opra Winfrey and Elie Wiesel.

LAKE FOREST — When Belise Rutagengwa chose to share her feelings about surviving the Rwandan Genocide, she wrote  about the kinship she felt with Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. But the Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart junior also detailed a fundamental difference between her experience and that of the famed author of Night.

"(For) Elie Wiesel, night was dark and dangerous, flooded with death and decay; the silent, black, smoke-filled sky betrayed all that happened while he was at Auschwitz," Rutagengwa wrote in an essay for Oprah Winfrey's 2006 National High School Essay Contest.

By contrast, she wrote, "night was my only escape. Night was when my family and I could find the courage to sneak through the Rwandese cornfields to find a place to hide by day."

"Each night was a step closer to liberation. One did not dare walk in the daylight; it would be like walking towards death."                       

Rutagengwa's stark memories served as an answer to the question posed by the essay contest: "Why is Elie Wiesel's book Night relevant today?" And her words were strong enough to move her to the head of some 50,000 entries, earning her one of 50 $10,000 scholarships announced this week on Winfrey's Chicago-based national talk show.The awards ceremony, which was taped on April 25 and broadcast Thursday, featured an appearance by Wiesel himself, continuing a humanitarian mission he began more than 50 years ago.Night was written by Wiesel in the mid-1950s after 10 years of refusing to speak of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His original 900-page memoir, written in Yiddish, was translated to French and published as the 127-page La Nuit in 1958.A translation to English was published in 1960, with Wiesel receiving a $100 advance and an initial printing of 3,000 copies. Wiesel once wrote that "some felt that its subject was too little known, others that it was too well known."But the once-repressed story caught on over time, eventually being translated to 30 languages. Wiesel became a leading activist for humanitarian causes and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Rutagengwa's own story of survival began as a 5-year-old child during the Rwandan Genocide, when violence between the central African nation's Tutsi and Hutu populations led to the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Tutsi in the spring and summer of 1994.

"I felt a strong identification with Elie Wiesel as I read Night," she wrote in her essay. "I say this because, like Elie Wiesel, I was one of the children of another atrocious time in history. I survived the genocide that occurred in 1994 in Rwanda.

"I was born a Tutsi and raised in Kigali, Rwanda. I had a loving family who provided a joy-filled home and a fine education. Life could not have been any better for me. We Tutsis strolled the streets unaware that we faced extermination."

Unfortunately, Rutagengwa's parents and grandparents were among the victims during the 100 days of killing. In her essay, she wrote about the need for international action to address the situation in the Sudan's Darfur region, where the non-Arab population has been subjected to organized killing at the hands of militia.

Rutagengwa — who now lives with an aunt in Mishawaka, Ind., and has been a student at Woodlands since her sophomore year — was unavailable for comment Friday. But in a statement released by the school, Rutagengwa said that she hopes her essay will "raise public consciousness and motivate (people) to ask their governments to intervene in the Sudan and elsewhere in the world where genocide is victimizing innocent peoples."

She added that "I feel so honored to receive this scholarship. I am very glad I'll have a big start in paying for my college education, but even more importantly, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to use this recognition to encourage people to act against genocide wherever it occurs."