WASHINGTON — When I heard the news Thursday that Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia, had been found guilty of war crimes in Sierra Leone, I immediately telephoned one of the people whose life had been ripped apart by his soldiers: my sister Eunice, back home in Liberia.


Before Mr. Taylor unleashed the tsunami of rape, murder, torture and dismemberment that would engulf Sierra Leone, killing more than 50,000 people and causing hundreds of thousands to flee, there was Liberia.


It was in Liberia that Mr. Taylor’s rebels arrived in June 1990 at the Firestone rubber plantation (they still called it “plantation”) outside Monrovia, where Eunice was working. The fighters were intent on the revenge killings that would claim hundreds of thousands of civilians from Liberia’s rival ethnic groups. Eunice, then 27, ran outside in time to see about 20 men grabbing her co-worker Harris Brown and dragging him outside.


Why? He happened to be Krahn, the same ethnic group as that of the country’s hated president at the time, Mr. Taylor’s predecessor.


With the civil war raging and Mr. Taylor’s gunmen roaming the country wearing the wedding gowns, blond wigs and Halloween masks that some believed would make them bulletproof, many Liberians did not allow their children to stray far from their side. Mr. Brown had taken his son to work with him, so the 10-year-old boy was there to witness what came next.


First, the soldiers stripped Mr. Brown to his underwear and sat him on the ground. They shot him from behind, then stabbed him in the stomach. Then they dragged the knife up through his chest. And when they were done, the man who wielded the knife that killed Mr. Brown walked up to his son, patted him on the head, and said, “Don’t cry.”


Eunice watched all this, then fled upcountry, joining the legions of African women doing what they do when their world falls apart: making cassava bread to sell on the side of the road. And every day that she strained the cassava to drain the juice to make the flour to bake the bread, she thought about her own son, Ishmael.


She had taken steps to make sure that what had happened to Mr. Brown’s son, what had happened to all of those other Liberian sons and daughters who were kidnapped by Mr. Taylor’s troops and forced to become child soldiers, did not happen to her Ishmael. She had sent him away, at the age of 5. She had sent him all the way to Gambia, to live with his father and his father’s people.


With Liberia’s rapidly vanishing infrastructure, battered economy, nonexistent mail service and about-to-be-destroyed telephone lines, the distance would eviscerate the relationship between mother and son. But Eunice, like so many African women then, made that choice to save her son’s life.


Because of Charles Taylor, she would not see him again for 21 years.


It was in Liberia that Mr. Taylor’s forces kidnapped another of my sisters, Janice, along with her husband, Yao, and their 1-year-old son, Logosou, from the Monrovia suburbs where they were living with a handful of orphans and refugees. As the Taylor rebels fired rocket-propelled grenades and artillery rounds, Janice crouched beside a bathroom wall with her baby. Logosou had become so used to the fighting in Liberia that he had acquired the habit of putting his hands up in the air whenever he saw soldiers, saying: “See, Mama? Hands up.”


Janice didn’t let him put his hands up this day, though; she crawled on top of him to shield him from the shelling. Ten Taylor fighters stormed the house, shooting wildly. They killed a 9-year-old orphan who had been injured during the siege, killed a man who happened upon the group, and took everyone else hostage, marching them 10 miles to their barracks. As my sister walked under the blistering sun, she held her son close, reciting the “Hail Mary” into his cheek.


A female soldier walked up to Janice and admired Logosou. “Oh, what a fine baby!” she cooed. “I’ve killed two like him today.”