Horrific childhood testimonies by survivors of the Khmer Rouge
genocide in Cambodia. These 30 brief narratives were collected by
Pran from now-adult survivors of Poi Pot's killing fields. Most of
those included here currently reside in the US. Pran, a
photojournalist whose story was featured in the movie The Killing
Fields, is the founder of the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness
Project; his wife (and co-editor of the volume) DePaul is its
executive director. Comparisons to Hitler's genocide are
inevitable: Here, too, a government systematically exterminated
millions of innocent men, women, and children through a program of
relocation, starvation, forced labor, and outright massacres. The
narrators, who were only children when the Khmer Rouge seized power
in 1975, cannot, of course, explain why the regime ruthlessly
murdered nearly two million of their compatriots, but perhaps
criminal chaos is much of the point here. Uneducated (thus
"untainted") village children were less likely to be worked,
starved, or walked to death, and were indoctrinated to disavow
family ties and show loyalty to all-powerful Angka (the Khmer Rouge
regime). Many children were forced to watch executions of their
relatives without flinching. A few became monsters, like the
six-year-old recollected by one witness here, who attacked a
pregnant woman with an ax. With too little room to present a
picture of the narrators' lives before and after the hellish years
of 1975-79, the recorded memories are saved from a tedious
repetitiveness by a few remarkable descriptions, such as that of an
emaciated malaria victim with a swollen belly looking "like a
frog," and a scavenging child finding duck eggs in a human skull.
This compelling material might be even more powerfully disturbing
had it been accompanied by additional explanatory and background
material. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Childhood testimonies by survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in
Cambodia. . . . Compelling."-Kirkus Reviews "Underscores with great
poignancy the horror of the Pol Pot period."-Nancy J. Smith-Hefner,
Journal of Asian Studies This extraordinary book contains
eyewitness accounts of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot's genocidal
Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, accounts written by survivors
who were children at the time. The book has been put together by
Dith Pran, whose own experiences in Cambodia were so graphically
portrayed in the film The Killing Fields. The testimonies related
here bear poignant witness to the slaughter the Khmer Rouge
inflicted on the Cambodian people. The contributors-most of them
now in the United States and pictured in photographs that accompany
their stories-report on life in Democratic Kampuchea as seen
through children's eyes. They speak of their bewilderment and pain
as Khmer Rouge cadres tore their families apart, subjected them to
harsh brainwashing, drove them from their homes to work in
forced-labor camps, and executed captives in front of them. Their
stories tell of suffering and the loss of innocence, the struggle
to survive against all odds, and the ultimate triumph of the human
spirit.
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