Survival in the Killing Fields
Read Survival in the Killing Fields Online
Authors: Haing Ngor
Haing Ngor,
a young doctor in his native Cambodia, saw his life transformed when the Khmer Rouge communists, led by the notorious Pol Pot, took over his country in
1975. He and his family, along with entire populations of cities and towns, were forced into the countryside to become ‘war slaves’ in a vast gulag policed by brutal enforcers and
spies. After suffering nearly unbelievable hardships, Ngor finally escaped Cambodia in 1979, resettling in the US, where he helped fellow refugees. His prospects improved when director Roland Joffe
cast him as the real-life character Cambodian translator Dith Pran in the film
The Killing Fields
(1984). His performance earned him an Academy Award. Ngor’s subsequent film work
included parts in Oliver Stone’s
Heaven and Earth
and various movies and TV shows, but acting was secondary to his main concerns of aiding Cambodians and bringing his Khmer Rouge
persecutors to justice. In 1988, he wrote his autobiography,
A Cambodian Odyssey
(
Surviving the Killing Fields
). Ngor died in 1996, while attempting to prevent a drug-dealing Los
Angeles street gang from stealing a locket which contained a photo of his wife. This is his true story of finding love and fighting for survival.
Roger Warner
is a journalist, historian and author of several books on Southeast Asia. His
Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in
Laos
won an overseas Press Club award for the best book on foreign affairs. He first met Haing Ngor when Dr Ngor was a refugee fresh from the traumas of the Khmer Rouge, in a camp along the
Thai border, long before Haing Ngor starred in the film
The Killing Fields.
Praise for the first edition (
A Cambodian Odyssey
):
‘Gripping . . . Invaluable . . . A landmark book . . . This is the most revealing book about the nature of evil I have ever read. But it is also a drama with heroes and
heroines – and comedy and laughter . . . Ngor starred in the best film on Cambodia that has ever been produced. And now he has written the best book on Cambodia that has ever been
published.’
T.D. Allman,
Chicago Tribune
‘Profound, personal, and proud . . . a story so essential to our understanding that it deserves to be considered as one of the more important autobiographies of our
time.’
Los Angeles Times
‘A beautiful, frightening, gentle, terrifying tale . . . The brilliant testimony of a courageous man . . . There might be moments when you read Haing Ngor’s [book]
and weep, but I promise you they will be tears of enlightenment.’
Chicago Sun-Times
‘A potent tribute to the human spirit . . . With sure and simple prose, Ngor sweeps the reader inexorably into a maelstrom not easily forgotten. Nor should it be; this
important document, which traces the suffering of a nation within the torment of one life, deserves remembrance.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘A terrible and thrilling story.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Anyone who wants to understand what Khmer Rouge rule did to the Cambodian people must read Haing Ngor’s
A Cambodian Odyssey
. I venture to say that if you
do, it will be among the handful of books you will recall for the rest of your life.’
Congressman Stephen Solarz
‘It is hard to imagine a more remarkable story. It is a record – and an indictment – that will last for generations to come.’
Pittsburgh Press
‘An emotional personal journey . . . harrowing . . . uncommonly candid . . . compelling because it reminds us anew of man’s capacity for cruelty and self-delusion.
It also reminds us of the surpassing strength of the human spirit. Most important, it implores the civilized world to remember the millions of innocent men, women and children who lie beneath
killing fields and to condemn those responsible for these brutal murders.’
New York Daily News
‘A personal testament of courage . . . Ngor’s observations of war, the horror of captivity, and the wholesale desecration of Buddhist culture and religion make for
sheer narrative power; but the book’s real impact has to do with the triumph of human spirit.’
Christian Science Monitor
‘A major book . . . You walk away from this autobiography with more enrichment and understanding than any movie could provide.’
Chicago Sun-Times
‘A searing eyewitness account of cultural genocide and personal triumph.’
Booklist
‘Stunning, triumphant . . . illuminating. Ngor not only describes the events of his own life but also delivers an insightful analysis of the events that transformed his
native land from “an island of peace” in war-torn Southeast Asia, to “a nation at war with itself.” His account bears witness for himself and the hundreds of thousands of
other Cambodians who lost loved ones among the millions put to death under the Pol Pot regime.’
Buffalo News
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in 1987 as
A Cambodian Odyssey
in the US
by Macmillan Publishing Company
This edition published in paperback in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2003
Copyright © 1987 by Sandwell Investment Ltd., and Roger Warner
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84119-793-9
ISBN 978-1-84119-793-7
Ebook ISBN 978-1-47210-388-8
Printed and bound in the EU
10 9 8 7
[I want to dedicate this book to the memories of my father, Ngor Kea, of my mother, Lim Ngor, of my wife, Chang Huoy (Chang My Huoy), who have died in the most miserable,
uncivilized, and inhuman ways under the Khmer communist regime. I have written this book for the world to better understand communism and other regimes in Cambodia.]
12 The Crocodile Loses Its Lake
16 The Parade of the Selfish and the Dying
The Prize
I have been many things in life: A trader walking barefoot on paths through the jungles. A medical doctor, driving to his clinic in a shiny Mercedes. In the past few years, to
the surprise of many people, and above all myself, I have been a Hollywood actor. But nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust.
That’s who I am.
Between the years of 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge communists exchanged our traditional Cambodian way of life for a vast, brutal experiment in communism. Toward the end of those
years I was living in the northwestern part of Cambodia in a tiny agricultural village. By then, the luxuries of life before the revolution were a half-forgotten dream. I went barefoot. My clothes
were rags and my ribs were showing from hunger. To keep the Khmer Rouge soldiers from killing me, I had to pretend I was not a doctor. They had already killed most of my family. And my case was
typical. By destroying our culture and by enslaving us, the Khmer Rouge changed millions of happy, normal human beings into something more like animals. They turned people like me into cunning,
wild thieves.
I began stealing on a small scale. Slipping out of my hut after dark, blending into the shadows, pausing to look and listen for soldiers, hearing only the crickets and frogs in their loud
nighttime chorus, I crept into the village garden. Reaching into the rows of ripening corn, pulling the husks carefully back, I twisted the corncobs from their stalks, pulled them out, and smoothed
the empty husks to their original shape around the hollow space inside. In the daytime, to a casual observer, the corn would appear to be untouched.
At first I stole alone. But other people in the village were hungry too, and they needed a leader. My gang raided fields and gardens by night. Our favourite target was rice.
For Cambodians, rice is not a side dish. Rice is the centre of our meals, a clean, neutral medium that sets off the flavours of other foods we add to it. Traditionally, until the Khmer Rouge
took over, we had eaten rice every day. Under the Khmer Rouge, we hardly ever ate rice at all – not rice as it should be, with each grain separate and moist, and a clean, fragrant steam
rising from the bowl.
Rice had become an obsession for my gang. I led them to rice paddies ready for harvest. Like madmen, we broke the stalks and branches of the rice plants with our hands, threshed the branches by
rubbing them back and forth on the ground with our feet, and filled huge hemp bags with unhusked rice before hurrying away. Later, in hiding from the soldiers, we removed the husks with mortars and
pestles, cooked the grains, and ate until our stomachs could hold no more.
We also raided vegetable gardens belonging to other villages nearby. I built up a large supply of stolen food and gave the extra food away. In all I fed more people in the village than anyone
except the regime itself. But I wasn’t content. It was time to strike back.
Under Khmer Rouge rule, all private property was outlawed. Cooking at home was outlawed. Everything from work to sex to family life was tightly controlled. Everyone in the village was supposed
to eat together at a central mess hall, called the common kitchen.
One day at the common kitchen while taking a meal, the usual starvation ration of a bowl of watery broth with a few rice grains at the bottom, I glanced through the open doorway of a nearby
storage shed. On the floor of the shed lay a small hand-powered rice mill.
As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was only a matter of time before the rice mill was mine.