Survival in the Killing Fields Read online

  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.]

  Contents

  Introduction: The Prize

  1 Early Rebellions

  2 Education

  3 Romance and Coup

  4 Civil War

  5 The City of Bonjour

  6 The Fall

  7 The Wheel of History

  8 Exodus from Phnom Penh

  9 Wat Kien Svay Krao

  10 Medicine for Angka

  11 Return to the Village

  12 The Crocodile Loses Its Lake

  13 New Directions

  14 The Plough

  15 Sickness

  16 The Parade of the Selfish and the Dying

  17 Reorganization

  18 Bells

  19 Angka Leu

  20 The Wat

  21 The King of Death

  22 Candles

  23 The Rains

  24 Rice Farming

  25 The Dam

  26 The Cracks Begin to Show

  27 Drops of Water

  28 Happiness

  29 Crossing the Sea

  30 Grief

  31 Retreat

  32 Liberation

  33 Battambang

  34 The Danger Zone

  35 The Locket

  36 Saloth Sar

  37 Okay, Bye-bye

  38 To America

  39 Starting Over

  40 The Killing Fields

  41 Celebrity

  42 Kama

  Epilogue by Roger Warner

  Introduction

  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 y
ears 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.

  Stealing the rice mill was not a rational idea. It was not like stealing food, where the benefits balanced the risks. Owning the rice mill wouldn’t keep me from starvation. At most, it would allow me to remove the husks from stolen rice a little faster than with a mortar and pestle. And the risks were higher than stealing food. The shed was next to the common kitchen, and the kitchen was guarded by soldiers night and day.

  To me, stealing the mill was a test: It was a test of my abilities as a thief, and a challenge to the miserable life I had been living. It was a way of finding out whether the gods wanted me to live or die.

  Each time I went near the common kitchen I watched the shed without appearing to watch it. Very slyly. But there were always soldiers around.

  Eventually I concluded that the only chance lay in trying to steal the mill when the area was full of people.

  A few evenings a week the village leader held political indoctrination meetings that everyone had to attend. Like most Khmer Rouge, the leader had taken a new name to show that he had a new revolutionary identity. He called himself Mao, probably in imitation of China’s Mao Tse-tung. He was an uneducated man who wore the standard black pajama uniform of the Khmer Rouge.

  During the next meeting that Mao held near the common kitchen, I sat at the edge of the crowd with my back against the shed. The walls of the shed were made of a stiff, woven material, like rattan. The evening had turned to black, starry darkness. No moon yet.

  Mao opened the meeting with the usual slogans. The rest of us got wearily to our feet and obediently shouted the slogans back to him, pounding our fists against our chests, and raising them in straight-arm salutes. ‘Long live the Cambodian revolution!’ he shouted. ‘Long live the Cambodian revolution!’ we yelled back, though we didn’t mean it. He said it twice more and we repeated it for him, and then he started with the next set of slogans.

  When he was done we sat down and he began telling us how lucky we were to be living under such a regime, where everyone was equal and where meals were served to us every day. How lucky we were to be struggling together to build a modern and powerful nation.

  The truth was that under the communists the country was much worse off than it had ever been during my lifetime. We had no electricity. No clocks or automobiles. No modern medicines. No schools. No religious worship. Very little food. And we lived in constant fear of the soldiers.

  He went on with his speech, reciting phrases he had learned like a parrot from his superiors. Every speech was almost exactly the same. The crowd sighed and settled down.

  It was time.

  ‘Lord Buddha,’ I prayed silently, ‘please forgive me. I do not steal to get rich. I share with others. Please protect my life once again.’

  I leaned forward, pulling the wall of the shed with me. The bottom of the wall overlapped the floor of the shed but was not fastened to it. I pulled myself backward and up into the narrow gap between the wall and the floor and into the even blacker darkness of the interior of the shed.

  ‘Our workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiers,’ Mao was saying, ‘have launched an offensive to build up the economy! We are struggling with nature to become masters of our fate! All our cooperatives are waging an offensive, working with great revolutionary zeal for the sake of a spectacular great leap forward!’

  Groping around on the floor I found a round, heavy object, heavier than expected. Fumbling, pulling at anything that stuck out, I broke the mill down into its parts, two heavy grindstones plus the casing and crank.

  ‘. . . they are now resolved to launch another relentless offensive . . .’ Mao’s voice droned on.

  Pushing against the bottom of the wall, I managed to squeeze out the same way I had come in.

  ‘. . . and on to victory!’ Mao bellowed.

  In front of me, the silhouettes of heads and shoulders facing dutifully in Mao’s direction. To the side, an irrigation ditch, part of a network of canals. With a grindstone under each arm and the crank in my waistband, I settled into the water. Go slowly, I told myself. Do not make a ripple. Do not make a sound. Going slow is much better than going fast.

  The speech, interrupted by mandatory clapping, grew fainter. Only my nose and eyes were above water, like a crocodile; my feet pushed on the mud underneath. The stars shone in the sky and again in their reflections on the surface of the water. But a glow had appeared on the horizon. The moon was about to rise. Time to hurry. Time to speed up before it was too late.

  Climbing out of the ditch, I walked as fast as I could to the fertilizer shed where I worked during the day and hid the mill under a manure pile. I ran to my hut, changed into dry clothes and ran back toward the kitchen, where once again slogans were being shouted and repeated loudly by the crowd. Then long applause. Too late – the speech was over.

  In the moonlight, soldiers had come to inspect the spot where I had been sitting, beside the shed. Curious civilians peered around, some of them calling my name. When I ran up, out of breath,
Mao called me to the front and demanded to know where I had been.

  Walking toward him, I let my back and shoulders sag. My eyes lowered in deference and my mouth formed a silly apologetic smile.

  ‘Sorry, comrade,’ I told him meekly, ‘my stomach was upset and I dirtied myself.’ I patted the seat of my trousers in case my meaning wasn’t clear. ‘I just went home to change my clothes.’

  Raucous laughter came from the crowd, even the soldiers. Everyone knew what it was like to have intestinal problems. Everybody did, because of our unsanitary living conditions. Even Mao, a man of more than average cruelty, began to grin. He waved me off, like a parent who is amused by the wrongdoings of a child.

  I walked back to the storage shed and sat with my back against it, as before.

  I ground rice in the rice mill later that night.

  And the next night I led my gang out to steal again.

  On a very different night, six and a half years later, I was sitting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. I wore a tuxedo. On my feet were shiny patent leather shoes. On the stage a woman announcer read, Haing S. Ngor, pronouncing it Heng S. Nor, which is as close to the correct pronunciation as foreigners usually get.

  Since leaving Cambodia, my life had changed as completely and as dramatically as it is possible to imagine. I had come to America as a refugee. With no experience in theatre or film, I had been hired to play a fellow Cambodian named Dith Pran in a film called The Killing Fields. I was aware of mistakes in my performance, just as I was aware of making many mistakes in my real life. Yet I had been nominated, along with several other experienced professional actors, for an Academy Award.

  But then, I thought, what is so special about acting in the movies? It is a matter of taking on a new identity and convincing others of it. Convincing others, perhaps, the way I had convinced Mao the Khmer Rouge village chief. Waiting for the envelope to be opened and the winner announced, I was excited, but my heart was at peace. Whatever happened, I could accept. Because I knew that my best performances were over before I left Cambodia. And the prize there was much greater.