Survivor Stories
Dr. Sotheara Chhim 42, Phnom Penh
I always dreamed of being an architect or maybe a civil engineer. The Khmer Rouge changed that. I think less than ten doctors survived. People returned home with illnesses and there was no one in the hospital. My mother said I had to study medicine. At first, I did surgery in the provinces. When I worked, I saw a lot of clients who became psychotic and ran away, and a lot of suicides. We thought maybe it was a curse from black magic. We didn’t understand it…
So I was one of the first to be trained in psychiatry.
Cambodians are still affected by the Khmer Rouge and its legacy. Many think Cambodians are OK and not traumatized because they can smile. But it’s not true. The pain is under the surface. The problem doesn’t go away. It comes back with a trigger, like during the tribunal…Here, it’s a concept called Baskbat, broken courage.
The work of healing is ongoing. There is no time limit to the work on the effects of the genocide. Healing will never be too late and healing can still be achieved.
Som Vorn Age and Residence Unknown
In 1978, I was jailed for taking a coconut. Then they checked my background and saw that I was the son of farmers and my parents were good people. Maybe picking just one coconut wasn’t enough to be part of a CIA network. The leader of the prison came to me and said they had been confused and not to be angry.
While I was away, they took my wife and 3-year-old son. She was pregnant, and they cut her stomach open and took the fetus. They believed it gave them magical powers and protection. Then they filled her stomach with grass.
The genocide was possible because, by killing the people mentally, you can kill more than if you kill them physically. It still affects people today because you lost your courage and you didn’t get it back. Today, we still feel defeated.
Chin Meth 53, Kampong Thom
When I first saw fighting, I was asked to dig a trench and get inside. I was so afraid to shoot that gun, I just shot at the sky. At night, when I slept, I saw myself carrying bombs. Now, when I’m sad, I smell the bombs and I imagine that place. And I remember carrying the guns…
After the evacuation, we were asked to collect everything from the houses: clothes, gold, rice, everything…then we had to put them separately. Some things stayed with the leader. We didn’t ask where it was. It belongs to Angkar. Then we were ordered to clean the city, the hotels, the streets. It was so quiet. I felt like it was a dead city.
Before my testimony, I always covered my face when I went to the market. I hid until the lawyers encouraged me to speak. Before the Khmer Rouge court, I had anger in my heart. Now, I can come here (to this prison) because I’m happy and my heart is free. During the regime, I worked so hard in these fields planting rice. Now, I come here and I just see my homeland.
Sith Yam 60, Kampot
I would save my own dinner and then, at night, bring it to my children. I would touch them when they slept and rub their legs to make sure they hadn’t died in the night from the watery porridge. One night, I touched my daughter on her leg. It was solid and did not move. I was so scared she had already died. I twisted her leg and she woke up. I was so startled and happy, I started to cry.
Every day, I was praying for someone to help get rid of the regime. I just wanted it over. When the Vietnamese finally came, I walked for a month until I could reach my village. Now, I tell my children you have to fight back and not let the Khmer Rouge return.
Sun Phy 42, Banteay Meanchey Province
I have no memories now. Our only memory was about food. What I knew was that my house was by the river. I think it was in Kratie (Krah-chey). I remember freshwater dolphins in my village, but I haven’t been there yet. I wanted to print out papers and hand them to people all along the river, but I don’t have enough money.
Can you imagine when my children ask where I come from, I cannot say? Can you imagine not having a homeland, no relatives? I believe there might be some of my relatives alive. If I could find my homeland, then maybe I could find them.
I feel so upset with myself. Other children who were sent abroad who can’t speak Khmer can find their relatives. I’m Cambodian, I’m here, and I still can’t find them.
Yun Bin 55, Kampong Chhnang Province
I couldn’t see anything; I just knew there was a pit in front of me. There was a soldier with an ax, and then I fainted. I felt my soul running to tell my parents that I was not being taken to be educated, but to be killed. Four more bodies were dropped on me and I regained consciousness, but my soul was already gone.
I tried to kick the bodies off of me and scratch the string off my hands. It smelled horrible. The warmth of blood and fat was all over my body. I looked up and heard someone yell to kneel, then I heard the breaking sound, like someone breaking a coconut, and then another body was thrown down.
I started to pray to my ancestors, to the Buddha, to anyone. I prayed that, if the bodies could help me get out, I would seek justice for them.
Ou Seng Thy 46, Kampot Province
After the regime ended, I started searching for my father. I met some friends who had survived, and they told me my father had been killed. Pol Pot soldiers took a palm leaf and cut his throat. When my mother heard this, she collapsed. This was 1983, and I was 18 years old. I was so angry, I became a soldier to take revenge.
I want the Khmer Rouge leaders who are accused, like Duch, to be judged and tortured. His flesh should be cut little piece by little piece until his death. We should do to them whatever they did to us. For example, one youth was arrested and he was tortured; his penis was burned with fire. If they cut our ears, we cut their ears a little; if they hit us, we hit them a little; if they burned us, we burn them a little back. We do that little by little until their death.
Sok Sop Eal 70, Kampong Ke Village
Of all my memories, the most painful is when they stopped me from praying, and they forced me to eat pork and feed the pigs. All jamia Muslim were forced to eat pork. They wanted to hurt us, insult us and cause us pain. They wanted to keep us from praying. All religions, even Buddhism, were forbidden.
When I was a soldier with Lon Nol, the other soldiers told me that Pol Pot was a bad man and without religion. But I didn’t believe them; I regret that now. I can’t believe the Khmer Rouge regime existed without religion.
Sou Sotheary 70, Phnom Penh
Maybe soldiers knew about my transsexuality because, one day when I was collecting stones on the mountain, seven or eight soldiers came and raped me. I fell unconscious and, when I woke up, I was covered in blood. I crawled back to the house on my hands and knees and told [my lover]. He had been in the house making baskets. He held me and we both cried. That night, we started to discuss how to escape.
Kang Seth 63, Chhouk District
In 1978, I was ordered to be a soldier to fight in the south against the Vietnamese soldiers. After one week, I ran away. I was caught by another group of Khmer Rouge soldiers and ordered into the Malik mountains to carry big stones. I also cut the forests and carried soil. We had to work so much with so little food. I assumed the Khmer Rouge thought we would die there, so they just made us work. To them, we were already dead.
When I was in prison, I belonged to the “old people,” so I wasn’t treated as badly. The others, they tied their hands behind their backs and pushed them off the roof of the prison. The ones they pushed were mostly kids and old people. I heard their voices. Being back here [at the monastery] reminds me of what happened. I still feel fear when I see it again. I don’t trust people around me—anywhere.
Phok Khorn 57, Siem Reap Province
I didn’t tell anyone about my forced marriage or when they put me in prison. I just wanted to forget and not feel the pain. The villagers knew I was a Pol Pot soldier but they didn’t know my experience.
In the past, when I thought about Tuol Sleng prison I cried. When I first went there, TPO sent someone with me. It reminded me so much of the past. TPO arranged a religious ceremony, and I just cried.
Most of the Pol Pot soldiers wore these tattoos to protect against spirits and from getting hurt in battle. I guess mine didn’t work! [Laughs!]
In 2006 when I first told people my background for the tribunal, my family was so surprised. Now, it’s time to find justice.
Nam Mon 48, Phnom Penh
My brother was a prison guard, and he told me that my father was in the prison. When I went to work to give people medicine, I saw him. He was so skinny because there was no food. He told me not to come to the room because, if they knew that he was my father, they would kill the family. I didn’t say anything. So I stopped going there. I asked one of the guards to give him medicine.
In the early days, after I was put in prison, they thought I was a boy. I had short hair and I looked like a boy. They took me to the bath and made me take off my clothes. I didn’t. But after they discovered I was a woman, they raped me.
Zélie Pollon is a journalist whose big picture project is compiling testimonies of war survivors from around the world. In the meantime, she covers New Mexico for Reuters America domestic news service. Her time in Cambodia was part of her Rotary Peace Fellowship in post-conflict reconstruction at the University of Bradford in the UK.
Alan M Thornton has been an advertising, editorial and fine-art photographer for 16 years. He also teaches university-level photography courses and leads workshops at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. His documentary work has been featured with Hewlett-Packard, which earned him the Prestigious Photographer sponsorship, as well awards from The Center For Fine Art Photography and the IPA Merit Awards for his travel and documentary portraits.
A book on the work, “IWitness: Testimonies by Survivors of the Khmer Rouge,” is due to be published in Cambodia by the end of the May. For more information or to support the project, please contact Zelie Pollon at zpollon@gmail.com.
Thank you for allowing my story on Cambodia so much space in the recent issue of the Reporter, and for including so many portraits and testimonies of Khmer Rouge survivors. I was disappointed, however, that you chose to edit out the paragraph that justifies culturally sensitive psychosocial interventions, the learning of which was the entire reason I was in Cambodia. The point edited out is that regardless of the criticism of Western intervention methods -- of medical imperialism, jeopardizing local coping mechanisms, etc. -- the fact is that war and violence creates trauma. There is no reason to believe that the physiological and cognitive experiences that underlie the human response to trauma are any less active or relevant in an Asian culture than in a Western country. There are certainly resilience factors in many different communities, (and immense study on how people working with war-affected communities might enhance those factors) and manifestation of trauma greatly varies in both form and intensity. But many argue, myself included, that the neglect of the impact of trauma is more politically-motivated, allowing abuse and exploitation to go unchallenged. What is different in other countries is the social meaning attributed to the experiences and, more importantly, to the approach to recovery.
Beautiful and touching narrative of Zelie's compassionate work with TPO helps us better understand how humanity needs to grow and share!
I did not serve in Vietnam, rejected as unfit, details omitted.
I am so happy to hear of the work in Cambodia to help people abused past redemption by Pol Pot and his agrarian marxist vision. I have met vets and refugees from the Southeast Asian (SEA) Peninsula over the years. I wrote a paper in college, which concluded that as with other marxist revolutions, when "peace broke out" in SEA the killing would begin in earnest. That is the a feature of marxism, that non-believers who might offer resistance are dealt with switfly.
The vivisection of pregnant females to obtain a fetus for "fun" was not limited to Cambodia, but regularly practiced in Laos and South Vietnam, and a long time before it happened as related here. The consummate depravity and perfection of terrorism as a tool by communists in SEA is well documented, as early as 1960.
All this information was there if you dug into it, as I did. After April of 1975, the plight of all the people abandoned by our poltical class was similarly available and is documented, if not in the detail here. Totaling up, about 5M in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam perished at the hands of the communist masters so attractive to John Kerry and other luminaries.
Joan Baez tried to organize a concert to raise money to aid refugees, as the atrocities got too big for apologist media to hide, and could not attract any support from the former "peace" community. All I can say is I guess they are like good Germans in 1944. Anything goes as long as I am fine and the "right people" are getting hurt.
Is there a lesson in this project? Many, I think.
The first one is what will you do to prevent such atrocity in the future? This nightmare is the work of men, it is not ordained, and particularly this one was created by a US Congress too afraid of "peace activists" to sell rifle ammo to the South Vietnamese as the communists came across the DMZ in bald violation of the Paris Peace Accords.
The second is what did the great moralists of peace do when the killing shifted into high gear? Nothing. What does that say about them as people? The numbers (and damn McNamara, too) are that the "peacetime" body count escalated by multiples from the height of US engagement in the war.
Where was Jane Fonda when this was going on? She wasn't walking in the street, protesting organized murder even more effective than the Final Solution.
I find it very admirable that SFR has printed this article. I am in awe of Zelie and Alan, that they could do this and retain their sanity and hope. I hope deeply that some in Cambodia may appreciate that we here care a bit, and forgive us our easy cowardice when, in fact, the war on the ground was going the right way. It was the war of politics where Pol Pot won, and turned loose on his countrymen. And this country turned its eyes away.
I remain, as for some time, disgusted and angry past redemption that Zelie and Alan, those went before them and told accurately of what was happening in SEA, have to witness a truth inconvenient to polticians and opportunists, current and past, pretenders to moral superiority in all manner of things. But that's my problem.
Unless you think the better solution is to prevent this kind of horror than try to help after it has done its work.
We cannot win all fights. I have no illusions about that. To understand what is happening on the ground in the horror of war (and it is a horror) you have to dig with an open mind.
John Kerry has announced from Pakistan that the tail rotor of the "...Navy helicopter" lost in the raid to get Osama. Kerry sells himself as a warrior and Vietnam vet, sometimes, a man of military experience.
If this quote is accurate, however, he didn't watch Obama's victory lap at Ft. Campbell. SEALs belong to the Navy, but all the aircraft in this op came from the 160th SOAR. Army aircraft, and no disrepect to USN, the 160th is just the best there is at doing this kind of op.
What else does Kerry not know?
I would also point out a huge difference between the US engagement in SEA and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US could walk from SEA without comebacks. Ho, the Pathet Lao and Pol Pot had all they could handle dealing with killing off any potential opposition, and later fighting among themselves for who would rule the Peninsula. Ho lost.
Pol Pot, Ho and others could talk about the success of communism in SEA and how history was on their side, but they really didn't have global ambitions, or by any means global reach.
Radical Islam, as opposed to people I have met in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has global ambitions, and has global reach. Er, if you didn't figure that out in 2001, just ride with me. It's true.
Not sure what the right path is, but we are in a fight we need to win. We cannot walk on this one and hunker down.
War is horrible. And the sorriest (worse) state of a person is that they have nothing at all they would fight for. Life is so empty one cannot be stirred to preserve it. Smarter people than me figured that out, but I will bet my life on the concept.
Life is not for the faint, sorry. You can be inoffensive, diverse and multicultural all you want. I've been there and done it, in the muslim world and other places. And bad people with ugly intent may or may not find you, appreciative of your willingness to be their victim.
Is that what you really want? What you bring to the world, your friends, you family?