Tuol Sleng and the Cambodian Genocide: Survivors' Stories

(30 min.) "This documentary relates the story of Tang Kim (who is a Buddhist nun today) and her constant struggles to come to terms with what happened to her during the Khmer Rouge regime. One night, newly married Tang Kim was told by the Khmer Rouge that she was being taken to live with her soldier husband. But instead, she and eight other women were sent to a rice field near her village for execution. Tang Kim heard the screams of the other women being raped. Knowing she would be next, Tang Kim begged her guard for protection. But the other soldiers returned and raped her as well."

[pp. 94-102] Survivor Vann Nath, a painter arrested and sent to S-21 in 1977, tells the harrowing story of his arrest, transport to S-21, torture and near-starvation until his escape in 1979. Included are photographs of one hundred people about to be executed, described by Vann Nath as just having arrived at S-21.

Carmichael, journalist and foreign correspondent, has woven together the stories of five people whose lives intersected to traumatic effect: Comrade Duch, head of S-21 prison; Ouk Ket, a diplomat recalled from Paris to Cambodia: Ouk Ket's daughter, Neary, who was just two when her father disappeared ; Ket's French wife, Martine; and Ket's cousin Sady, who never left Cambodia and still lives there today. Through these personal stories, the author's own research, numerous interviews and months spent following Duch's trial, Carmichael extrapolates from the experience of one man to tell the story of a nation. In doing so, he reaffirms the value of the individual, countering the Khmer Rouge's nihilistic maxim that: 'To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.'

[Previously published as A Cambodian Odyssey] Haing Ngor won an Academy Award playing translator Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields. In this book he tells of escaping Phnom Penh and hiding his identity (he was a doctor practicing Western-based medicine, which was forbidden). He describes imprisonments, interactions with Khmer Rouge soldiers, hunger & deprivation working in the countryside pretending to be an uneducated peasant; brutalities he witnessed, and risks he took helping the injured .

"Often called the Cambodian Diary of Anne Frank, this prize-winning biography of Teeda Butt Mam chronicles four years of hell in the Cambodian Holocaust and its effects on one family and the millions like them who were enslaved by the Khmer Rouge. Set against a nightmarish background of degradation and terror, it is about the ability of individuals to rise above even these conditions...."

One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was defeated.

Writing from prison, Sarith Peau describes how, as a young teen when the Khmer Rouge came to power, he was beaten and tortured, hung by his wrists behind him, and forced to bury mutilated bodies. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge he was made part of a crew to walk on acres of human bones in order to sort them into piles, even- he believed - finding the skull of his grandmother with a ragged blindfold still on. In America, suffering from severe undiagnosed PTSD and nightmares, he was at age 33 imprisoned for life for killing two other Khmer survivors.

Color 3-volume graphic novel in French, by "Tian," who experienced the forced evacuation from Phnom Penh in April 1975, hardships and suffering in the countryside under the Khmer Rouge, the chaos during the Vietnamese invasion, and escape to a minimally better Thai camp. v.1, Au revoir Phnom Penh. v.2, Ne vous inquietez pas. v.3, Un nouveau depart.

French-born Picq was married to a Cambodian resistance fighter who became a middle-rank Khmer Rouge cadre. At first sympathetic with the aims for a renewed Cambodia, she did a variety of work including as a translator in Ieng Sary's foreign ministry. Picq's fear grew however as she saw people being purged by the K.R. Her husband remained loyal to Ieng Sary, but she was horrified and wrote in protest when Sary was pardoned by Sihanouk in 1996.