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Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors. Compiled by DITH PRAN. Introduction by BEN KIERNAN. Edited by KIM DEPAUL. New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1997. xvii, 199 pp.
In April of 1975 the communist Khmer Rouge entered the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and ordered the city's inhabitants into the countryside. For the next four years, people lived in labor camps under the watchful eye of black-clad cadres. Family members were separated from one another. Children were taken from their parents. Virtually everyone over the age of five was assigned to a work team and forced to labor fourteen to eighteen hours a day with only a single bowl of watery rice to eat. During this period as much as one-third of Cambodia's population may have perished as a result of starvation, disease, or execution.
This collection of essays recounts the story of Pol Pot's reign of terror from the perspective of its youngest victims. The twenty-nine essays were compiled by Dith Pran, whose own horrific experience under the Khmer Rouge is recounted in the film The Killing Fields. Some of the essays...