One day, Ser Moeun’s landlord—a friend of the social worker’s—made a pass at her and told her that if she was “nice” to him, he would forget about the rent. Ser Moeun threw him out of the apartment. The social worker’s response when Ser Moeun complained was to tell her that since she was a “refugee woman” she had to expect things like that. After a couple of years of this difficult relationship, Ser Moeun gained enough confidence, both in her English and in her ability to cope on her own, to resolve the problem, and she severed all ties with the social worker.
***
In February 1976, ten months after the fall of Phnom Penh, our first concrete reason to hope arrived in the mail. A letter from a friend working with refugees in Thailand, Warren Hoffecker, reported that one of the refugees, a man who had gone to high school with Pran, brought out a report that Pran had been seen some months earlier in Siem Reap Province, driving an oxcart to pick up rice for people in his work camp. The man gave a lot of accurate details about Pran; I was persuaded the sighting was reliable. Siem Reap was Pran’s home province, and that was where he was heading when he left the French Embassy. I told Ser Moeun the good news but also cautioned her that it might still be a long time before Pran could make his way out.
Hoffecker, in his letter, said he faced the same burden—of telling Cambodian friends that their relatives inside might not be coming out for a long time. “Try to find some gentle way of getting her to accept the fact,” he wrote, adding with sardonic sadness: “There must be a less agonizing way of making a living than attempting to explain that the era of American miracles is over and there is nothing you can do.”
Hoffecker had some good contacts with members of an anti-Communist resistance group, which periodically sent armed patrols into Cambodia to gather information, harass the Khmer Rouge, and sometimes to extract people. I offered a reward if they could find Pran and bring him out. Warren made the arrangements. These guerrillas continued their forays, but they never located Pran. There was only one more reported sighting of this kind. A year later, in the spring of 1977, two of my sources independently reported that Pran had been seen in Kompong Thom, a province in central Cambodia a long distance from Siem Reap. They also said the reports indicated that he had become active in some capacity in the resistance.
None of this made much sense—why would he move to the interior, away from the border? why would he suddenly take up arms now, when he had no training as a soldier?—but these sources had been reliable in the past, and I clutched at the news as at a life preserver. If he was still alive, two years after the Communist takeover, with at least hundreds of thousands of others dead by massacre and disease, then I had a chance to see him again.
When Pran escaped last October, I asked him about these reports. The first was correct: he had been driving an oxcart in Siem Reap in the latter half of 1975. The second was erroneous: he was never in Kompong Thom Province. But one of his brothers had been there, whose name was very similar—Dith Prun. When the Vietnamese army overran Cambodia early in 1979 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, Pran finally learned what had happened to Prun, the oldest of his three brothers.
Prun had been a colonel in the Lon Nol army. He escaped to Kompong Thom with his wife and five children in 1975. For more than two years, until late 1977, he was able to conceal his military past, but then someone informed on him. The Khmer Rouge murdered the entire family. One report Pran received said that all seven were thrown alive to crocodiles.
***
In the spring of 1976, I returned to work at The Times as assistant metropolitan editor. That same week, the Pulitzer Prizes for 1975 were announced, and I won it in the foreign reporting category for my coverage of Cambodia; I accepted it on behalf of Pran and myself.
My family joined me in New York the following year. Though pieces of the book were written, it was nowhere near finished. Regardless, I felt I had to come back to the real world.
I continued to write letters and make telephone calls in my search for Pran, but my job gave me little time now to get depressed.
Ser Moeun would call, troubled, from time to time. Newspaper reports of the mass killings in Cambodia would stir her doubts again, and she would ask me to tell her once again exactly what Pran had said when he left the French Embassy. “Was he going to try for the border? What did he say about me and the children?” What she was really asking me, but was afraid to put into words, was whether I thought Pran could still be alive. And I kept saying, as much for me as for her, that I knew he would eventually emerge safe. Early in 1978, one of her woman friends in the Cambodian community suggested to Ser Moeun that she ought to think about remarrying, at least for the children’s sake. The woman mentioned a well-to-do Cambodian widower who was looking for a wife. Ser Moeun dismissed the notion out of hand. She was going to wait for Pran.
The miracle began to happen shortly after 9 a.m. on April 18, 1979. I was shaving and the phone rang. It was Andreas Freund of our Paris bureau. “I have good news for you, Sydney,” he said. And then he told me that an East German correspondent based in Paris had been traveling through Cambodia in a group of Soviet-bloc journalists; while in Siem Reap he had met Pran and was carrying a message from him for me. The message had eight words, in English—the eight most exquisite words I have ever heard: “Dith Pran survivor, living in Siem Reap Angkor.” I wanted to kiss Andreas through the phone; someday I’ll do it in person.
I then called the East German, Gerhard Leo, who works for Neues Deutschland. Like a crazy man, I pumped him for every last detail about Pran. He told me, with a calm that was the reverse of my excitement, that he had been approached by Pran near the temple complex of Angkor Wat on February 15. Pran took Leo aside where they could not be overheard and, in French, asked him to take the message to me. “It will make him happy,” Leo quoted Pran as saying. Pran also told Leo his general background—that he had worked for The Times, that he had evacuated his wife and children before the Khmer Rouge came, and that he had survived under the Khmer Rouge by passing himself off as a member of the working class.
All this took place shortly after the Vietnamese army swept through Cambodia in January 1979, pushing out the Khmer Rouge government and installing their own client regime; the dozen Soviet-bloc journalists were there through the auspices of the Vietnamese and their Moscow allies. Leo apologized for the two-month delay in getting me the message but explained that, after visiting Cambodia, he had gone back to Vietnam to cover the Chinese invasion of that country and had only just returned to Paris.
He said Pran seemed to be in “relatively good health.” Moreover, Pran had asked Leo to take a picture of him and send that to me, too. That photograph—of Pran in Vietcong-style black pajamas standing in front of some lesser Angkor Wat temples—has been sitting, framed, on my office desk ever since.
Having the picture of him in front of me served wishfully—but not realistically—to mute my fears. From all the refugee reports, it was clear that being alive on one day in Cambodia was no guarantee of being alive the next.
Yet despite these constantly depressing reports, neither I nor Ser Moeun—as we kept our long-distance vigil—could have conjured, or wanted to conjure, the true misery and madness of the life that had been imposed on Pran inside Cambodia.
***
On April 20, 1975, when Pran and his group left the French Embassy and headed to the northwest in the chaos of the forced exodus, he still held some hope that life under the Khmer Rouge would be tenable. But within a day or so, he knew differently. The Communist soldiers were treating people like livestock; they were slashing the tires on cars to force people to walk; they used ideological words he had never heard before; they seemed totally alien. By the fourth day, when he reached the river town of Prek Kdam, twenty miles out of Phnom Penh, he had decided on his plan.
He threw away his regular Western-style street clothes and put on a working-class disguise, that of a lowly taxi driver—dirty shirt, short pants, sandals, a traditional Cambodian neckerc
hief. He also got a shorter haircut and threw away the twenty-six hundred dollars I had given him, since money was useless in the new Cambodia and it could only incriminate him.
“I could tell they were lying to the people to get them to cooperate,” he says. “They told us we were only going to the countryside for a few days, because the Americans were going to bomb Phnom Penh.”
“If you tell the truth, or argue even a little, they kill you” was Pran’s simple rule of survival. “They told us all people are one class now, only working-class, peasants.” So he censored his thoughts and watched his vocabulary, keeping it crude and limited, to conceal his education and journalistic past. He talked as little as possible, and then softly and obsequiously. “I make myself a quiet man, like a Buddhist monk.” He feigned total ignorance of politics. “I did not care if they thought I was a fool,” he says. Inner discipline was a tenet of his survival. “I must resist in every way until I have victory.” “Resist” is a word he uses constantly in telling his story.
Not every Cambodian—or even every journalist who had worked with Westerners—was as astute as Pran. At Prek Kdam, Pran met Sophan, a cameraman for CBS, sitting calmly by the side of the road with his two wives, four children, and sister-in-law. “Sophan was happy,” Pran recalls. “When the soldiers asked him, he told them who he was and turned over his camera and film. He believed they were going to let him be a cameraman for the new government.”
Wary, Pran exchanged only a few words with Sophan, told him he did not trust the Khmer Rouge, and shuffled quickly away in his new lower-class guise. Some time later, friends told Pran that Sophan and his entire family had been executed.
The first major Khmer Rouge checkpoint Pran encountered was at Phao, about forty miles out of Phnom Penh. Here the Communists were screening everyone meticulously. “They talked gently,” Pran recalls. “‘Tell us the truth about who you are,’ they said. ‘No one will be punished.’ Most people believed them. They caught many big officials and military officers this way at Phao.”
Pran told them his by-now polished tale of being a civilian taxi driver, and the Khmer Rouge accepted it. “They asked me where my wife and children were, and I told them that in the confusion we became separated and they were lost to me.”
Pran received an identity card and moved on. Within a month, he reached the village of Dam Dek, about twenty miles east of his hometown of Siem Reap. He stopped there—and stayed for two and a half years—“because villagers told me the Khmer Rouge farther on were very brutal.”
They were hardly benign in Dam Dek. Pran witnessed many beatings, with heavy staves and farm implements, and knew of many killings. “They did not kill people in front of us,” he recalls. “They took them away at night and murdered them with big sticks and hoes, to save bullets.” Life was totally controlled, and the Khmer Rouge did not need a good reason to kill someone; the slightest excuse would do—a boy and girl holding hands, an unauthorized break from work. “Anyone they didn’t like, they would accuse of being a teacher or a student or a former Lon Nol soldier, and that was the end.”
Famine set in right away in Dam Dek, as it did across the entire country. The war had disrupted all farming and the next harvest would be too little, too late. Pran believes that maybe 10 percent of the Cambodian population of more than seven million died of starvation in 1975 alone, especially older people and children.
Early on, Pran secretly bartered his gold wedding band for some extra rice—but it didn’t last very long. Eventually, the rice ration in Dam Dek was reduced to one spoonful per person per day. The villagers, desperate, ate snails, snakes, insects, rats, scorpions, tree bark, leaves, flower blossoms, the trunk of banana plants; sometimes they sucked the skin of a water buffalo. Reports reached Pran’s village that to the west the famine was even more severe and that some people were digging up the bodies of the newly executed and cooking the flesh.
By October 1975, Pran—then part of a work gang planting and tending the rice fields—had become so weak that he needed a wooden staff to keep himself standing. He could not raise his legs high enough to cross the knee-high embankments around the paddies, so he would lower his body onto these knolls and roll himself over. His face grew puffy with malnutrition, and his teeth began coming loose. He feared he was dying. So he took a very grave risk.
One night, during the harvest season, he slipped out of his hut of tinder wood and thatch, crawled into a nearby paddy, and began picking rice kernels and stuffing them into his pocket. Suddenly, out of the darkness, two guards rose up. Pran tried to run, but his legs gave out and he fell. He pleaded with them, saying he was only stealing a little rice because he was starving. They called a dozen members of the village committee—ten men and two women—who began beating him with long, bladed implements used for cutting bamboo. He crumpled to the ground. They continued pounding him, shouting: “You are the enemy. You were stealing rice from the collective.” “I thought they were going to cut my head off,” he says.
They paused in their beating only to tie his hands tightly behind his back and lead him away to a more desolate spot. “Let’s kill him,” the leader of the group said. But another Khmer Rouge cadre, who liked Pran because he was a good worker, urged mercy. No decision was made, and Pran, trussed and swollen and bleeding, was left kneeling in the open all night to await his fate. It began to rain. “I prayed and prayed to Buddha for my life,” he says. “I said if my mother’s milk had value, my life would be saved.”
By morning, the man who had counseled against the death penalty had persuaded the others. Pran was paraded before the entire commune of six hundred and denounced for his “crime.” He was forced to swear that he would never again break the commune’s rules. The oath he was made to pronounce was “If I break the rule, I will give my life to you, to do with as you please.”
Once released, he took another risk. Following Buddhist custom, he shaved his head as a sign of gratitude for his salvation. The practice of religion had been forbidden by the Khmer Rouge; all statues of Buddha had been destroyed; monks had been either killed or made to work in the fields as common laborers. Pran’s act could have brought another death sentence down upon him.
Somehow, he got by again. When the Khmer Rouge asked him why he had cut off all his hair, he told them he had been having severe headaches and thought this might help. In this land of primitive medical practices, the Communists believed him.
This behavior may seem paradoxical to us, but not to Pran. Although for four years he went to extraordinary lengths to hide his background from the Khmer Rouge in order to stay alive, he never in heart denied himself or his upbringing. He prayed silently all the time. And he never changed his name, the one obvious mark that could have given him away, should anyone have recognized him and turned him in.
“Your name is given to you by your mother and father and by Buddha,” he says. “If you are a good person, your name will be lucky and Buddha will protect you.”
From 1975 through late 1977, Pran remained in Dam Dek, working at a series of arduous jobs: carrying earth to build the paddy embankments, harvesting and threshing the crop, cooking for a district cooperative of eighteen blacksmiths who forged farm tools, plowing with a team of horses, cutting and sawing trees in the jungle, fishing with hand nets in the Tonle Sap Lake. The work day ran from 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. and during the harvest season, in December and January, a few extra hours at night for threshing. The Communists called these the “assault” months, because everyone had to work faster and harder.
The Draconian rules of life turned Cambodia into a nation-wide gulag, as the Khmer Rouge imposed a revolution more radical and brutal than any other in modern history—a revolution that disturbed even the Chinese, the Cambodian Communists’ closest allies. Attachment to home village and love of Buddha, Cambodian verities, were replaced by psychological reorientation, mass relocation, and rigid collectivization.
Families were separated, with husbands, wives, and children all working on separ
ate agricultural and construction projects. They were often many miles apart and did not see each other for seasons at a time. Sometimes children were separated completely from their parents, never to meet again. Work crews were sex-segregated. Those already married needed special permission, infrequently given, to meet and sleep together. Weddings were arranged by the Khmer Rouge, en masse; the pairings would simply be called out at a commune assembly. Waves of suicides were the result of these forced marriages. Children were encouraged, even trained, to spy on and report their parents for infractions of the rules. “The Khmer Rouge were very clever,” Pran says. “They know that young children do not know how to lie or keep secrets as well as adults, so they always ask them for information.” Informers, old and young, were everywhere; betrayal could be purchased for a kilo of rice.
Sometimes Khmer Rouge youths were ordered to kill their teachers or even their own parents. Some carried out these acts without apparent qualm. Others were devastated. Pran remembers a case in his district in which a man was identified as an enemy of the commune, and his son, a Khmer Rouge soldier, was told to execute him. He did so, but later, alone, he put the rifle to his own head and killed himself.
Pran says he was always most afraid of those Khmer Rouge soldiers who were between twelve and fifteen years old; they seemed to be the most completely and savagely indoctrinated. “They took them very young and taught them nothing but discipline. Just take orders, no need for a reason. Their minds have nothing inside except discipline. They do not believe any religion or tradition except Khmer Rouge orders. That’s why they killed their own people, even babies, like we might kill a mosquito. I believe they did not have any feelings about human life because they were taught only discipline.”
The Death and Life of Dith Pran Page 5