Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  The following morning the exodus began. Huoy and I removed the white tarp from the roof of our hut. We packed the tarp, the mosquito net, the mats and the clothes into bundles once again and attached them to the shoulderboard. Another journey. We had been on the move ever since the communists took over. From Phnom Penh to Wat Kien Svay Krao. From there, the failed attempt to escape the country, which brought us to Tonle Batí. From Tonle Batí by truck and train to Phum Chhleav, with Ma’s death on the way. And now this. The Khmer Rouge said we were going to the ‘front lines’ but didn’t explain what or where the front lines were. For all we knew we were going to the moon.

  With a groan, I hoisted the bamboo stick to my shoulder. The load was heavy. My weight and strength were still below normal because of the dysentery, and I had stubbornly packed the rest of my medical reference books in our luggage, even though Huoy had asked me to throw them away. Huoy carried the teapot in her right hand, and with her left hand she steadied a bundle on her head. We entered the muddy pathways of the crowded settlement. In many places the paths were six inches deep in water. Garbage and human wastes flowed downhill over the paths and in and out of houses. Phum Chhleav was on low ground, and when the rains came it caught the runoff water from higher land nearby.

  Around us, the other inhabitants emerged from the huts they had built of thatch and reeds and pieces of plastic, and started down the paths. It was a cold morning. The ‘new’ people wrapped their kramas around their shoulders to stay warm. Those who didn’t have kramas or extra shirts shivered and rubbed themselves with their hands. We walked down the paths toward the railroad tracks, but not everybody in Phum Chhleav was lucky enough to leave. Through the open door of a hut, we saw an old lady lying unconscious against a wall. Her legs were grossly swollen with oedema. She stank with wastes and was covered with flies. Unable to walk and too heavy to carry, she had been left behind.

  As we climbed onto the railroad track, which was elevated a few feet above the nearby ground and was the only dry place in the landscape, we looked around at the pitiful spectacle. And then I understood why the rice fields had been so empty of workers. It was as if all the patients I had visited in their huts had been multiplied many times over and put in a parade before our eyes. People with shrunken faces and haunted, vacant eyes, with legs and arms as thin as sticks or else puffy and bloated with oedema. Leaning on canes or on relatives’ shoulders, or alone, they walked with that terrible economy of movement that signals the approach of starvation. As Huoy and I watched, a thin, scrawny, middle-aged woman put down the end of the hammock she had been carrying, slung under a bamboo pole. The man inside the hammock called out weakly, ‘Sweet, sweet, bring me with you! Don’t leave me behind!’ But the woman shook her head and trudged off down the railroad track. After a moment of indecision the man carrying the other end of the hammock abandoned it too and hobbled off after her. No one went to the hammock to help the man. I didn’t. Even if I could have helped him, there was no way that Huoy and I could have carried him. If we tried to carry him we probably wouldn’t make it ourselves. So we walked on.

  The sun cast our shadows in front of us, onto the railroad track. I put the shoulderboard down, shifted it to the other shoulder and went on. To me, every hundred yards seemed like a mile. To other people, every ten yards was a mile. Around us the malnourished, the sick and the near-dead shuffled on in groups of two and three, dressed in whatever rags they owned. Everyone was muddy. Some had wet their crotches or soiled the seats of their pants. They stopped to rest, covered with flies, and some who rested just stayed there, giving in to gravity. A teenage boy ahead of us tried to get up from a sitting position. He put his palms on the ground and pushed but wasn’t strong enough. He tried again, pushing as hard as he could with his matchstick arms. With a great effort he got his buttocks off the ground and then brought his legs underneath and shakily rose to his feet. He took a step, almost fell and then took another faltering step as we passed him.

  What made it worse, what made it more appalling was that somehow it was ordinary. You put one foot in front of the other and you kept on walking. You heard the cries of the weak but you didn’t pay much attention, because you were concentrating on yourself and your own survival. We had all seen death before. In the exodus from Phum Chhleav, the atrocious had become normal.

  No one took count, but my guess is that of the seventy-eight hundred who walked in to Phum Chhleav, a little over half walked out, and some of those were dying on the way. Those who lay down and didn’t get up had plenty of company, for scattered along the railroad track were corpses from the previous days and weeks. What happened to the corpses is what always happens in a tropical climate. Their skin had swollen, turned purple-black and burst through their clothes. Most of them had one leg or one arm raised stiffly in the air. They stank badly. Their eyes were half open. Flies clustered around the mouths and anuses and eyes. For them I felt sorrow more than revulsion. It was not the dead’s fault that they were lying there. It was the Khmer Rouge’s fault for causing the deaths, and the relatives’ fault for not burying the dead. And that made me angry.

  How fast man changes! How fast he sheds his outer humanity and becomes the animal inside! In the old days – only six months before – nobody abandoned the dead. It was part of our religious tradition that if we didn’t cremate or bury the bodies, and if we didn’t pray, the souls would wander around lost. They would be unable to go to heaven, or to be reborn. Now everything had changed – not just our burial customs but also all our beliefs and behaviour. We had no more monks and no religious services. We had no more family obligations. Children left their parents to die, wives abandoned their husbands and the strongest kept on moving. The Khmer Rouge had taken away everything that held our culture together, and this was the result: a parade of the selfish and the dying. Society was falling apart.

  My own family was falling apart too. Of my father’s eight children, only three of his sons were still with him, and I was barely on speaking terms with the other two and their wives. My brothers had done nothing for me when I was sick. They had been willing to abandon me to die. Huoy and I kept my parents in sight as we trudged along the railroad track, but we didn’t walk together.

  In the late afternoon we all made it to the railroad station at Phnom Tippeday. There the Khmer Rouge gave us two cans of rice apiece, enough for a couple of undersized meals. We trudged on, following the crowd along the road to the south.

  We went through a village called Phum Phnom – literally translated, ‘village of the mountain.’ It lay at the base of the mountain ridge that dominated the western skyline. It was empty except for some Khmer Rouge soldiers and those of us ‘new’ people who were passing through. Near the old town hall, which the Khmer Rouge had taken for their regional headquarters, the road split in three directions. We took the left fork, following the other stragglers from Phum Chhleav.

  That night we camped on a hillock in the rice fields – my parents, my brothers and Huoy and I. A Chinese family shared the hillock with us. The night was noisy with frogs and crickets and the treetops stirring in the wind. I couldn’t sleep. I got up several times to sit in front of the fire, feeling its warmth, rubbing my hands, watching the flames. Huoy, who was worried about my health, kept asking me to come back next to her and sleep. Finally I did. In the morning we discovered that the Chinese man on the other side of me had died. In the dark nobody had noticed.

  With this, something inside me snapped. It was too much to accept – the death march, the hunger, the uncertainty of going to another unknown destination. I brought Huoy and the rest of my family to a shady spot on the side of the road and asked them to stay there. Then I went off, exploring, without any clear idea of what I was going to do.

  The first person I ran into was Pen Tip. Pen Tip had practised medicine in Phum Chhleav, though he was not a doctor. Even then there had been something familiar about him, and I had searched my brain for the reason. Finally I placed him: around 1972, at the hospital
in Phnom Penh where I had gone for my radiology rotation as a medical student, Pen Tip had been a radiological assistant, positioning patients for the X-ray camera. He was a tiny man, less than five feet tall, sure of himself and quite clever. We knew each other by sight, but this was our first conversation.

  Pen Tip told me in a self-satisfied way that he had gotten permission to stay in a hamlet nearby. He said it was better to stay there, close to the railroad, than to move even farther into the countryside. Anything was better, he declared, than going to the front lines.

  ‘I was thinking the same thing,’ I said. Whatever the front lines were, I didn’t want to go to them. ‘Besides, in the mountains to the south there is sure to be more malaria.’

  ‘I agree, Doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t call me “Doctor,” ’ I said. ‘But thank you for the advice.’

  I left Pen Tip and wandered off. The next person I talked to was an ‘old’ person who turned out to be originally from Chambak, just down the road from my home village, Samrong Yong. Because I came from a village near hers, she was very kind to me. She took me to see a man whom she thought might take me in. His name was Youen. He was an ‘old’ person and section leader of another hamlet nearby.

  Youen was a dark-skinned man with short, wavy hair and broken teeth. He wore only black culottes cinched around his waist with a cracked leather belt. As we talked, he took out a pouch with locally grown tobacco and soft, brown flexible pieces of banana leaf inside. He sprinkled tobacco on a rectangular piece of banana leaf and rolled it into a cigarette, with one end slightly larger than the other. He flattened it between his fingers and lit the larger end with a lighter.

  I told him my name was ‘Samnang’ (a common nickname whose literal meaning is ‘lucky’). My wife was ‘Bopha’ (which means ‘flower’ in Khmer, just as ‘Huoy’ means ‘flower’ in Teochiew Chinese). I said I had been a taxicab driver in Phnom Penh. I came from a humble background. ‘Bopha’ and I wanted to work for him. We would do anything he asked if we could stay there. We wanted to serve him and in this way serve Angka. If he let us stay there it would save our lives.

  ‘Tell me more about your background,’ he said.

  I explained how I had lived in Samrong Yong all my life, just a simple man of the countryside, until the war drove me into Phnom Penh. My wife and I had been poor under the Lon Nol regime, barely able to find enough to eat. ‘Bopha’ had sold vegetables in the market, but corrupt officials took everything she earned.

  Apparently he believed that Huoy and I came from a proper class background, because he agreed to let us stay under his care. I thanked him effusively and went back to find Huoy and my parents.

  I was happy. Here was a little backwater, outside of the main current of hunger and revolution. Here we could stay and get enough to eat. Youen would protect us. I told my parents they probably could get a place with him too, if they came along.

  My father and my brothers exchanged knowing glances.

  I had pointedly invited my parents to join Huoy and me, but not my brothers and their wives and children. On the surface, my reason was practical: we could not all hide with Youen; as a group we would be too conspicuous. But the underlying reason was my anger at my brothers. Had they helped me? Only my father had visited when I was sick. We were all family, but my strongest obligation was to my parents, to the top of the hierarchy. Toward my brothers I felt little; toward my sisters-in-law, nothing. Neither of them had been nice to me or to Huoy.

  We talked it over, my father and my brothers and I. Papa agreed that he and my mother would go with Huoy and me.

  But fate had not finished playing its hand. The Khmer Rouge had finally realized that they were losing too many workers on the exodus. They sent oxcarts to help the survivors along. My brother Pheng Huor got one of the oxcarts and put his family inside.

  My parents were standing beside me with their luggage. Pheng Huor and his wife, two daughters and son drew slowly away with a great creaking of the oxcart’s wooden axle. Then Pheng Huor’s three-year-old son looked back, saw his grandfather there and began to cry.

  It was too much for my old father. The little boy was his favourite in the entire family, the only son of his favourite son.

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ Papa shouted. Pheng Huor stopped the oxcart. Without another word, my father and mother ran to the oxcart with their luggage, leaving Huoy and me behind.

  17

  Reorganization

  Youen, the chief of the hamlet outside Phum Phnom, was not a man of much ability. He knew how to farm, he knew how to obey orders, but he was not particularly clever or strong. Still, he had agreed to protect Huoy and me, and as long as he did that he would have our loyalty.

  His hamlet was full of ‘old’ people. Not much had changed there since prewar times, though the chaos of the revolution was all around. A short walk away, in Phum Phnom, was the Khmer Rouge regional headquarters. In another direction lay Phum Chhleav, a place we were glad to leave behind; and somewhere off in a third direction were the mysterious ‘front lines,’ which Huoy and I were trying hard to avoid.

  In exchange for Youen’s patronage, Huoy and I became his servants. We worked at his house, and at the houses of his sister and his daughter nearby. Huoy helped with the cooking and housework. I swept the yards, filled the water jars and took the oxen out to graze on the stubble of the harvested rice fields. Whenever I walked past anyone in Youen’s family I bent over to keep my head lower than theirs. Even if they were sitting down, I tried to stay lower than them. In Cambodia this is the normal deference shown by servants to their masters.

  It was amazing, really, what had happened to us. In Phnom Penh, as a doctor, I never would have stooped before an illiterate farmer like Youen. He would have lowered himself in front of me. Now everything was reversed. I offered him water with my eyes downcast, the cup held in both hands. I called him puk, which means ‘father’. As far as Youen and his family were concerned, I was Samnang, the ex-taxi driver. Bopha was my wife. Those were our identities. Huoy and I kept to our roles night and day, except when we were alone together, and even then we whispered, so nobody would discover our true backgrounds.

  The strange thing was that Huoy and I were happy. We were like people who had fallen from a cliff and landed on a ledge halfway down. We got used to the ledge and didn’t complain about being lower than before – we were glad enough that we hadn’t fallen all the way to the bottom. Life wasn’t too bad. We didn’t have to work very hard. And our health had gotten better, because we had enough rice.

  When we first moved in with Youen, he gave us a few cans of rice from his personal supply. Soon he put our names on the ration list, the first step in making us permanent members of his community.

  He sent me to a Khmer Rouge depot to get a rice ration. I came staggering back with a 25-kilogram bag of paddy rice on my shoulder and a jubilant smile on my face. Imagine getting so much food from the Khmer Rouge! Imagine knowing that we had enough food for weeks ahead!

  Each grain of paddy rice is covered by a tough brown husk with raised ridges. The husks are inedible, so they have to be removed. Youen’s sister, whose name was Yin, lent me a hand-operated rice mill. I poured the paddy rice into the mill and turned the crank around and around, grinding the rice between the two flat stones. Out came a mixture of white rice and empty husks, plus some broken bits and pieces.

  Next, Huoy poured the mixture of rice and husks on a large flat basket and began tossing the grain up in the air and catching it again. She had never tried it before, but it was really quite easy. The white rice landed back in the basket but the lighter husks or chaff floated away in the breeze.

  The rice was edible now, but some of the grains were still covered with a brown layer of bran. Yin showed us how to polish the rice in an old wooden device in Youen’s yard. The polisher was like a large-scale mortar and pestle, except that the pestle that struck the rice grains was attached to a foot-operated lever.

  This was the old-fashion
ed way of processing rice in the countryside, milling it, winnowing it and finally polishing it. It was all new to Huoy, who like most city people always bought white rice in the market. But once we had polished the rice she was in her element. She put rice and water in a pot and rubbed the rice between her palms to release the dust and the impurities. She reached in with her fingers to pick out the bits of husk and other impurities that floated to the top. Then she drained the water from the pot, added fresh water to the level of the rice and a little higher, checked the level with her forefinger to make sure, covered the pot and put it on the fire to boil. Once the water had reached a full boil, she pulled wood from the fire to reduce the heat until the water was simmering quietly. Then she let it cook covered and without stirring until all the water had boiled off and evenly spaced steam holes appeared in the surface of the rice.

  It was perfect – the grains separate and fragrant-smelling, not too wet or dry. Before eating, Huoy took three sticks of incense from our luggage and lit them, to honour her mother. She prayed aloud, waving the incense in her palms three times in Chinese fashion. ‘Mother, we have good food now,’ she said. ‘We are thinking of you, and we miss you. You eat first.’

  After the offering we began our meal. We had nothing to serve with our rice and didn’t care. We just ate and ate and ate. We ate so much it hurt, and we were still happy.

  After we were on the ration list, Youen’s sister Yin suggested that we take the next step toward permanent residence, which was building a house. She, Youen and I were standing in Youen’s yard, next to the tree that Huoy and I had been sleeping under at night. I didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t my place to, and studied Yin discreetly. She was a remarkable woman – divorced, in her forties, a gruff-voiced cigarette smoker with thick, muscular arms like a man’s. She was physically stronger than Youen, smarter than him and more of a natural leader. Her brother scratched his head as the idea of my building a house slowly sank in.