Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  Yin said impatiently, ‘If Samnang doesn’t know how to build a good house, I will show him.’ With that, she picked up an axe, handed me another axe and took off at a fast stride. I glanced at Youen, who nodded his permission, and followed her.

  I followed her on a path through some rice fields and into the forest. She had enormous, muscular calves and wide, splayed-out feet, and it was all I could do to keep up with her. Finally we reached a dense grove of trees on a hillside and stopped. To give herself maximum freedom of movement, she stood with her legs apart, took the hem at the front of her sarong and twisted it around and around, brought the twisted cloth through her legs and up, and then tucked it into her beltline at the back of her waist. This way her sarong was like a pair of shorts, revealing her stocky thighs. Yin swung her axe. She felled a tree and I felled another one, but it took me longer. She watched me critically as I finished chopping the tree down and then we carried the tree trunks back to the village. Every few minutes I had to stop to put my log down, but Yin strolled on without changing pace, her log on her shoulder, a half-smoked cigarette tucked behind her ear.

  We went again the next day, collecting timber to use for the house. She began to talk in her gruff voice as she walked ahead on the pathway. ‘You eat and eat until there’s nothing left,’ she said. ‘You will have no seed to plant next year.’ I kept quiet, afraid that Huoy and I had offended her by eating our rice so greedily. Then I realized that she was talking about ‘new’ people in general and indirectly criticizing the regime.

  Yin had watched the relocation march from Phum Chhleav. ‘I saw you people walking past here to the front lines. Never seen so many sick people before. Never,’ she grumbled. ‘Don’t know what things are coming to. Before, when you worked you got money. You could take your money to the market and buy medicines. Cure yourself. But not now. No markets. Can’t buy anything. No money either. New government doesn’t even have money.’

  She turned around as if with an afterthought, swinging the log on her shoulder as if it were weightless, and looked at me with narrowed eyes. I was panting hard.

  ‘Never seen anything like this watery rice they feed you people. Hardly any rice in it at all. People like you get weak and skinny. You’re not good for much when you’re weak. Not good for much at all.’ I looked down at my body and had to agree with her. My shirt was open in front and all my ribs were showing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said humbly, ‘it is true that there has not always been enough to eat. But Angka says we have to sacrifice until we build up the nation.’

  Yin looked at me as if I were a fool, and spat vigorously to the side. ‘Used to grow more rice around here,’ she said. ‘Much more. Now, people living here don’t work as hard as they used to. No reason why they should. Can’t plant what they want. Can’t eat when they want. So they grow less. Problem is, there’s a lot more people to eat it now. Like you and your wife.’

  ‘Auntie Yin,’ I said, using the polite prerevolutionary form of address, ‘I apologize for the food my wife and I eat. We do not mean to be a burden.’

  ‘Not your fault, son. Angka runs things around here. Angka owns all the fields. Owns everything. I planted mango trees – I’ve got to ask Angka for permission to pick the mangoes. Never seen a government like this one.’

  Yin continued down the path, shaking her head. ‘Never seen a government like this one,’ she repeated, and spat again.

  I hurried after, smiling to myself. Her sceptical grumbling was full of common sense. Yin could live in her house without going to the front lines. She didn’t go hungry. But she still didn’t like the revolution, and I found comfort in that.

  When Yin and I had cut enough wood for the house frame, we gathered reeds that had been growing on the edges of the rice fields and made thatch by sewing bundles of reeds together. Soon we had the house finished, a sturdy, waterproof, one-room affair. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was far better than the hut in Phum Chhleav and better than my first hut in Tonle Batí. Huoy and I moved in, buried my medical books and other secret possessions under the dirt floor and spread the white plastic mat on top.

  With the house, we became members of Youen’s community. But I sensed that our situation was not permanent. From time to time emaciated stragglers from the mass relocation marches came wandering through the landscape, as sick as anybody who had been in Phum Chhleav. And all around Youen’s hamlet the Khmer Rouge were busy. Every day, messengers on bicycles and motorcycles drove by, coming from or going to the headquarters in Phum Phnom. The leaders went past us on horseback and jeep, on their inspection tours. The Khmer Rouge had big plans. They were mobilizing the whole countryside.

  All too soon, the day came that I had dreaded. Youen assembled everyone from the nearby houses, and announced, ‘Angka needs all childless couples to go to the front lines.’

  The news was like a body blow. Huoy and I thought we had an understanding with Youen. We had become his servants. We had worked for him. He was supposed to protect us.

  Youen said the two of us and another couple would be going. ‘Better get ready,’ Youen told me. ‘They say you should have a hammock, a hoe, some rope and some baskets for hauling dirt. You won’t need anything else.’

  I felt betrayed. ‘How can I go to the front lines?’ I told him. ‘I don’t have any of the equipment. It’s ridiculous. I won’t go.’

  Youen hadn’t expected me to talk back to him, and he was slow to react. ‘Well, maybe Angka can supply you with what you need at the front lines,’ he said.

  ‘No. I need the equipment here,’ I said. Indirectly, I was both resisting the order and challenging his authority. Besides, I knew that Youen had a son who was married but childless. He hadn’t made his son go. He had protected Huoy and me for a short while, but when the pressure was on, he got rid of us.

  Youen raised his voice and spoke to everyone. ‘This is Angka’s rule, not my rule. Everyone who must go, must go!’

  Yin came up to me and stood with her back to her brother so he couldn’t hear. ‘Son, we have no choice,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want to push you out. I wish you could stay. You and your wife are nice people. But really, you must obey. If you don’t obey, it will mean trouble for everyone.

  I knew that she was right. Yin was a smart, good-hearted woman, and my respect for her was great. But I argued until Youen gave me two old hemp rice sacks to make a hammock with, and one hoe and a rope. Then I asked him for another hoe and the baskets, not because I thought he was going to agree but because I was stalling for time. Huoy was in our house getting our secret possessions from the hole in the dirt floor. By the time she came out of the house with our luggage, the bonheur between Youen and me was gone. I didn’t care.

  Huoy and I and the other couple got ready to walk. An escort of soldiers with rifles had come in to show us the way. The soldiers motioned to us to start. We began to walk slowly down a path to the south, to rejoin Angka’s experiment of social reorganization.

  We walked for less than an hour. We were still in sight of the big mountain ridge behind the Phnom Tippeday train station, but on its back side, out of sight of the wat on the plateau. Though I had no way of knowing it, this was the area where we would remain for the next three years. None of the places we had already been in this part of the country – from the railway station at Phnom Tippeday, to Phum Chhleav where I had pulled the plough, to Phum Phnom where the Khmer Rouge had their headquarters – or where we would go, among the transient labour camps of the front lines, was more than a few hours’ walk apart. Our new universe was about ten miles square.

  The soldiers took us to a hillock where the front lines ‘cooperative’, as it was called, had its field kitchen, warehouses and administrative quarters. We were given the rest of the tools we needed and sent off to another wooded hillock, where we would sleep.

  With her quick, expert fingers Huoy sewed a double hammock out of the rice sacks. We rigged the hammock between two trees and strung the mosquito net overhead to protect u
s from the mosquitoes, gnats and flies. We were part of a section of about two hundred young married ‘new’ people, some with children, most without. Between two and three thousand other ‘new’ people camped out on neighbouring hillocks in the dry rice fields.

  The main task of our cooperative was digging canals for irrigation and water control. Every week or so, as work on the canals progressed, the location of the cooperative was moved. Every day we dug as long as there was light to see by, and usually long after. At night we attended political meetings. I had never worked so hard in my life, nor slept and eaten so little. We had no days off, no holidays, no celebrations.

  It was here on the front lines that I truly understood, for the first time, the Khmer Rouge’s far-reaching plan for the reorganization of Cambodian society. They had led us to it in stages, first with the evacuation of the cities, then with the gradual tightening of their rules, then with the second and third exoduses where necessary. In February 1976, on the front lines, they were trying out their revolutionary theories in purest form.

  The key concept for the new society, as we were told all the time in propaganda sessions, was ‘independence-sovereignty’. One word made out of two, independence-sovereignty. For Democratic Kampuchea, this meant being absolutely free of other countries – free of their aid and even of their cultural influence. We Khmers would make it on our own. By reorganizing and harnessing the energy of our people and by eliminating everything that distracted from our work, we would become an advanced, developed nation almost overnight. And that rapid development, or ‘great leap forward’, as it was called, required our ‘correct revolutionary understanding’ of many other concepts and terms. For us it was almost like learning a new language.

  For example, there was the concept of ‘struggle’. I had been hearing about ‘struggle’ ever since the takeover in Phnom Penh, but it was only on the front lines that I fully understood how it fit in with the rest of the ideology. ‘Struggle’ was military talk, like ‘front lines’. It reflected the idea that the nation was still at war. On the front lines we didn’t just work, we ‘struggled’, or else ‘launched offensives’. We were to ‘struggle to cultivate rice fields vigorously’, ‘struggle to dig canals with great courage’, ‘struggle to clear the forest’, and even ‘struggle to solve the manure problem’. We were to ‘launch an offensive to plant strategic crop’, and ‘launch an offensive to perform duty with revolutionary zeal’.

  The goal of this struggling and launching of offensives was ‘victory’, or ‘mastery’. We were going to achieve ‘victory over the elements’. We would become ‘master of the rice paddies and fields and forests’, ‘master of the earth and water’, ‘master of the canals’, ‘master of the flood problem’.

  To become masters, to achieve the ‘great leap forward’, we had to sacrifice. That meant working hard without complaining, no matter what the obstacles. No complaining, even though we worked eighteen- or twenty-hour days, with only thin rice gruel to eat. They wanted us to be single-minded work fanatics, never slowing our pace. They wanted us to be revolutionary zealots. As a song on the Khmer Rouge radio put it, ‘We are not afraid of the night, the day, the winds, the storms and rain and sickness. We gladly sacrifice for Angka to show support for the revolution.’

  We had to sacrifice everything from the old regime, including material possessions. ‘Get rid of all the Western goods you still have with you,’ a cadre told us. ‘Because if you keep those things your minds will still be on the old times and you will not be able to work hard. Discard the makeup, the fancy clothing, the books, the gold. You do not need them. Get rid of your cooking pots and utensils too. If you cannot discard these things, you are the enemy. You will still be serving capitalism, and not serving the community. You do not need any property now.’

  They abolished private property. Everything belonged to Angka now. Luckily, the Khmer Rouge code kept the soldiers from searching our bodies for property, because that was where Huoy and I kept our gold and where all the ‘new’ people hid their valuables. And they never found my medical books and instruments because I buried them underground. But they went through our luggage. Missing, when we came back from work, were some of Huoy’s silk blouses and sampots, some of her brassieres, her makeup kit, most of her mother’s clothes and our cooking pots, except for the teapot, which we were allowed to keep.

  They had already abolished religion – disrobed the monks, destroyed the Buddha statues. On the front lines they abolished the family too. They wanted us to renounce personal attachments of any kind, because those relationships interfered with our devotion to Angka. Children had to leave their parents, the elderly had to leave their sons and daughters, and if work assignments required it, husbands and wives had to split up too. From Angka’s point of view this was ‘liberation’, because it freed us from the time of caring for others and gave us more time to work. To maximize working time they abolished individual meals too. Everyone ate meals in the common kitchen.

  ‘How lucky you are!’ Chev, the front lines leader, exclaimed to us in an evening meeting. ‘You come back from work and the rice is already cooked for you! You have no cares, no worries. Your children are taken care of. Your parents are taken care of. Everybody is happy! Everything is provided to you by Angka. The young people don’t even have to go to school! Under Angka, the ‘school’ is the farm. The ‘fountain pen’ is the plough. The ‘paper’ is the land. You can ‘write’ all you want. Anytime. Everything is free. No money for tuition. You don’t need to pay for anything now.

  ‘How lucky you are!’ he said. ‘Under the regime of the arch-fascist, arch-imperialist, arch-feudalist Lon Nol, you were oppressed! You never knew any happiness! You were not masters of your country then! You were slaves! Everywhere was corruption! The greedy merchants and the fascist military took over the land! Now under the glorious reign of Angka you are masters of your own destiny. You are masters of the water and the land. The entire people, united in solidarity, join in building the country. Life is much better now. There is no more corruption. No more gambling or prostitution. You are learning from the peasants and workers, who are the source of all useful knowledge. Only the peasants and workers possess it. The monks don’t possess it. The only wise man is the one who knows how to grow rice.’

  The Khmer Rouge wanted a complete change of society, from top to bottom. Gone was everything that had governed our lives in the old times. Lon Nol was gone, airlifted to America before the fall; Sihanouk was gone, his fate a mystery. The monks were gone. (‘The monks are bloodsucking imperialists. If any worker secretly takes rice to the monks, we shall set him to planting cabbages. If the cabbages are not full-grown in three days, he will dig his own grave.’) The families were broken up, the children and the elderly sent off to live in their own groups. There were no more cities. No more markets, stores, restaurants or cafes. No privately owned buses, cars or bicycles. No schools. No books or magazines. No money. No clocks. No holidays and religious festivals. Just the sun that rose and set, the stars at night and the rain that fell from the sky. And work. Everything was work, in the empty, primitive countryside.

  In place of the old regime there was a new government whose upper layers could only be guessed at. Angka – whoever that was – was at the top. Logically, Angka had to be a person or group of people, but many found it easier to believe that Angka was an all-powerful entity, something like a god. ‘Angka has eyes like a pineapple,’ Chev told us, repeating a common saying of the regime. ‘It sees everywhere. So you must behave correctly.’ The mystery of Angka’s identity added to its power, because ‘Angka’ also meant the regime at all levels, from the topmost leader down to the lowest spy. In fact, Chev sometimes told us that we were Angka too.

  Below the topmost officials was (I guessed) a layer of ‘zone’ leaders, with the ‘zones’ roughly corresponding to the old provinces. What used to be Battambang Province was now a part of the Northwest Zone. The identity of our zone leader was unknown to me, but his top loca
l official was a man who sped around the dirt roads on inspection tours, always sitting in the passenger seat of a jeep. I had seen this man several times, riding with his right arm sticking out the window and his hand resting on the roof, though I had never been close enough to see his face. Below him in the civil administration was Comrade Ik, the old man on horseback, who had addressed us in Phum Chhleav. Below Comrade Ik were the village leaders. The leader of Phum Phnom, and overseer of Youen’s hamlet, was Chev; but Chev also had a parallel role as leader of this cooperative on the front lines. Other village leaders and a few military leaders reported to him on the front lines, and below them were section leaders, who usually were not Khmer Rouge but trusted ‘old’ people. Beneath the section leaders were group leaders, who usually were ‘new’ people directing the work of about ten other ‘new’ people like me.

  Sometimes, as I stood by the canal, hoe in hand, I had to admit: Angka, the Organization, had indeed reorganized the countryside. Before the takeover, nobody could have thought that the land would look as it did now, with thousands of people marching to work in orderly single-file lines. And Angka did more than set the tasks. It had provided a complete philosophy, parts of which were obviously true (the corruption under Lon Nol had indeed been terrible), and other parts of which appealed to patriotism (we needed to rebuild the country after the civil war). With loudspeakers attached to poles near the common kitchens, our new leaders blared a new music that carried far across the rice fields. And when I listened to that marching music, with its strong and vigorous beat, and when I saw the huge red flags flapping in the breeze and didn’t look too closely at the lines of people, I found myself believing, for at least a few moments at a time, that the Khmer Rouge had done it. They had succeeded in remaking the country to their bold plan. They had erased the individual, except as a unit in a group. They had given us a new religion to devote ourselves to, and that religion was Angka.