Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  In late June, when the common kitchen reopened for a day, I showed up to eat and noticed Chev and Uncle Seng sitting at a table by themselves. Chev, the smiler, was noticeably subdued. So was Uncle Seng. They too had been replaced by men from eastern Cambodia and assigned to the front lines as workers. It was a long step down for Chev, formerly the head of my cooperative, the man who had sent me to prison twice and ordered my father and brother killed.

  Our new village leader was named Mao. Like Chev, he was a smiler, dangerous and insincere. ‘Comrade Chev and Comrade Seng,’ Mao told them in a soothing voice, ‘wait here for a while. We want you to go to a meeting.’

  From the fear on their faces Chev and Seng knew who they were going to be meeting with. Soldiers watched their every move, and there was no chance for them to escape.

  The following day the common kitchen was closed again and I roamed far from the village to search for food. Tha, my twelve-year-old stealing partner, went with me.

  We were walking through the dry stubble of a rice field when a soldier saw us and yelled for us to stop. He asked us what we were doing and I told him that we were looking for wild foods. ‘You must go this way,’ he said, pointing his hand toward a path through the woods. In his other hand he was holding a long, curved knife.

  We walked down the path, wondering at the reason for the order, when suddenly we found the answer. Ahead of us, in a clearing, was a pit filled with slowly burning rice husks.

  Chev hung over the pit with his wrists tied to a tree branch above. Rice husks covered him to his chest, but we could see where he had been stabbed and slashed by the knife.

  We stopped. Chev was still alive. He groaned, turned his head and his eyes bored into mine. He recognized me. I looked back at him steadily for a long moment, without saying anything. I thought, Chev, you are dying but I have survived. Then the boy asked me to come along and I turned my back on Chev, leaving him to his appointment with the King of Death.

  We didn’t see Uncle Seng, but we knew that his fate was the same as Chev’s. He had been punished for being part of a failing regime.

  It was kama. Men aren’t always able to take revenge, but the gods are. The gods understand justice. They had punished Chev for killing, and they had punished Uncle Seng for not stopping the killing. And they had sent me walking along the forest path to be a witness.

  Well, Pen Tip, I thought, you tried your best to kill me. But some day kama will catch up to you too. Because good comes to those who do good, and bad comes to those who do evil.

  The boy and I got out in the rice fields again. People were everywhere, bending over, picking up grains of rice. We joined them, scanning the hard, reddish ground.

  One day I came back from foraging in my half-crazed state and found the house ransacked. I knew who had done it. Mao’s wife, corrupt and greedy, was looking for Huoy’s jewellery. I went to Mao’s house. My medical instruments and Huoy’s papers and some of my papers were there on the table. He asked me if I was a doctor. I told him no. And I do not even know why I told him no, whether it was habit, or whether I was no longer a doctor in my own mind. I thought, Maybe I should have told him yes, so he could kill me.

  None of my identification cards he had found listed me as a doctor. He hadn’t found anything valuable of Huoy’s either. Some items of clothing, her birth certificate, her diplomas, other pieces of paper. Then my mind cleared and I saw what I wanted, a large folding ID card from Huoy’s days as a teacher. In one corner was a small black-and-white photograph of her, taken in 1973 in a period when she had worn her hair short.

  ‘You can have everything there,’ I told Mao. ‘I don’t mind that you take it from me. But just let me have that photograph of my wife.’

  He looked at the ID card, which was lying flattened on the table. It was the size of a piece of notepaper, but with two vertical creases, and Huoy’s photo on an outside corner.

  He took Huoy’s past in his hands, ripped it down the crease, and handed the photograph to me. As if he needed to keep the rest.

  31

  Retreat

  When the drought ended and the rains began, the Khmer Rouge got us to replant the common gardens and the rice fields. Soon there was food to eat again. But for me, there was no satisfaction, only bitterness. There was food, but it was too late for Huoy.

  I let my whiskers grow and didn’t mend the rips in my clothing. People told me I looked old, like a man of fifty.

  In the daytime I worked on the fertilizer crew again, but without energy. If the soldiers had taken me away I would have thanked them, for making my reunion with my wife that much sooner. At night, after visiting Huoy’s grave, I became a thief. I stole compulsively, like a gambler, to feel alive.

  With my stealing partner, Tha, I led gangs of hungry men to the common garden on the mountain. We raped the garden, taking whatever we wanted, ready to fight any guards who showed. We harvested rice fields as they ripened, using our bare hands and feet. I built up a huge supply of rice, wrapping it carefully, storing it under the manure pile in the fertilizer shed. I gave food to Tha, who supported his family; to Sangam, my colleague in the fertilizer shed; to a distant cousin named Ngor Balam, whom I had met just recently; to my brother Hok, who had located my brother Pheng Huor’s three children and taken them in; and to others.

  Still, stealing food wasn’t enough. To test my skills and to test my fate, I stole a small, hand-powered rice mill from its shed during the evening political meeting, while Mao was giving a speech. With the mill, I could remove the husks from paddy rice many times faster than before. But I still wasn’t satisfied. I resented any restrictions. I wanted to eat whenever I was hungry. So I put rice and water in my field cooking pot, put the lid on and made a hole for it in the ground before building a fire on top. I squatted in front of the fire, pretending to warm my hands, when Mao came by the fertilizer shed on an inspection tour. He squatted next to me and warmed his hands while we talked about the proper mixtures of animal dung and hillock earth. When he left, I pulled the fire apart and took the pot out. The rice was cooked perfectly.

  As I got bolder, I also got careless. During a political meeting I was accused of having a fishnet and failing to contribute the fish to the common kitchen. The truth was that I did have a fishnet, though it was safely hidden. I also had a good idea who was behind the accusation.

  My reply was reckless. I said if an eyewitness came forward and he could prove I had a fishnet, I would gladly surrender my life to Angka. If no eyewitness came forward, I didn’t want to hear any more about the matter. And I slammed my fist on the ground for emphasis.

  Even as I slammed my fist I knew I had gone too far. Without Huoy to tell me to hide my emotions, my anger was getting the better of me. Luckily for me, Mao let me off with a lecture. He said that displays of anger were capitalist and individualist. He told me to tame myself and show obedience to Angka. I apologized meekly.

  Soon after that my hidden accuser, Pen Tip, called me to his house. I was better prepared this time, my anger cool and contained.

  Pen Tip had done well by the change in village leadership. He had not only helped target Uncle Phan’s wife for execution but had become Mao’s unofficial right-hand man, and this brought him even more power than ever. If the stories were true, a woman from the village complained to Pen Tip for sending her to the front lines while he lived comfortably in the village. The next night Pen Tip was one of the men who gang-raped her and then killed her. Whether this had actually happened I cannot say, since I was not there. But the story fit his character.

  When I showed up he was sitting on a split-bamboo bench and swinging his legs, like a child. He raised and lowered his eyebrows. His glance slid past me to one side and then the other. He looked at the floor and at the ceiling but never directly at me.

  Pen Tip said he knew I was a doctor and hoped I wouldn’t get in any trouble. I asked him calmly what he was trying to do to me now.

  ‘Uh, last night Angka sent two chhlop to your house
,’ he said. ‘They saw you take a lot of rice and hide it in a plastic bag in your garden. Did you do this, or not? If you did, just give the rice back and Angka will forgive and forget. But if you say you didn’t, ah, Angka will investigate and you will be responsible. But since you are my friend, I wanted to tell you first. I wanted to, uh, warn you.’

  I thought quickly. It was the same as the incident with the fishnet: he was having me watched, but his watchers were not thorough. The night before, I had filled a large bag with freshly milled rice, but I buried it in my usual place, below the fertilizer pile, rather than in my garden. What could I do? Mao lived next door. I needed to get rid of Pen Tip, but this was not the time or the place.

  It was hot in the house. Pen Tip swung his legs from the bench, waiting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said sarcastically. ‘If Angka sent two chhlop last night and they saw me hide rice in my garden, why wasn’t I arrested? Why wasn’t I taken away? Because I didn’t hide any rice. That’s why. And I’m sorry your people didn’t do a good job for you, Pen Tip. It must be hard to find reliable chhlop. I sympathize.’

  Pen Tip grew angry. As I left the house he told me that Angka would send someone to check on me.

  He didn’t waste any time. That afternoon, when I was at the fertilizer shed, his wife walked to my house carrying a woven plastic rice bag and buried it in my garden. Fortunately, one of my neighbours saw her and ran to tell me. It was no use asking Mao for justice, because Pen Tip was his protégé, so I ran to Khmer Rouge headquarters in Phum Phnom. This time they listened to me. They understood false evidence and purges, since this was something they faced themselves. A cadre came to my house, dug up the rice and called Pen Tip and his wife in for questioning. It was all very polite on the surface and typically Cambodian. Nobody lost their tempers, everybody kept face and nothing was decided.

  Pen Tip and I would have gone on making moves and counter-moves until one of us was killed. But by late 1978 our struggle began to look small and petty compared to other events on the horizon, and we put a temporary halt to it.

  The first clue that something was happening came from Comrade Ik, the old man on horseback. He called a meeting in December while the harvest was still in progress. Several hundred of us sat on a dirt floor to listen to him while his horse stood under a nearby tree.

  The old man told us that we still had to struggle to accomplish Angka’s goals. We were to plant and harvest two or three crops of rice a year. He said nothing at all about the realities – that there had never been a second or third crop, that most of the first crop had been taken from us, that only token work continued on the dam project. Comrade Ik seldom admitted the regime’s failings. So it came as a complete surprise when he added at the end of his speech:

  ‘Recently, our enemies have dared attack us on our borders. We are not worried about the fighting. We have nothing to fear. We have already defeated the American imperialists, and this time the enemy is small in comparison. What is important to remember is that we must fight on all battlefields. Not just the military battlefields, but also the battlefields of the rice paddies and the canals. We must continue to work. Our soldiers will guard the border, don’t worry. They will protect us. But if you see enemies coming here, let Angka know. And if the enemy says something to you, don’t believe it. You must believe only Angka.’

  The old man hit his fist on his skinny chest and yelled, ‘Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’ We rose to our feet and echoed each phrase three times. ‘Long live the great solidarity!’ and then ‘Long live the revolutionary military forces!’ Tears of joy ran down the faces of men around me, and it had nothing to do with the slogans. What the old man hinted at we had guessed. The ‘enemy’ was invading. It could have been any enemy and it could have been any border, but for us war slaves there was only one conclusion. The Khmer Serei – the Free Khmers or freedom fighters – had finally launched their attack from their sanctuaries along the Thai border.

  I was happy for the news. I could feel the change in my body – a stirring of hope, a strengthening. Now I had something to live for. I thought: Oh Huoy, if you had only lived, we would have a chance to see freedom together.

  About a week later Sangam and I were pulling an oxcart loaded with fertilizer out to the fields when we heard the dull noise of faraway explosions. We looked up. Two jets tore across the sky like silver darts, just above the horizon. They were the first planes of any kind we had seen for years.

  The jets travelled rapidly to the east. Behind them, columns of smoke rose from the bombs they had dropped. We stood there admiring the sight.

  ‘They should hurry up and come for us,’ Sangam remarked.

  ‘The sooner the better,’ I said.

  The invaders, however, did not hurry. We did not see any more planes, and the Khmer Rouge did not tell us any more news.

  In early January 1979 a freight train pulled into the Phnom Tippeday station from Phnom Penh. In its boxcars and on its roofs sat Khmer Rouge soldiers with bandages and casts and crutches. The wounded soldiers set up camp and hobbled around, cooking over fires. There were angry looks and loud arguments between them and the soldiers stationed near our village.

  A few days later, long, single-file lines of civilians began to arrive from the south, from a roundabout route to Phnom Penh, led by cadre driving massive roofed oxcarts. The civilians were healthier and better dressed than we were. Like the wounded soldiers, they were part of a disciplined retreat. They had plenty of food: cloth tubes filled with rice hanging around their necks like thick necklaces; live chickens; bags of dried, salted fish; sacks of rice on the oxcarts. The oxcarts parked along the railroad tracks, and soon the evening air was filled with the smoke of hundreds of campfires.

  Both the civilians and the wounded soldiers were under orders not to talk to us ‘new’ people. They seemed to be afraid. Every day some of them were tied up and led away at gunpoint, never to return. An amputee on crutches was led away for the crime of ‘failing to protect the fatherland’.

  Paranoia was everywhere. In our village, day or night, those who looked too pleased were taken away. One wrong word, one joyful glance, and Mao ordered executions of entire families. The soldiers were in a frenzy. To them it was our fault that the ‘enemy’ was coming.

  It was a time to be especially careful. Pulling the oxcart along paths where we had gone many times before, Sangam and I came to a hillock piled high with corpses. The bodies were jumbled together in the awkward postures of death, arms or legs stiffly raised in rigor mortis. The victims had been killed by blows to the back of the head. Their flesh had turned black from the heat, and their bodies had swollen so much it burst their clothes. The smell was awful. Vultures plucked at them. A few days later we saw another mass-execution site, hundreds of bodies piled in a pit in the forest.

  I went to the leaning sdao tree and prayed to Huoy for protection. I began sleeping near her grave, and then in the fertilizer shed, and in a different place each night, afraid of Mao, afraid of Pen Tip. I stopped stealing. The night wasn’t safe for stealing anymore.

  I packed everything needed for a quick getaway and stored it under the manure pile. I told Sangam and my brother Hok and Ngor Balam to get ready if they wanted to go with me. Balam was a tall, older man, formerly an airlines executive in Phnom Penh. He was only distantly related to me on my father’s side, but we were of the same clan and trusted each other. We agreed to go together to the Thai border, to meet up with the Khmer Serei.

  Before we could leave another wave of newcomers arrived. This time they did not come from the east, like the first wave, or from the south, like the second, but from the northwest, from villages outside Battambang City. They too walked in long, single-file lines, carrying their possessions in knapsacks and on shoulderboards, some of the women with baskets on their heads. They were better clothed than we were. They did not dare talk to us. The third wave converged on the first two waves and briefly overlapped and then separated as the newer evacuees retre
ated toward the Cardamom Mountains.

  We had lived in the Phnom Tippeday area for more than three years. It had been our universe, and our jail. Now we saw it as others did, as a patch of rather unimportant territory in the far-ranging manoeuvres of war. We guessed that the ‘enemy’ was approaching on two fronts, from the east, the direction of Phnom Penh, and from the northwest, near Battambang City.

  Mao disappeared, taking with him all the oxen and water buffalo, sacks of rice and salt, supplies of dried fish and other food from the common kitchen, all the kitchen utensils, his family and his personal possessions. In his absence no one gave orders in the village. I thought it was time for us to leave, but Balam and Hok persuaded me to wait. Mao reappeared, and for a few days more we had meals in the common kitchen. We went out into the fields to harvest the rice, and we went to political meetings at night. We listened to the same old tired speeches about ‘launching an offensive’ against the forces of nature and ‘struggling to achieve true independence-sovereignty.’ Like a record player playing the same song over and over. We listened quietly, because we were afraid, and planned our escapes.

  Mao and the other Khmer Rouge leaders left again, secretly, at night. Pen Tip proclaimed himself temporarily in charge. He told everyone in the village it was time to evacuate. And the people obeyed. They packed their possessions on shoulderboards and baskets and homemade knapsacks, but there was much grumbling among them.

  I packed all my possessions, including the medical textbooks that had been hidden for years. Sangam, Hok and Balam, plus their wives and children and me, fourteen of us in all, tried to walk northwest toward Battambang City, but soldiers blocked our way. We turned around and trudged after the rest of the villagers.