Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  While waiting for my family I went to get rice. A little over an hour’s walk from my campsite was an underground rice storage warehouse similar to the one I had tried to go to earlier. A huge crowd gathered outside, at the top of a staircase leading down to a concrete-lined subterranean chamber. Inside, piles of rice sacks were visible in the dim light. The rice was free, and everyone took as much as they wanted. Women piled rice onto baskets they carried on their heads, and men staggered away with rice on shoulderboards or rucksacks. I tied a sack to either end of a shoulderboard, which bent the ends of the shoulderboard downward like a bow. Everyone was happy. A few people loaded oxcarts high with rice sacks and drove off to Battambang to sell them.

  Finally the Vietnamese pushed the Khmer Rouge toward the Cardomom Mountains. I walked back to the town of Muong and found my family there. They had all survived, though the group numbered two fewer than before.

  What had happened was that just before liberation the Khmer Rouge forced all the civilians farther into the jungle. During the retreat my brother Hok, the fifth son in the family, ran into Hong Srun, the fourth son, whom none of us had seen since Tonle Batí. The reunion was happy but brief. The Vietnamese attacked, shells landed nearby and everybody fled. In the chaos Hong Srun went off, taking two of Pheng Huor’s children with him. Only Ngim, the daughter aged nine, stayed with Hok.

  Thinking that I (the third son) had probably died, the group threw most of my luggage away. They dumped my medical books, which I had carried at such cost and buried in so many places. They threw away my glasses, most of my clothing and, without realizing it, a cushion of mine with eighteen hundred US dollars inside it and a blanket with pieces of gold sewn into the hem. Fortunately they kept a few small items, including the photograph of Huoy.

  I brought them back to my camping place to wait for Hong Srun and the other two children so all of us could travel to Battambang together. Hong Srun didn’t show up, and about the first of May I decided to take the family to Battambang to wait for him there. I wrote a sign to Hong Srun and fastened it to a tree. In the early morning we started walking westward on National Route 5, and by dusk we had arrived in the second-largest city in the nation.

  Battambang was a city of squatters living in the empty shells of houses. We stayed in a house on the edge of town with about twenty other people and slept on the floor. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture.

  During the Khmer Rouge regime everything wooden or metal in the houses of Battambang had been taken away – the beds and tables, the window frames, the corrugated metal used on some of the roofs. Most of the temple buildings and all the sacred objects in them had been destroyed. Hulks of cars lay in the side streets, without tyres or windshields. A steam shovel sat rusting and immobilized in front of the central market. When we got there, the central market and all the indoor stores, restaurants and shops were closed on order of the Vietnamese, who were officially opposed to the return of a market economy.

  Unofficially, however, the Vietnamese tolerated small business enterprises on the street. The medium of exchange was rice. Shoppers walked around with their wallets – with large quantities of rice wrapped in their kramas or piled in baskets on their heads.

  With rice you could negotiate a fare on a bicycle-powered pedicab, or on one of the horse-drawn taxis clip-clopping through the streets. You could buy live fish, fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, hot soup or noodles, old clothes, tape cassettes. You could have your hair cut and have a bicycle or a radio or a watch repaired. The only thing you could not buy with rice was rice itself – you had to buy that with gold. The year before, when Huoy was starving, I had traded two damleung for two cans of rice flour. In Battambang City one damleung bought a sack containing 1,750 cans of rice, much too heavy to carry. That’s how much prices had fallen. That’s how much food there was once the Khmer Rouge were out of power.

  Something like the normal Cambodian way of life was returning to Battambang. The vendors squatting under cloth awnings, the women shoppers looking critically at the food and pinching it to see if it was fresh. Bargaining, gossiping, trading news – it was almost like the old days. But much was missing too.

  In the evenings a band played in an empty lot. A generator powered the loudspeakers and lit up strings of brightly coloured bulbs. Hundreds of people gathered to dance and watch, like insects drawn to the lights. The women wore their best clothing, but they had no makeup, and their hair was still short from Khmer Rouge days. The men left their shirttails out, like field workers who had forgotten their manners. They danced the romvong, stepping around in time to the music and slowly waving their hands in the air. They were unable to stop themselves from rejoicing. They danced until dawn, shutting from their minds the past of suffering and hunger and the deaths of relatives. I thought it was too soon to rejoice, but I didn’t blame them for what they did.

  To me, Battambang was a place to gather strength before moving on. Balam and I went on a walking tour of the town, and it helped me realize that the sooner we left, the better. First we went to an information centre the Vietnamese had set up. A flagpole extended from the information building, and from it hung an enormous red flag. It reminded me of the plain red flags that used to be flown on the front lines. It was even more like the official Khmer Rouge flag, which was red with a gold three-towered emblem of Angkor Wat in the middle. This flag was identical, except that its emblem of Angkor Wat had five towers instead of three.

  ‘Communists,’ I whispered to Balam, who nodded.

  We went into the information office. On one side was a bulletin board covered with notices from survivors looking for their lost relatives. On the other side were photographs of Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers shaking hands and smiling and a chart showing the structure of the new provincial government. In the middle, at a wooden table, sat a woman answering questions in both Khmer and Vietnamese. Behind her hung a photograph of a pile of human bones, taken at a Khmer Rouge mass grave – a reminder that the Khmer Rouge had been murderers and that we were supposed to be grateful that the Vietnamese had kicked them out.

  Standing guard in the building were Vietnamese soldiers and Cambodian ‘Self-Defence Forces.’ The Vietnamese soldiers wore new olive-green uniforms. They were fully armed and clearly in charge. The Cambodians wore whatever they could find – long- or short-sleeved shirts, black or brown trousers. Some went barefoot. Their weapons ranged from AK-47s to rusty carbines to nothing at all. They were known as ‘Heng Samrin’ soldiers, after the leader of the puppet regime. I had never heard of Heng Samrin before, any more than I had heard of Pol Pot. Certainly Heng Samrin was a man of no previous standing in the nation.

  Balam and I left the information office without asking the only real question that interested us, and that was the quickest route out of Cambodia. Even more than the differences between the Vietnamese and Heng Samrin soldiers, the red flag told us everything we needed to know about the future of the country. One glance and my mind was made up. Time to leave, before the communists put me in prison again.

  Balam and I continued our tour of the city, watching and listening, keeping our mouths shut.

  We saw a temple with many people praying inside and weeping for their lost relatives.

  We saw a former elementary school surrounded with barbed-wire fence, and Khmer Rouge prisoners dressed in their black uniforms inside. The people outside the fence pointed at the Khmer Rouge who had made their lives a misery, and shouted threats at them.

  We saw Vietnamese soldiers, always in twos and threes, never alone. Heng Samrin soldiers came up to us to ask if we wanted to trade gold for medicine, while their Vietnamese bosses pretended to loiter nearby. The Vietnamese wanted gold, but they were indirect and clever about it. Through their Cambodian front men, you could buy anything – generators, outboard boat motors, rice by the truckload.

  It was a city full of intrigue. I trusted nobody. A man I had known slightly in Phum Ra came up to me and whispered that he was a member of the Khmer Serei. H
e asked me to join the freedom fighters on the Thai border. I didn’t believe him and sent him away, though later it turned out he was telling the truth.

  One afternoon I went bathing in the river, and another man washing himself in the river recognized me. He was Dr. Dav Kiet, a classmate of mine from medical school. Kiet was working in the hospital in Battambang. He asked me to join him on the staff, since there was a shortage of doctors. Standing on the river-bank, I pointed at my skinny arms and at the ribs protruding from my chest and told him that my health didn’t allow it.

  The next morning a chauffeur-driven Mercedes appeared at the house where my family was staying. The man in the back seat of the Mercedes came up the steps, took his shoes off at the door, walked in and asked for Dr. Ngor Haing. He was the governor of Battambang.

  I was wearing a torn sarong, nothing else. The governor and I shook hands. We sat cross-legged on a mat. He asked me about my family, about my old life in Phnom Penh, about what had happened in the Khmer Rouge years. Finally he got to the point and told me that Dr. Dav Kiet had suggested that I work in the hospital.

  The governor said I could work part-time if I was worried about my health. If there was anything wrong with me, the hospital would give me medicines. Not wanting him to lose face, I promised I would go to work as soon I felt better. Actually, I didn’t want to work at the hospital at all.

  The governor came again the next day and again I resisted. But by then I had realized why. It was not just that I wasn’t feeling well, or that I didn’t like the Heng Samrin regime. It was because I was afraid of going back to work in obstetrics and gynaecology. I wanted to forget how Huoy had died. I wanted to seal it out of my head. And it wouldn’t be easy if I was delivering babies in the same hospital I had wanted to take Huoy to when she was in labour.

  All the same, it would have been unwise to ignore the governor. I decided to see the hospital for myself. Dav Kiet took me on a tour.

  The hospital was in terrible shape. For a short while around 1977 a distinguished Western-trained doctor – the man I’d wanted to take Huoy to – had been allowed to practise there, but then the Khmer Rouge killed him and let the hospital slide into ruin. The laboratory wasn’t functioning. There was hardly any medicine or surgical equipment. The patients flowed into the hospital endlessly, a river of the malnourished and ill. We walked into the delivery room and saw a woman in her seventh month of pregnancy in labour. She had broken her water many hours before, but the labour was making no progress. The mother was growing feeble, and though the doctors and nurses were doing their best, there was nothing they could do. They didn’t have the equipment. The woman was in the same situation as Huoy. Black, black clouds closed in on me, and I had to get out of the delivery room fast.

  Kiet took me around to meet all the doctors and nurses and they were all very respectful to me, even though my clothes were torn and my hair and beard were long and wild-looking. They emphasized that they were offering me a job in a hospital run entirely by Cambodians. There were no Vietnamese there. All I had to say was yes, and my lost career and my former social status would be returned to me as though the revolution had never happened.

  I told them no.

  The next day the governor came back.

  I told him yes, because I was afraid. It was either go to work in the hospital or leave for the border at once.

  I began working at the hospital but my mind was not there.

  I thought about Huoy all the time. If she had lived, we could have been crossing the border by now. But she had not, and because of it I could not work in this hospital. If I could not save my own wife, how could I save others? What good was I? What good were any of the doctors? The woman in the delivery room had died in childbirth. Just like Huoy. If I saw people laughing, I turned away. I never smiled. At night, Ngim tried to cheer me, but it was no use. I had lived too long. The gods had made a cruel mistake. It would have been better that I had died with Huoy, so our souls could be together.

  Pen Tip arrived in Battambang. I sent him a message through a mutual acquaintance. The message was for him to visit me at the hospital with his black notebook. He would know what that meant – a black notebook listing the deeds and misdeeds of his life, like the records kept by the King of Death.

  Pen Tip’s message back to me was that he had never done me wrong. He claimed he didn’t know why I was angry.

  I was too tired and discouraged from my hospital work to go after Pen Tip. And then something else happened anyway that absorbed all my attention. The governor sent a note to all the doctors asking us to attend a two-day conference. We would stay at his residence the first night and go to the second half of the conference the next day.

  I thought: Why can’t we go home to our own homes the first night? Where are they really going to take us? Out in the woods, with soldiers? Does this regime hate doctors too?

  I went to talk to two of my colleagues in the hospital.

  ‘Brothers,’ I said cryptically, ‘in the west, the dam is broken and the waters are flooding out. Are you going or staying?’ They understood my meaning. There was nothing to the west but the Thai border.

  These doctors were not ready to go, but they arranged for me to be on duty the night before the conference was to begin. That would give me an excuse to miss the first day of the conference. I would have a day’s head start before the governor knew I was missing.

  I talked it over with my family. My brother Hok decided to stay in Battambang a while longer and wait for Hong Srun, who still had not arrived. Balam decided to take his wife and children and come along with me. I told Balam to start walking west on National Route 5 before dawn on May 14. I would catch up to him by noon.

  ‘Uncle,’ Ngim said to me, ‘I want to go with you.’

  I told her no, she had to stay with Hok. But Ngim pleaded, and I told her only if Hok gave permission. To my surprise, Hok did.

  Ngim and I were very fond of each other. She was a sturdy, active girl with a strong mind, like her mother. She wasn’t afraid of anybody.

  I told Ngim to put her clothes in my knapsack. She would have to carry the knapsack for the first few hours, until I caught up with her and Balam.

  I worked the night of May 13–14 at the hospital, willing the hands of the clock to move faster. In the morning I got off work, changed into civilian clothes and began walking toward the Thai border.

  34

  The Danger Zone

  On the road out of town, a man saw me and called out, ‘Luk! Luk!’ – the old form of address to a social superior. He clicked his heels and came to military attention.

  ‘The devil’s victim!’ I exclaimed, pleased and astonished. It was Sok, my driver from prerevolutionary days. I clapped him on the shoulder, told him he didn’t have to call me luk anymore.

  ‘Where’s the boss lady?’ Sok asked, meaning Huoy. I told him that she had died. Sok nodded gravely, as though death was to be expected. Then he invited me to his house for a meal. I protested that I didn’t have time. ‘I’m going to the border, but if you want, you can come with me,’ I said.

  ‘Too many in my family group, boss. I will go later, but right now you must come to my house for something to eat.’ He pulled me by the wrist toward a little hut nearby.

  I had always wondered what had happened to Sok in the evacuation of Phnom Penh. It turned out that after he had driven off to get his family in my Mercedes, the Khmer Rouge blocked the streets. He was unable to come back to pick up Huoy as he had planned. He had always regretted it, and ever since then he had wondered what had happened to Huoy and me.

  On this morning he gave me the best of his family’s food, rice and pieces of grilled chicken. He treated me with great respect. I would have liked to bring him to the border, but he was right. With him was an extended family of aunts, cousins, babies and grandparents – an enviable number of survivors – and they were not ready to go.

  I resumed walking on the road behind schedule but in good spirits. About two in the af
ternoon I caught up with my family group. There were only seven of us now: Balam, his wife, their two children and their nephew, my niece Ngim and me. We ate in the shade of a kapok tree by a pond. Ngim gave me my knapsack, and then we started walking again.

  With us heading westward on National Route 5 were travellers pushing wooden-wheeled handcarts and a few others driving oxcarts, the axles squeaking and squealing. Carrying our luggage on our backs, as we were, seemed harder, but once we left the road it would make more sense. Where we were going, it was best to travel light.

  Toward sunset, Heng Samrin soldiers stopped us at a checkpoint. For our own protection, they said, we should sleep in a village nearby. Unwillingly, we went off to the village and lay down. Some of my gold was in my waistband and the rest was in Huoy’s purse, which I kept under my legs. Most people wrapped their gold in the bundles they used as pillows, but this was a mistake: in the middle of the night, the Heng Samrin soldiers came up and took all the pillows at gunpoint. That was what they meant by protection.

  The next day we reached Sisophon, the last major town before the border. There, the Heng Samrin soldiers took what they wanted in broad daylight. From me they took a shirt and a pair of trousers. From others they took clothes, canteens, rice and whatever else they could use.

  West of Sisophon was an enormous stretch of flat, dry, barren rice fields. In places it was a mile from one tree to the next. In the shade of an especially large tree, Heng Samrin soldiers had set up a checkpoint with sandbags and machine guns. Vietnamese soldiers sat nearby in the shade, a little too casual, a little too relaxed. When we got there the Heng Samrin soldiers accused us in loud voices of trying to leave the country. There wasn’t much we could say to this, because ahead of us there was nothing except for the Thai border. They turned us around, started us walking back the way we had come. Predictably, someone made an offer, and the soldiers told us to come back. The cynical charade ended and the bargaining began.