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Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors. Compiled by DITH PRAN and edited by KIM DEPAUL. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. xvii, 199 pp. $27.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).
April 17, 2000 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and in recent years a number of autobiographical accounts of this tragic period in modern Cambodian history have appeared. Among such works are those of Chanrithy Him, Luong Ung, Daran Kravanhm, and Dith Pran. What makes Dith Pran's contribution unique is that it brings together accounts by many Khmer who experienced as children the tragedy and trauma of the killing fields. Dith Pran is the perfect person to have compiled the volume because he himself lived under the Khmer Rouge and escaped the killing fields. He was the New York Times photojournalist made famous by the award-winning film, The Killing Fields, and portrayed so brilliantly by the late Haing S. Ngor. Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields also contains a valuable introduction by Ben Kiernan, director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University. Kiernan's insightful essay situates these important stories in the context of the Khmer Rouge politics and political culture, which resulted in what he terms "the mass kidnapping of a nation" (p. xiii).
This volume contains twenty-nine moving personal stories of children living under the Khmer Rouge, seventeen by men and twelve by women, whose ages during the period in question range from five to seventeen. Many of these writers were originally from...