The US journalist’s account of his colleague’s struggle to survive the Cambodian genocide—the basis for the Oscar–winning film The Killing Fields. On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers seized Phnom Penh—the capital of Cambodia—and began a brutal genocide that left millions dead. Dith Pran, a Cambodian working as an assistant to American reporter Sydney H. Schanberg, was a witness to these events. While his employer managed to escape across the border, Dith Pran fled into the Cambodian countryside—and into the heart of the massacre. The basis for the acclaimed movie The Killing Fields, this is the compelling account of the days before the fall of Phnom Penh. It’s the story of one man’s struggle for survival in a country that had become a death camp for millions of its citizens—and another man’s failed efforts to keep his friend and colleague safe. Written within a year of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, it is a work of both historical and literary significance. Sydney H. Schanberg contributed a moving new foreword to this first eBook edition.

The first collection of Sydney Schanberg's work to be published.

Publisher Fact Sheet This extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts by Cambodian survivors of Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s offers searing testimony to an era of brutality, brainwashing, betrayals, starvation, & gruesome executions.

Best known for his academy award-winning role as Dith Pran in "The Killing Fields", for Haing Ngor his greatest performance was not in Hollywood but in the rice paddies and labour camps of war-torn Cambodia. Here, in his memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge, is a searing account of a country's descent into hell. His was a world of war slaves and execution squads, of senseless brutality and mind-numbing torture; where families ceased to be and only a very special love could soar above the squalor, starvation and disease. An eyewitness account of the real killing fields by an extraordinary survivor, this book is a reminder of the horrors of war - and a testament to the enduring human spirit.

This book is a photographic witness of the lifestyle of displaced Cambodians who still live in camps on the Thai border. The book draws its title from the Khmer Rouge genocide that took the lives of more that one million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979. When Vietnamese troops intervened in 1979, thousands of Cambodians sought refuge along the Thai border, many of them in settlements just inside Cambodia, hoping for a quick return home. However, civil war broke out in Cambodia and the border camps that had been set up to temporarily house displaced persons became outposts for Cambodian resistance leaders and were thus military targets. In 1985 the Vietnamese and allied Cambodian forces drove the inhabitants of the camps over the border into Thailand, where an estimated 350,000 still live in dusty, crowded camps, subject to artillery bombardments. There are eight such camps, Site 2 being the largest with an estimated 200,000 residents. Because the Cambodians are labelled 'displaced persons' rather than 'refugees', they are not eligible for resettlement and do not qualify for UNHCR protection. A new international organization, the United Nations Border Relief Operations (UNBRO) was established to distribute food, water and housing material to the camps on a temporary basis.