By Lindsey Hilty
Staff Writer
Journal News (Ohio, USA)
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." — Inscription on the Statue of Liberty
Studio Nails owner Konitha Von Nida of Liberty Twp. said she and her family spent years surviving in Khmer Rouge concentration camps. Giving up was not an option.
"My father says, 'We're going to die anyway. At least if we die, we are searching for freedom,' " she said.
Naked and close to starving, Von Nida said she was too tired to care as she stepped on bodies covering the road to the Thailand border. She was too hungry to care that her father, Heng Sary, was forced to scavenge bread from underneath a dead woman or that she was sleeping in a hole left by a land mine.
"I don't even know how I felt," Von Nida said.
It was just one more horror to add to her childhood memories of escaping genocide in Cambodia, where between 1 million and 2 million people were massacred or worked to death through forced labor in the 1970s, according to the CIA.
Studio Nails owner Konitha Von Nida of Liberty Twp. said she and her family spent years surviving in Khmer Rouge concentration camps. Giving up was not an option.
"My father says, 'We're going to die anyway. At least if we die, we are searching for freedom,' " she said.
Naked and close to starving, Von Nida said she was too tired to care as she stepped on bodies covering the road to the Thailand border. She was too hungry to care that her father, Heng Sary, was forced to scavenge bread from underneath a dead woman or that she was sleeping in a hole left by a land mine.
"I don't even know how I felt," Von Nida said.
It was just one more horror to add to her childhood memories of escaping genocide in Cambodia, where between 1 million and 2 million people were massacred or worked to death through forced labor in the 1970s, according to the CIA.
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