Production, speakers offer glimpse into genocide

Hoeur Kim (right) speaks to area high school students Wednesday while her daughter, Sreng Kim-Chhay, looks on. The women are to present “Escaping the Killing Fields: A Daughter and Mother Tell Their Stories” this evening at Heidelberg University. (PHOTO BY ROB LEDWEDGE)

September 20, 2012
By MaryAnn Kromer - Staff Writer
The Advertiser-Tribune (Ohio, USA)

Heidelberg University is observing Genocide Awareness Week with a series of events that recall the atrocities that took place in Cambodia in the 1970s. The annual observance revisits genocides that have occurred in various parts of the world.

Tuesday evening, a readers' theatre presentation, "April 17: Stories from the Cambodian Genocide," was staged.

Chris Tucci, professor of theater at Heidelberg, wrote the script based on the book "First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung.

The drama recalls April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over the Cambodian government. The military began a purge that claimed more than 20 percent of the Cambodian people over a period of nearly four years.

Somaly Hay escaped political oppression - and now helps those left behind

Somaly Hay uses the proceeds from her business, Somaly Hay & Co. on Golden Street in New London, to help villagers in her native Cambodia. (Tim Cook photo)

08/15/2012
By Julianne Hanckel
TheDay.com (Connecticut)

Somaly Hay & Co. is an unassuming storefront on Golden Street in New London. Step inside and you’ll quickly discover that it’s more than a cornucopia of jewel-toned colors, one-of-a-kind pieces and handmade crafts. It’s also a jewelry lover’s paradise.

With gold, silver, pearl and precious stone jewelry and layers upon layers of hand sewn silk and cotton dresses, pants and scarves, one could easily get lost in the store’s featured Cambodian collections, but the real treat is the shop’s owner, Somaly Hay.

Get her talking and her sincerity and sense of humor flow; traits that also shine in her deeply-rooted passion for helping others who are trying to help themselves. But underneath her vibrant personality is a scarred heart.

At 53, she is a survivor of one of the worst mass killings in the 20th century.

In The 'Shadow' Of Death, Stories Survive

Vaddey Ratner's novel is derived from her own experiences — she spent four years of her youth working in forced labor under the Khmer Rouge. (Kristina Sherk/Simon & Schuster)

August 14, 2012
By Lynn Neary
National Public Radio (USA)

I actually want to tell a story about the power of storytelling to transcend suffering. Because it was the stories that saved me.

When she was just 5 years old, Vaddey Ratner's comfortable and protected life as the child of an aristocratic Cambodian family came to an abrupt end, as Khmer Rouge soldiers entered the capital, Phnom Penh. They banged on the gates of the family compound and ordered them to leave — it was the start of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, which left hundreds of thousands of Cambodians dead, including all of Ratner's family except her mother.

She tells a fictionalized version of her story in her first novel. In the Shadow of the Banyan follows Raami, a little girl from an aristocratic Cambodian family who loses everything when the Khmer Rouge take over.

Ratner says she always felt like an oddball as a child. She was self-conscious because she walked with a limp as a result of polio — an affliction shared by her fictional heroine, Raami. One day, some of the children in Ratner's extended family began to tease her, saying she was not part of the family, that she must have been found in the street. Ratner ran to her father for comfort

"He said, 'You know, they were probably right. I did find you, and I found you in a bird's nest. You wobbled when you walk, but you know, there are these things, these wings coming out of your back,' " she recalls. "I looked at him skeptically, and he said to me, 'Well, you know, that's what I dreamt.' "

Khmer Rouge Labor Camp Survivor Learns to Cry

Arn Chorn-Pond, a Khmer Rouge survivor and co-founder of Cambodian Living Arts (VOA/Irwin Loy)

May 29, 2012
Irwin Loy
Voice of America

PHNOM PENH - Arn Chorn-Pond sits with his eyes closed, exhaling as his fingers dart along his bamboo flute. There was a time when playing the flute was, to him, a matter of survival.

Arn was only a child when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. Sent to the labor camps, he survived by learning how to play revolutionary songs on his flute. He watched as those around him were murdered or starved to death. Sometimes, he says, the music was used to cover up the screams of people being executed.

“They would put a loud microphone so I can play into it, so that people in the countryside will hear music instead of hearing the screaming," Arn recalled. "The Khmer Rouge, made a special axe, they hit people in the back of the head, and you can hear miles away, I’m telling you. You can literally hear miles away. Like an axe hitting a coconut shell, but only human skulls. I can hear it even today, in my head.”

Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung to tell her story

May. 7, 2012
Written by Keith Uhlig
Wausau Daily Herald

A survivor of the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s will tell her story in Wausau this week.

Loung Ung, author of the award-winning memoir "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers" will speak in a community forum Tuesday at Wausau East High School. Ung's presentation is sponsored by A Walk in Their Shoes, a collaborative effort by a group of north central Wisconsin educators. The goal of A Walk in Their Shoes is to bring history to life for students and community members, linking personal stories to world-changing events.

The group has sponsored presentations by people who witnessed wars in Rwanda and Sudan in Africa, and the son of a leader of a Jewish guerilla army that fought the Nazis during World War II.

Never Fall Down

"Never Fall Down" by Patricia McCormick (HarperCollins Children's Books / April 20, 2012)

April 29, 2012
By Susan Carpenter
Los Angeles Times

Never Fall Down

• A Novel
• Patricia McCormick
• Balzer + Bray: 224 pp., $17.99, ages 14 and up

When it comes to genocide, Hitler is obviously well covered. There are countless titles for young readers about the atrocities he inspired. The Khmer Rouge, which seized control of Cambodia in 1975 and, in its attempts to create an agrarian form of communism, killed millions of its own people, is less familiar territory, especially for young readers.

"Never Fall Down" offers a detailed look at what it was like to live under such a cruel government from the perspective of one of its best-known survivors, Arn Chorn Pond.

Pond was 11 when his village was invaded by the Khmer Rouge and his family was forced to march toward an uncertain future. Pond thought it was exciting at first, but after walking for days, passing babies left crying in the middle of the road and ditches filling with dead bodies, he began to realize: He wouldn't be returning home in three days as his captors had said.

Cambodian Genocide Survivor to Speak in Long Beach

Oni Vitandham

Wednesday, 25 April 2012
By Brian Addison
Long Beach Post

Cambodian community here in Long Beach is a vibrant one, boasting the largest Cambodian population anywhere outside of Cambodia itself. Many of the Cambodians here are immigrants and it is not uncommon to hear stories of struggle and pasts engulfed in violence, as many witnessed the disastrous results of the Khmer Rouge rule over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. When the regime was able to overthrow the then-U.S.-backed government once the U.S. left neighboring Vietnam, it led to the murder of some two million Cambodians in what many consider a genocide.

A U.N.-backed trial finally started in 2003 and has faced immense trouble, with its second judge leaving the trial this past March after feeling that the Cambodian-led side was preventing further investigation into the crimes -- the second such accusation by an outside judge.

This history is important to the Cambodians here in Long Beach (as it would with anyone involved in such atrocities). And unlike some, they are not afraid to speak out about what happened to them, what their views are, and how they function in the dichotomy of U.S. living and Cambodian political history.

Meet one such woman: Oni Vitandham. Her story is almost fairy tale-like, having been born a Cambodian princess in 1972 in the Kompong Speu province of Central Cambodia. Her father, a resistor to the Khmer Rouge regime, went to fight against them after placing his daughter in the hands of friends. It is presumed he was killed under the hands of the regime's deathly rule and, sadly, Oni watched caregiver after caregiver come and go as the regime continued its brutality.

At 92, she's still haunted by Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia

LONG BEACH, CALIF. USA -- Sath Om Photo by Jeff Gritchen / Press-Telegram (Jeff Gritchen)

April 22, 2012
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Long Beach Press Telegram

LONG BEACH -- The face of Sath Om reveals even more than her chilling words. The pain seems so immediate and real, it is as if time has stopped. 

"It's still real," the 92-year-old survivor of the Cambodian genocide says through translation as the tears flow. "It's like a stick in your eyes when it's remembered."

Om has harrowing stories of life during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 when upward of 2 million Cambodians died from malnutrition, disease and murder in the country's notorious Killing Fields.

Om was burned out of her house and had to run for her life.

She was imprisoned for a time.

Cambodian-American Poet Peauladd Huy's Reading

Peauladd Huy from Connotation Press on Vimeo.
http://vimeo.com/37832289

Surviving mass violence: Is there an obligation to remember and share? - Après avoir fui l’horreur: y a-t-il obligation de se souvenir, de partager?

En français en fin du texte anglais

Monday March 19

7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Shift Space

1190, Saint Antoine Ouest (& de la Montagne)

An increasing number of initiatives aim to give voice to those affected by war, genocide, and other human rights violations. The resulting stories often include violence, suffering, brutality, and exile but also, hope, renewal, and resilience. For some individuals, the duty to remember motivates their storytelling. Others, however, hesitate or refuse to share their painful memories. In this context, what is the role of speech and of silence? Is speech necessarily a part of the healing process? Is silence always a refusal to share one’s memories? Over the course of the conversation, we will explore how we may go about sharing difficult life stories within our communities.

Guests:

Davith Bolin holds a master’s degree in communications from l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Since 2007, he has been actively involved in the Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations project of Concordia University. Davith has conducted more than thirty interviews with Montrealers from Cambodia.

Muy Len Pong was 15 years-old when the Khmer Rouge began their dictatorship in Cambodia. The regime resulted in the death of millions of people between 1975 and 1979. Muy Len arrived in Montreal in March 1981 and built a new life here. His participation in the Montreal Life Stories project is marked by an outstanding interview of 14 hours.

Moderator:

A passionate advocate of creative expression and self-created contentment, Isabelle Abdel-Sayed facilitates change through Self-Transformation Coaching. She draws immense joy from meaningful conversations, the “aha” moments that arise from them, and from connecting with others around what makes us whole.

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lundi le 19 mars

19 h à 21 h

Shift Space

1190, Saint Antoine Ouest (& de la Montagne)

Author Hopes To Shed Light Khmer Rouge Trauma

“Out of the Dark: Into the Garden of Hope” by Sam Keo, a Cambodian psychologist. (Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Sam Keo)

Thursday, 26 January 2012
Men Kimseng, VOA Khmer | Washington, DC

“The disease that we endured during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime cannot be completely healed.”

Click the control below to listen to the audio program:

Click here to download or listen to the audio program in MP3

Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge will have to live with the emotional scars of the regime, but staying positive can help them move forward, says Sam Keo a Cambodian psychologist who has written a new book.

“Out of the Dark: Into the Garden of Hope” is an attempt to help Cambodians move past the trauma, he said on “Hello VOA” Monday.

“The disease that we endured during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime cannot be completely healed,” said Keo, who is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. “It stays on. But we can help them work as normal for certain periods of time, until they run into big stresses.”

Back Home in Cambodia With Food as Comfort

January 12, 2012
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times

Mike, who left at the age of 19 and is now 51, said he planned to stay. Among others who have returned and stayed are Ou Virak and Theary Seng, prominent advocates of a U.S. brand of human rights and civil society, which at this point fits a little awkwardly with Cambodia’s strong-arm form of government.

PHNOM PENH — The really challenging thing is trying to teach his countrymen how to eat a hamburger — a culture clash that is more than culinary as he tries to fit himself, like a lost piece in a puzzle, back into the land of his birth.

His Cambodian name is Chenda Im, but after more than 30 years as a refugee in the United States, he goes by Mike, and he is the founder, owner, manager, cook and pitchman of Mike’s Burger House, which he opened on the lot of a gas station here after his return four years ago.

“I’m American, and I already know how to handle burgers,” he said, as a salsa tune played in his restaurant. “The Cambodians, they eat the bun and then a little bit here and a little bit there. I say, ‘No, you just press down on the bun and eat it.’ And sometimes they say, ‘Don’t tell me how to eat. I’ll eat it my way.”’

Mike’s experience pitching hamburgers in Phnom Penh offers a look at the particular kind of culture shock experienced by people returning to their own culture.

Audience with king still a vivid memory

Hem Rith, 53, speaks to the Post yesterday on the sidelines of the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Heng Chivoan

Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Mom Kunthear
The Phnom Penh Post

Hem Rith guesses she was only 5 years old when she was snatched from her home in Kandal province by the Khmer Rouge to work as a waiter in the Royal Palace, but it was not until her master consoled her one day that she discovered her boss was then-King Norodom Sihanouk.

The 53-year-old’s bones are visible beneath her sun-darkened skin, but despite physical evidence of hardship, she is stoic in remembering the fate the murderous Khmer Rouge regime chose for her in serving Democratic Kampuchea’s figureheads at the Royal Palace during their reign.

“About two weeks after I was taken from Takeo to the Royal Palace, [then-King Norodom Sihanouk] talked to me and asked me where I came from, and he also asked me whether I knew him or not, and I said no,” Hem Rith, sitting in the cafeteria at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, said yesterday.

Bay Area Cambodians seek justice in homeland

Sophany Bay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, holds a photograph of her daughter Lilavodey "Pomme" Bay, who was killed by the regime when she was six months old, in 1975, by an injection of an unknown substance, at the Wat Khemara Rangsey Temple, in San Jose, Calif. on November 12, 2011. Bay is returning to Cambodia to witness the second trial of Khmer Rouge leaders. (LiPo Ching/Mercury News). (LiPo Ching)

11/20/2011
By John Boudreau
jboudreau@mercurynews.com

Sophany Bay's three young children died in her arms, one after the other, during Cambodia's genocide. Sarem Neou lost her two daughters to starvation and disease; her mother was dragged to death by a horse after she was suspected of stealing food for one of the girls; and her husband died after learning of the horrific deaths of his children. Kelvin So's brother, a surgeon, was one of thousands of professionals executed by Khmer Rouge soldiers.

Collectively, the three survivors lost hundreds of relatives -- aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews -- during the reign of terror from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia when an estimated 1.7 million people died, about a quarter of the small Southeast Asian country's population.

Now Bay, So and Neou are among 45 Cambodian-Americans -- including six from the Bay Area -- who will get the opportunity to see justice done. When opening arguments start Monday in Phnom Penh in a trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders charged with crimes against humanity, Bay and Neou will be sitting in the gallery alongside other witnesses to genocide. They and the other Cambodian-Americans are being legally represented in the trial and might provide testimony.

Nach Chauv returns to Cambodia to search for answers about childhood

Nach Chauv

Nov 13, 2011
By MEGAN SCHMIDT
The Holland Sentinel (Holland, Michigan, USA)

Holland — Nach Chauv was 9 years old when he traveled on foot through miles of mine fields, escaping Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Bandits and soldiers lurked, and the sound of land mines blasted around him during the journey through the jungle to Thailand.

Months later, he and his brother were on a plane to be reunited with their mother in Holland. Chauv has never been back.

On Nov. 20, however, he will return to Cambodia with a film crew in tow to document his search for answers to lingering questions about his childhood and his father. The project is titled “The Search.”

“My biggest question is if my father passed away of a natural cause, or was it something else?” said Chauv, who goes by Kyle.

Tortured souls

Footscray shop owner Kuan Pung miraculously survived the brutaility of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Pictures: Marco De Luca

08 Nov, 2011
Moonee Valley Weekly (Victoria, Australia)
Excerpt

As the ‘Arab spring’ ferments civic unrest, arrests have led to torture, reminding the world of recent conflicts where the dirty work of despots has been revealed by the survivors. Inevitably, many of them, as refugees or fare-paying migrants, have made their way to Melbourne’s western suburbs. Daily, they struggle to come to terms with their past. Anthony Loncaric met some of them. His story contains some graphic descriptions.

THE nightmares have finally stopped. Kuan Pung no longer dreams about anything.

It’s been 32 years since he was freed from the clutches of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, responsible for the deaths of about 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

The 60-year-old Avondale Heights resident remembers all of it, starting with being forced to leave his home in Phnom Penh to work in a village in the country’s north.

His job was to make fertiliser using human faeces, which he would collect from holes dug in the farmland’s soil where the captives did “their business” because there were no toilets.

Some days he was told to carry bodies of captives who had died from illness or starvation.

I trained so I could kill the people who murdered my family - but instead I have forgiven them

Reaksa Him at the Spa Centre about how he escaped the killing fields in Cambodia when he was a child and later returned to forgive his family's killers.

Wednesday 2 November 2011
The Courier (UK)

“I REMEMBER it all very clearly,” says Reaksa, a polite, softly spoken and professional man, who wastes no time with small talk before getting right to the bones of the interview.

“When I first moved to Canada, I used to have flashbacks and nightmares. Every night before I went to bed, I was scared to go to sleep.”

When he then launches into his memory of that terrible day in 1977, it is a wonder that this is no longer the case.

“One morning, they arrested my father and took him to the jungle.

“They took him and others to a big grave and pushed him into it from behind. They slaughtered him and I saw every single moment of it.

“Then they pushed me into the pit. I heard them do it to my baby brother as well.

“I had blood coming through my nose and mouth. I could hardly breathe. But they thought I was dead already.

Cambodian killing fields survivor encourages students to value family

Author and activist Loung Ung, speaks Tuesday morning at the OSU Newark Convocation. / Jamie Potts/ The Advocate

Sep. 20, 2011
Written by Abbey Roy
Newark Advocate Reporter

NEWARK — The first-time college students who attended convocation Tuesday at the Newark campus of Ohio State University might have been under the impression it was finally their year for freedom.

No more parents to come home to after class — commuters exempted — plenty of late nights out with friends, long-awaited independence from the sheltered life of the high school years.

Loung Ung’s keynote address might have made them want to cling just a little bit longer.

The author and survivor of the Cambodian killing fields — the extermination of roughly 2 million Cambodian residents, including Ung’s father, mother and two siblings, by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 — recalled in intimate detail her struggles as a child and lifelong search for peace.

Vann Nath

Vann Nath, a Cambodian who painted to stay alive, died on September 5th, aged 65

 Sep 17th 2011
The Economist

WHEN he was 52, with a hand that still trembled, Vann Nath produced a painting of a young man lying under a blossoming tree. He was playing a pipe while, in the background, cattle grazed by green palms in some bucolic corner of Cambodia. It was meant to be a self-portrait, he said, a beautiful memory from his childhood. He wanted only to paint idyllic landscapes now, in the style of temple murals or the French Impressionists who had first inspired him to take up art.

That was because, in 1978-79, he had been made to paint quite different pictures. In those months he was interned in S-21 prison, a former French lycée in Phnom Penh which had been converted into a torture-compound for alleged enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime. Perhaps 14,000 people were sent to S-21 for a daily routine of electrocution, water-boarding and flagellation before being carted off for execution—a shovel or spade to the head—at the nearby “killing fields”. Mr Vann Nath was one of only six or seven prisoners to make it out alive.

Artist’s life a model for reconciliation

September 12, 2011
Emma Leslie
CathNewsIndia.com

Cambodia bade farewell last week to Vann Nath, well known as one of the seven survivors of the S-21 torture center known as Tuol Sleng. But for me, he will always personify the Cambodian capacity to remember, heal and reconcile its past.

Vann Nath was arrested in Battambang on December 29, 1977. One of his last paintings depicted his transportation by the Khmer Rouge to Phnom Penh, where he was incarcerated at S-21.

His abilities as an artist were identified, and he was put to work painting and sculpting images of the KR leader Pol Pot - a job that saved him from the fate of so many others at S-21 and enabled him to portray vividly the horrors he witnessed within the walls of the torture center.