A Story of Survival

By Sothy Eng

Professor of Practice of Comparative and International Education
 

Forty years ago, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and unleashed a wrath of vengeance against its own people. The genocide war in Cambodia left almost 2 million people dead from execution, starvation and disease. Many were the country's most educated citizens.My father always speaks of a dream he had during the first week of evacuation from Phnom Penh. Literally, that dream led him to find his new place that allowed him and my mother to survive, and of course, for me to write this story.

Perhaps it was my frequent visits home with inquisitive graduate students that prompted me to ask, in detail, the story I had wanted to hear. As a child of genocide survivors, it was something I feared, something I ignored. Yet, the more students I brought to Cambodia, the more their questions made me realize that my family's story was something to be acknowledged, for the survivors and for their children. And so begins the story of one family, who much like the rest of the Khmer people, faced tragedy and immeasurable sorrow, and somehow, found a way to survive.

On April 17, 1975, my family was informed that Khmer Rouge (KR) soldiers were evacuating Phnom Penh. My parents knew what the KR was planning. My father worked at the Social Republican Party headquarters, the officially recognized government backed by the United States. My family could have escaped days earlier in Operation Eagle Pull, the U. S. evacuation of Phnom Penh, but my father felt he was saving himself and my mother and abandoning everyone else he loved. He would rather die trying to save them than try to live with the guilt of leaving them behind.

So there they were. They packed everything they could. The next morning, the KR announced all people in Phnom Penh should return to the villages of their families, extended families or ancestors. My father knew if he went back to his province, Kampot, he would die. Instead, he decided to go in the direction of Vietnam, along with my mother's sisters and parents. If they could reach Vietnam, they would have a chance for survival. In the mass exodus, it took three days to travel six miles, reaching Prek Eng district. My father felt something was trying to stop him from going forward. So he stopped there.

That night, my father lit 34 incense sticks and prayed for a sign for the best place to relocate. He dreamed not of a map of a place he had seen before but of broken bamboos. Early dawn, he discussed the dream with my grandfather. He immediately referred it to the village "Puk-Russei," literally meaning broken bamboos. It was where my aunt's in-laws lived. So they decided to cross the Mekong River to come to the Broken Bamboos village.

KR officials were there to thoroughly document their background. They asked where my family came from, what they did for a living, if my father was a former soldier. My parents knew that acknowledging their past would lead to swift execution. My father lied he said he was illiterate, selling baguettes, by foot, at the Phnom Penh Port. The KR officials allowed them to stay but kept coming back almost every day for a month, searching for inconsistencies.

One night, three KR soldiers came to the house and took my father away. It was clear by this point in the revolution that leaving home in such a way meant death. Again he was asked the same background questions. He never revealed his true identity. After three hours, he was released.

In total, my father was "taken out" to get killed three times. One afternoon, as he watered vegetables in the community garden, he was approached by KR soldiers instructing him to follow them. He survived by telling them the vegetables needed to be watered now, otherwise the plants would die and the community would starve.

After the evacuation, my mother had delivered a baby girl. She later had a complication and was sent to a KR hospital, leaving my father to feed the baby with just rice porridge. KR soldiers came to the house yet again, this time instructing my father, the baby, my aunts and grandparents to follow them. They were taken to a large boat. While people boarded, the baby started to cry, strangely loud. My father asked if he could delay his departure until my mother got discharged so the baby could have breast milk. KR officials looked up his name, pulled out a red pen and crossed out his name. They took my father and the baby home on a cart. My father thought at that moment perhaps the spirits of the temple where the boat docked helped him, and perhaps they did.

The boat left with all of my mother's sisters and parents. They have yet to return home.

A few days after my mother arrived home, the baby died. She was not the only sibling of mine who died during the war. Two boys and a girl were stolen by diseases all too common during the KR regime.

After the war ended in 1979, my father was free to unwrap the cloak of lies that protected him and my mother for almost four years. He became a principal of a junior high school in the village. He has since helped many children to get an education. Growing up, I remember many of his students came to visit him with bags of rice and produce to thank him.

My parents currently have two sons and a daughter—all born after the war ended. They said Puk-Russei village gave them a life. I grew up there till I finished high school, before moving to Phnom Penh for college and later to Texas Tech University for graduate school.

From time to time when we meet, my parents, especially my father, talk about that dream and how fortunate they were to survive. While they suffered the pain and sorrow of losing their children, they have shown my brother, sister and I the importance of faith and family and hope.

Both still believe in dreams. Last year, we children offered them their wish by having a "merit-transfer ceremony to the next lives and to the dead relatives" based on the dream my father had that year.

A longer version of this blog post first appeared on the Huffington Post.