First I read When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him. This harrowing and honest memoir of young girl growing up in Khmer Rouge-ruled Kampuchea was my introduction to the literature of the Cambodian Holocaust. I’ve never seen the movie that everybody seems to reference when talking about the horror that was Pol Pot’s Kampuchea because I cannot watch reenactments of actual, horrible events. I’ve also never seen Schindler’s List nor The Passion of the Christ. Reading about such events and acts is bad enough.

During the time covered in the book, Chanrithy Him suffered the loss of her father, murdered in a “re-education camp”, her mother, who died in a squalid hospital from untreated disease and malnutrition, five siblings, who died of malnutrition and disease, and other family members lost to the insane and disastrous policies of the Khmer Rouge government. The book begins with some background about Chanrithy Him’s childhood, but focuses on the details of her daily life in Cambodia/Kampuchea from April 17, 1975 when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Pen until her escape a few years later with what remained of her family to a refugee camp in Thailand.

“Death is a constant, and we’ve become numb to the shock of it. People die here and there, all around us, falling like flies that have been sprayed with poison.”

You can read the first chapter of When Broken Glass Floats online here.
And here is an interesting review of three memoirs of the Cambodian Killing Fields, all published in 2000: Music through the Dark, written by Bree Lefreniere and narrated by Daran Kravanh, When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him, and First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung.

Next I read When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution by Elizabeth Becker. This book was a more complete history of Cambodia before and during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. The author attempted to show how Pol Pot and cohorts came into power, what kept them in power, and what the effects of their genocidal policies were on the people of Cambodia. It’s a decent enough attempt, but Ms. Becker gets bogged down in the details and sometimes fails to explain the larger picture. Pol Pot and his friends sometimes seem like sympathetic characters even in the midst of their carrying out of horrendous acts simply because they are humans who even turn against one another at intervals.

Some of the most memorable passages in the book tell about Becker’s personal experiences in Cambodia as the guest of the Khmer Rouge regime. She was invited, along with two other journalists, in December 1978 to see what the Khmer Rouge had accomplished in a little over three years of rule in Cambodia. She, of course, saw only what the government wanted her to see, and she was unable to talk to people or see anything without the ever-present guides and translators who presented the Communist propaganda line in spite of the general appearance of grinding poverty and escalating violence and paranoia. Becker’s visit came to a climax with the midnight murder of one of her fellow journalists, Malcolm Caldwell, a sympathizer with the Khmer Rouge government, who nevertheless became a victim of its incompetence and general craziness.

Read this one for all the detailed information and for an idea of what was going on when all over the country and in foreign countries in relation to Cambodia. Read some of the memoirs and personal stories listed above to get a feel for what horror was perpetrated by the this so-called “agrarian communist utopia of Democratic Kampuchea.”

For today’s round-up of reviews of titles set in Southeast Asia or written by Southeast Asian authors, check out the One Shot World Tour at Chasing Ray.