Scan barcode
jedwards97's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
There’s no string of words that can accurately review this book. The entire work is focused on the struggle for life of survivor Haing Ngor during the mostly grotesquely abhorrent attack against human life I’ve ever encountered in any medium. My only remark is that I cannot believe this doesn’t have wider critical acclaim, for me it should have been an instant international sensation. Not solely for the unbelievable true story, it’s blaring honesty, it’s stomach curdling vulgarity, the beautiful poetic writing and perfect pacing, but for illuminating one of the darkest moments in recent history with the love of life and the will to survive against the very worst of humanity.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual violence, Gun violence, Torture, Slavery, Physical abuse, Death, Suicide, Violence, and Murder
usorkis's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Highly emotional masterpiece
aggie2010's review against another edition
5.0
In his memoir Survival in the Killing Fields, Haing Ngor recounts his harrowing tale of survival under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. After his forced evacuation from Phnom Penh to the countryside, Ngor must conceal his identity as a doctor and work for the Khmer Rouge on various ill conceived projects aimed at revolutionizing Cambodia into an agricultural society. Throughout his four years under the cruel thumb of the Khmer Rouge, Ngor endures starvation, disease, imprisonment and torture, and witnesses the destruction of his entire family and way of life. Ngor's memoir is a poignant story of one man's struggle to survive and a chilling testament which exposes the ruthlessness of the Khmer Rouge regime. This is a story that truly shakes ones' faith in humanity. It shows with brutal detail the evil human beings are capable of. Ngor's memoir cut me to my core. It is a story that will forever haunt me.
christinajl_gb's review
5.0
Amazingly powerful book about a doctor during the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia. The images of this book have stayed with me a long time, even though I read it sometime ago.
nicolesullivan98's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
gingernutpup's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
3.75
burritapal_1's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Khmer Rouge=Cambodian communists
The author and protagonist is from a village called Somrong Yong. It has houses one row deep with rice fields and Forest surrounding it, on a Highway south of Phnom Penh.
The government was very corrupt before the Advent of Khmer Rouge, when a personnamed Sihanouk was in charge; you could be kidnapped by the guerilla rebels and you'd have to pay money to be released and then the military would kidnap you and you'd have to go through the whole thing all over again.
When Lon Nol's Army toppled see Sihanouk's government, the regime gave an order to all the teachers to tell their pupils that Sihanouk was a corrupt traitor. These students were to repeat this to their parents.
"All across Cambodia that week, parents scolded and beat their children. It was not just because the parents were loyal to Sihanouk, though they were. It was because Cambodian Society was like a family on a big scale. Just like a father who was the head of the family, Sihanouk was the head of cambodia, the royal father. For little children to say that he was bad was disrespectful. Indirectly it criticized their own fathers."
The Lol Nol government had ordered see hanuk's statues toppled all over cambodia. This is when the demonstrations began. Even if he couldn't be restored to power they wanted his statues restored.
When Haing is and his family and the rest of the population of Phenom Penh is evacuated out of the city, they eventually end up in a war slave camp. The first morning when Huoy, his girlfriend / wife, and he are ordered to work they are given regular hammers in order to make gravel by Smashing rocks. They worked for 12 hours a day. Their lunch was a bowl of salted rice porridge, and their dinner was a bowl of rice and some soup with vegetables and bits of fish. This later on will have seemed like a banquet to them.
But after they're done with their work, a soldier comes up to them and says Angka invites you to a bonn. A bonn is a religious word meaning a celebration or a ceremony at a temple. Wanting to rest, but knowing they had to go, Huoy and he went down the path into the forest with all the other workers. When they reached the clearing there was a mit neary: this is a young woman who aspires to conform to the new regime. They try to look as masculine as possible. She tells them lies, the first of many lies that will be repeated over and over, trying to brainwash the population:
" 'Angka won the war,' she began. 'not by negotiation. Not by sompea' - she gestured scornfully with her Palms together - 'to the Lol Non government, or to the US government, or to the other capitalists. We won by fighting!
'at the beginning we had only empty hands,' she declared. 'we had no rifles, no ammunition. Then we got slingshots. Bows and arrows. Crossbows. Wooden traps. Knives and hatchets. We used hoes and sticks. And we fought until we won against the capitalists! We were not afraid of the American government Or the other big powers!'
What kind of folktale is this? I wondered. They had ak-47s. They bought heavy weapons from corrupt generals of the Lon Nol regime."
There's a time when Haing Ngor runs into fellow professionals from the medical industry in his work camp. They get together in the evenings and discuss what is happening in the country. They know they can trust each other.
Haing comes up with a name for the people under the Top man of the Khmer Rouge. He tells the others that they can't even read or write, they don't know where the revolution is going, and they don't even know that they are communists.
" 'of course they do.'
'No they don't,' I said flatly. 'when have you ever heard them mention the word "communist"?'
'that's true,' said the pediatrician after a moment's thought. 'But then what are they?'
'Kum - monuss,' I said, and they all laughed. It was a play on words: kum, a long standing Grudge that finally explodes in disproportionate revenge, and monuss, meaning people. 'that's what they are at the lower level,' I said, ' "Revenge people." 'all they know is that City People Like Us used to Lord it over them and this is their chance to get back. That's what they are, communist at the top and Kum - monuss at the bottom.' "
the author will use this expression many times throughout the book to describe the uneducated and cruel people who were responsible for carrying out the orders of Pol Pot and killing more than 2 million people of their countrymen.
At one point Haing and other war slaves are ordered to dig canals with hoes. Women carried the dirt let loose, loaded it into baskets and carried it up the sides of the canals. They started work before the sun is even above the horizon. When the sun shine across one wall of the canal and into the edge of the bottom, they were allowed to take a break. This is where they get to smoke cigarettes:
"there are also a few marijuana smokers. Next to us in the shade of a tree, an old man sucked noisily on a bamboo water pipe and held the aromatic smoke in his lungs as long as he could before exhaling contentedly. Marijuana smoking was an age-old tradition followed by a small percentage of Rural men, and by a few others who had started smoking in Lon Nol's army. The Smokers themselves didn't attach any particular meaning to the drug and neither did the Khmer Rouge rouge, who didn't bother outlawing it. When the marijuana smokers got up from their breaks they seemed to work even harder than before. I tried smoking it once, hoping it would do the same for me, but instead I felt an almost overpowering urge to lie down and sleep, so I never smoked it again."
Although it's hard for a Huoy and Haing to have any intimate time together, living in a war slave camp, Huoy does get pregnant. This is at a time when they are starving the war slaves. Huoy is so thin that her ribs are showing, and being an obstetrician, Haing is very worried about Huoy and the baby.
When she goes into labor 2 months early, Haing becomes frantic, and he runs to the Khmer Rouge headquarters, to the center of the enemy operations to beg to be allowed to ride the train to batambang where there is a small crude hospital, and he would have a chance to get medicine and a Caesarean for Huoy.
They laughed at him. He ran back to Huoy and she asks him why he was gone so long, not understanding what he had done. She begs him for food.
"I took up the stethoscope and the blood pressure cuff. Her blood pressure had dropped. Her heartbeat was slow and very, very feeble.
'Do we have anything to eat?' said Huoy. She spoke in a whisper, like a child.
'The neighbors are looking for food for you,' I said.
'I need food! I need food. I need medicine. Sweet, save my life. Please save my life. I'm too tired. I just need a spoonful of rice.'
Before she died, she asked me to cradle her. I swung her onto my lap, held her in my arms. She asked me to let her kiss me. I kissed her, and she kissed me. She looked up at me with her great round eyes, and they were full of sorrow. She didn't want to leave.
'take care of yourself, sweet,' she said to me.
Then the room was full of people."
Despite having been imprisoned and tortured two times already, this breaks Haing more than those torture sessions had.
Later on in the book Haing Ngor reflects on what could have been done to avoid the destruction of Cambodia, and the country I live in is very much at fault:
"... once Lon Nol was in power, the United States could have forced him to cut down on corruption, and it could have stopped its own bombing, but it didn't, until too late. The bombing and the corruption helped push Cambodia the other way, toward the left. On the communist side, China gave the Khmer Rouge weapons and an ideology. The Chinese could have stopped the Khmer Rouge from slaughtering civilians, but they didn't try. And then there is Vietnam. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the Vietnamese communists used Eastern Cambodia as part of their Ho Chi Minh trail network, they were putting their own interests first. They have always been glad to use Cambodia for their own gain.
But sad to say, the country that is most at fault for destroying Cambodia is Cambodia itself. Pol Pot was Cambodian. Lon Nol was Cambodian and so was Sihanouk. Together the leaders of the three regimes caused a political Chain Reaction resulting in the downfall and maybe the extinction of our country."
" the Khmer Rouge were never military geniuses, but they were brave. Half a million pounds of bombs fell in their territory, some of the heaviest bombing the world has ever seen, but it didn't stop them. When they attacked, they used human waves. They didn't care how many they lost - they just kept attacking and attacking, even when it was impossible to win. It was easy to find replacements for the soldiers they lost - the American bombing had displaced so many families that peasant boys from all around Cambodia were trying to join. To convince their new recruits that the sacrifices were necessary, the Khmer Rouge told them that they were supermen, the best in the world, the only ones who could defeat the American imperialists. The young soldiers believed it. These were the brainwashed teenagers I first saw on April 17th, 1975, when they took over Phnom Penh."
"...Saloth Sar, previously known as the 'original Khmer' and 'brother number one,' took his final pseudonym: Pol Pot.
you know what happened next. He decided to put the rest of the country into collectives, just like the liberated zones, only he deceived us about his plans. So the 'temporary' Exodus from Phnom Penh became a permanent one, and gradually we 'new' people were resettled in Rural cooperatives and deprived of our religion, our rights, our families and our personal property, just as The Peasants in the liberated zones had been."
The loss of his beloved Huoy and the three times Haing was imprisoned and tortured in a brutal, brutal way, affected Haing's mind. Though he finally made it to the United States, in later years he was unhappy, and contradictory; hard to get along with. the final sadness to cap his severely harsh life was when he was murdered outside his apartment in Los Angeles.
I was much affected reading this story. He made a great contribution to the world by bringing the story of Pol Pot's genocide of the Cambodian people to the public. He was a co-star in the movie "The Killing Fields," playing the supporting part to Sam Waterston.
I'm convinced there's no hope for this species called humans.
jettzee's review against another edition
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5