Tran Lam

Khmers Rouges Survivor Tran Lam

Phnom Penh people punishment. On April 17th, 1975, in 48 hours, Phnom Penh has been emptied of his habitants, because the troop of young peasant armed to the teeth, spread terror in the city. Red blood headbands on their forehead, their eyes showed their monstrous identity of killers without mercy for their own people. My mother has been taken away from me because of that Khmer Rouge war. That loss throw me in such suffering that I believe to be a living dead. These Khmer Rouge have been created by Pol Pot, their chief, in order to despise city people because they said that we were the reason of their misfortune. My family and I were deported, as the whole Khmer population, to the countryside. Cambodia fell into a terrible war where the Khmer Rouge transformed the country into a large concentration camp, death camp. The Khmer Rouge killed the elite people and by the way of a vast genocide, most if the Cambodian people. The death camp daily life is made of torture, humiliation, summary executions, starvation, terror... I was lost in hell, face to face with death all the time. During Pol Pot regime whose goal was to established rural communism and terror, millions of Khmer people lost their life in least than four years. The Khmer Rouge slogan was: "you must spy on each other"