Be part of A multimedia series On four members of the FRG staff who look at life under the Red Khmer fifty years later
Poly Sam was 11 years old when the Khmer Rouge walked in Phnom Penh the same day as the traditional New Year holidays.
“It was supposed to be a day of celebration, but it turned out to be a very, very bad day, and the beginning of a very bad time for many Cambodians,” he recalls recently.
April 17 marked the 50th anniversary of the victorious arrival of the Khmer Rouge in the capital of Cambodia. For Cambodians, it’s a day in memories for its horrible beginnings.
In a few years, up to 2 million people would have died in the hands of the diet led by Pol Pot.
“You know, for me, there are a lot of negative memories,” said Poly. “But it’s a memory that I can share with people because we don’t want anyone again.”
From Khmer Rouge survivor to a Thai refugee camp, and later as a teenager migrant in the United States, Poly met more than most people for five decades.
He witnessed unspeakable acts and extreme deprivation. And he survived when so many others did not do so.
“I’m lucky,” he said. “A lucky slut son.”
Before the Red Khmer, Poly’s brother, Sien Sam, was a school teacher who later became a soldier of the short -term regime of Cambodia – the military dictatorship which was ousted in 1975.
His was one of the first to die while the Red Khmer forced everyone to get out of Phnom Penh and in the countryside, Poly.
Outside the city, Khmer Rouge soldiers walked their own to be “re -educated”. It was not until later that the “missing” grew in number, never to come back, people began to understand what was going on, according to Poly.
“He was probably killed in the first or second week. But we don’t know; nothing could be checked,” he said. “Until this day, we still don’t know where he is dead.”
Tips for survival
Today, Poly explains why he is lucky: the chance to lose only four or five members of his family. Fortunately, never having been tortured. And lucky to have endured.
“It’s very lucky for a child. You are on the ground all the time, so you can recover a lot of things,” he said.
“You learn a lot of stuff on how to survive. For example, you catch the fish, you wrap the sheet around the fish, and you put it under the floor and you burn a fire on the top. When nobody is around you, you remove it and eat it.”
Surviving the Red Khmers was one thing, but escaping from Cambodia to Thailand was another.
He begged his mother to allow him to try to flee his country. She had lost her eldest son against the Red Khmer. Her two other sons were already living in the United States, and now she feared being about to lose her latest.
Poly has risked his life to flee the country, carefully making its way through Cambodia of a camp of a person inner internal to another.
The last obstacle was the biggest: to sneak in a refugee camp on the Thai border which was closely controlled by Thai soldiers allowed to shoot anyone on the spot.
The only way was under the cover of the darkness. Poly described its most dangerous moment and the lengths and depths of what it took to survive adolescence.
The first obstacle slipped under the barbed wire fences without being noticed by Thai soldiers. Once inside the camp, the next challenge was to hide out of sight until the United Nations workers took control of the camp during the hours of clarity.
Poly was hidden in the same place that no one would look: the latrine of the common pit. He threw himself in and waited until he was sure to emerge.
‘No one can undo it’
After four years in the camp. Poly was brought to the United States in 1983. More than 100,000 Cambodians settled in the United States between 1979 and 1990. In total, more than a million fled Cambodia during the years of civil war and troubles.
An American family adopted Poly informally, sent it to the school and then helped him obtain a diploma as a social worker at the college.
He worked for this for seven years before joining the Khmer Free Asia Khmer service in 1997. He now heads the Khmer service as director.
Can he forgive?
“What has happened in the past, nobody can undo it. We have to look to the future, so I forgive,” he said.
“I forgiven at the Red Khmer. Some of them were themselves victims. It is therefore not necessary to hold resentments to them. ”
But he says that it is another story for the former Khmer Rouge executives who continue to hold and abuse power in Cambodia today: “It is very difficult to forgive them.”
Published by Matt Reed