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    The Death and Life of Dith Pran
    The Death and Life of Dith Pran
    The Death and Life of Dith Pran
    Ebook120 pages

    The Death and Life of Dith Pran

    By Sydney H. Schanberg

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    About this ebook

    The US journalist’s account of his colleague’s struggle to survive the Cambodian genocide—the basis for the Oscar–winning film The Killing Fields.
     
    On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers seized Phnom Penh—the capital of Cambodia—and began a brutal genocide that left millions dead. Dith Pran, a Cambodian working as an assistant to American reporter Sydney H. Schanberg, was a witness to these events. While his employer managed to escape across the border, Dith Pran fled into the Cambodian countryside—and into the heart of the massacre.
     
    The basis for the acclaimed movie The Killing Fields, this is the compelling account of the days before the fall of Phnom Penh. It’s the story of one man’s struggle for survival in a country that had become a death camp for millions of its citizens—and another man’s failed efforts to keep his friend and colleague safe. Written within a year of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, it is a work of both historical and literary significance.
     
    Sydney H. Schanberg contributed a moving new foreword to this first eBook edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    ISBN9780795334733
    The Death and Life of Dith Pran
    Author

    Sydney H. Schanberg

    A New York Times reporter in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge, Sydney H. Schanberg won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the genocide in 1975. His book The Death and Life of Dith Pran, based on his account of the search for a Cambodian colleague and friend who had disappeared into Cambodia's most dangerous regions after the fall of Phnom Penh, was made into the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields. After his return from Cambodia, Schanberg was appointed Metropolitan Editor of the New York Times--and later became an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and Newsday. He is also the author of Beyond The Killing Fields, an anthology of his coverage of conflict in countries including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Iraq.

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    • 5/5
      I saw the movie The Killing Fields, over 20 years ago, and in 2004, I read Children of the Killing Fields. I was sad to hear of Dith Pran's passing; I was stationed in Japan when I read the news. Over the years, I watched documentaries and read other survivors' accounts of the killing fields. Now, in 2023, at last I got to read Mr. Schanberg's actual account of his friendship with this wonderful man. It was raw with emotion, and he knew when to bring a piece of comic relief. I admire his blunt tell-it-as-it-was approach to the horrors of the war and fall of Phnom Penh, and the disgraceful conduct of some of the American higher-ups. This is without any doubt a must-read, among all the other important works about the Cambodian Genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

    Book preview

    The Death and Life of Dith Pran - Sydney H. Schanberg

    The Death and Life of Dith Pran

    Sydney H. Schanberg

    Copyright

    The Death and Life of Dith Pran

    Copyright © 1980, 1985, 2013 by Sydney H. Schanberg

    Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

    Cover jacket design by Terrence Tymon

    ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795334733

    To my children, Jessica and Rebecca

    and to Elizabeth

    and to Bailey Ruth

    Contents

    Foreword

    Introduction

    The Death and Life of Dith Pran

    Foreword

    The story of Cambodia is a universal one—it is not a new thing that small countries and vulnerable peoples get abused by the large and powerful. But the awfulness of what happened in Cambodia should not be allowed to blur into a historical generality. This is why I am glad that this account, originally published as a long magazine article in The New York Times, is now a book. Books fade more slowly than newspaper pages.

    It appears here as it was written, in 1980. Events since then have altered the details of Cambodia’s existence, but the basic fact of life for these people has remained unchanged. The Cambodians are still everyone’s pawns and are still suffering terribly.

    It is my hope that this chronicle of the relationship and experiences of the two of us—an American and a Cambodian brought together by a war—will help provide a glimpse at this history.

    Sydney H. Schanberg

    Introduction

    On that magical day in October, 1979 that Dith Pran and I reunited in that refugee camp in Thailand—after his nearly five years of captivity in Cambodia under the genocidal Khmer Rouge—we walked hand-in-hand around the compound in a daze, trying to understand our miracle.

    Pran was moving on wobbly, scarred legs and some of his teeth were broken. He looked wan and seemed shrunken, the result of beatings and starvation. He also was suffering from malaria—but we didn’t know that until we landed in San Francisco and got him into a hospital. But as weak as he was on our walks through the camp, he began to brighten up and talk in an excited voice about the stories we should do right now about new developments in Cambodia. I talked him out of it, reminding him of the importance of first getting well and rediscovering his family, and preparing to meet all the people at The New York Times who wanted to applaud him. That made him smile. But it also showed that he was the same Pran, the true reporter whose untold stories were bursting inside him.

    So, with the help of our embassy in Bangkok, we took a flight to San Francisco, where his wife Meoun and their four children had resettled in 1975 after their helicopter evacuation with the American Embassy as the Khmer Rouge closed in on the capital.

    Pran’s escape from Cambodia had become world news. The New York Times moved into high gear to welcome him and cover the costs, just as they had done for his family. He now had many new friends to meet.

    Pran quickly recovered his health and his old self, bouncy and eager to start his new life. In New York, The Times gave him training in news photography and he soon joined the paper’s photo staff. He also became immersed in spreading the story of Cambodia in America and around the world.

    My next challenge was to write the story of Pran’s ordeal—a suggestion made by Arthur Gelb, a senior editor known for his creativity. The title was The Death and Life of Dith Pran, and it was the cover story of the paper’s Sunday Magazine on January 20, 1980. It was a long piece and later became a hardcover book and now it’s the RosettaBooks e-book you are reading.

    Within a few years, our story became a feature film, directed by Roland Joffe and produced by David Puttnam. Our agreement with the film company was to take no liberties for the sake of the movie, but to tell our story as it had happened. The Killing Fields, starring Sam Waterston as myself, and the late Haing S. Ngor, also a Cambodian survivor, as Pran, premiered in 1984 and won three Oscars the following year.

    Pran continued his work as a photographer at The New York Times. He became an American citizen in 1986. He and coauthor Kim DePaul compiled a book entitled Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs of Survivors, published in 1997 by the Yale University Press. At the United Nations, he was appointed Good Will Ambassador for refugees. He campaigned for a Cambodia war crimes trial. In his spare time, he gave lectures. Saying he was a disciple of Elie Wiesel, he funded the not-for-profit Dith Pran Holocaust Project. Pran told one interviewer: Part of my life is saving life. I don’t consider myself a politician or a hero. I’m a messenger. If Cambodia is to survive she needs many voices. His four grown children and seven grandchildren now keep these efforts alive.

    The arc of my own life also changed considerably. At the end of 1985 I left The New York Times because its management was uncomfortable with my investigations of New York City’s power elite. I was immediately offered an Op-Ed column at New York Newsday, where investigative reporting was more welcome and I remained there for a decade. During those years, my marriage ended, my daughters Jessica and Rebecca went off to college and on to their own lives. I made return trips to Cambodia in 1989 and 1997 and wrote long pieces, one for Vanity Fair magazine. At Newsday, I met Jane Freiman, the paper’s restaurant critic, and we married shortly before the paper closed down in 1995. I then explored online journalism at the short-lived apbnews.com before moving over to The Village Voice to work for Don Forst, my editor from Newsday. At The Voice, I wrote government stories and press criticism and about the infamous Iraq War. I think that, like Pran, I am a survivor, and I believe I am a lucky man.

    During those years, I saw Pran from time to time and he was thriving. Though the genocide he witnessed was in his mind much of the time, and he initially had nightmares about his years under the brutal Khmer Rouge, he was not gloomy. He was always smiling and making people laugh. When I hung out with him, my mood improved.

    In the summer of 2007, when we saw Pran at the wedding of his eldest son Titony, in Virginia, he complained about pain he was having in his stomach. By January 2008, when we visited him at home in New Jersey, he was very sick. It was pancreatic cancer and it was in the late stages. Surgery was not an option. The staff at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Jersey was superior, but there was no remedy.

    Pran’s family hurried to his side, including the grandchildren. Everyone was sad. But Pran wouldn’t stand for a solemn atmosphere. Even when he was in bed, having pain, the talk was not dark.

    Every day, his fellow photographers and other friends from The Times, and even

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