Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims

Chapter 4. The Lost Childhood

4. The Lost Childhood When I was lucky enough to have rice, I ate it quietly and in secret because I was worried I would be killed if the Khmer Rouge saw me. —Sambath Sambath did not understand who the Khmer Rouge were when the group came to power. He just knew that people were starving and forced to work like slaves. In the mornings, he went to the cooperative to have rice or porridge . Sambath was still allowed to go to school, so he and about 30 other students his age would gather in the classroom. In the beginning, he was taught grammar and the Khmer alphabet, with the teacher writing vowels and consonants on the chalkboard. But the children had no books or pencils. Soon the teacher showed up to work, but no longer taught. Instead she sat in front of the classroom and forced the children to cut the grass growing along the side of the road. Within a month, Sambath was told school was over. The children were needed in the fields. Sambath’s job was to carry human feces used to fertilize the rice fields. The feces were kept in a tank and then dumped on the ground to dry. He piled the fertilizer in a basket and carried it on his head to rice fields a quarter mile away. Each day he made the trip, again and again, until he was told to stop for the day. “It smelled and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he said. Others saw opportunity in the piles of waste. Sambath once watched a man taste the feces for nourishment, a supplement to the meager rations. A few people stood beside the man, asking him how it tasted. In the beginning, there was still rice or porridge to occasionally take to his other family members. But soon the rice mostly disappeared. “It was like a big party when we had rice,” he said. “I ate as much of it as possible because it was rare to have it. I was always hungry, day and night.” Sometimes his mother asked him and his sister to take scarce rice and other food to his grandparents, who lived several miles away. Sambath always traveled at night The Lost Childhood 45 so he wouldn’t be discovered, and he dared not carry a lamp because he could be arrested and killed if caught. Later in 1975, after the Khmer Rouge had been in power for several months, Sambath’s mother bled to death giving birth to the child of her new Khmer Rouge husband. There was no medicine or properly trained medical staff who could have prevented her death. Sambath’s baby sister died as well. Sambath’s mother seemed to have a premonition that she wouldn’t live long. Before she died, she told Sambath’s grandparents to take care of her children . She gave them her gold, rings, a necklace, and a bracelet that she had kept hidden from the Khmer Rouge. The jewelry could be used as bargaining items if the situation worsened. After his mother died, Sambath lived with his grandparents. There he ate only watery porridge. Even though there was sugar cane surrounding his grandparents’ home, he was not allowed to touch it, much less eat it, for fear he would be accused of stealing Angka property. His grandparents told him that they were new people so they had to work harder so Angka would trust them. Near his home there were “old people”—those who had already lived for several months or years under Khmer Rouge rule—and they were treated better than his family, given more powerful positions and more to eat. “Don’t steal anything and don’t be lazy,” his grandparents told him. Still, as he got weaker and weaker, he stole some sugar cane and went with his grandfather to catch eels in secret, which also would have been seen as a betrayal if they were caught. There was never any meat or rice to eat. For nourishment, Sambath began eating the dried cow meat that had been twisted into a rope to tie up hammocks. Soon he had no rope to tie his hammock. He ate lizards, centipedes, and other insects, anything he could find that would fill his belly. He even grilled cockroaches. “I had no food and was hungry all the time so I was forced to eat everything ,” he said. “The cockroaches smelled bad but...