First they killed my father, a daughter of Cambodia remembers: heart wrenching story

Posted on June 27, 2014

The story starts in Phnom Penh of mid-seventies with little Loung Ung and her large family of 9 people – parents and 7 siblings leading a cushy and comfortable life. Loung tells the story with flourish that makes the noises, food, smells, comings and goings of this Cambodian capital and that of the family, vivid to the reader. And then one fine day in the month of April in 1975 the story changes and how! Their family, along with all other families in the city, is ordered to leave the city immediately. The elders scramble together all their belongings that they could carry and begin the death march. Five year old Loung is too young to understand what is happening but because her Papa is with her, she knows she will be taken care of. Thus starts the grueling exodus that is one of the cruelest in the recent human history. Loung describes the ordeal through her eyes and I found my throat tightening when she described how her eight year old brother Kim suffered beating and thrashing just so that he could get left over food for the family. I had to stop at times, compose myself and then start reading the next day as I just could not take in what was happening in the book. To imagine that Loung and others lived through this life for four years is incredible and I salute them for braving extreme hardships. These four years saw death of Loung’s elder sister and that of her baby sister through continuous malnourishment. Her father and later her mother were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. Loung was forced to stay at a work camp for orphans where she trained as a child soldier. She, along with her remaining siblings survived through labor camps, hunger, sickness, violence and attempted rape. The strong family ties saw them survive and slowly come back to civilized life. This is a chilling true story though Loung must have recreated the events while writing with the help of her siblings as she was just a five year old girl when the exodus began. She is gifted with a strong memory and was a precocious child with a strong fighting spirit who remains hopeful despite the brutal reality around her. Genocides are the darkest chapters in human history and yet just 40 years ago the calm and quite Cambodia lived through one of the worst genocides. For someone like me who did not know the details, this book made a compelling reading. Some readers may not like to read about pain and cruelty, but I, for sure would like to recommend this book to all who like to know about the history and life of people who braved the worst. The more we read these stories the greater is our awareness about such happenings and for this reason alone, Loung’s heart wrenching story needs to be read by all of us.